(Context note: I read this post, all the comments, then Ben Todd’s question on your AMA, then your Progress Studies as Moral Imperative post. I don’t really know anything about Progress Studies besides this context, but will offer my thoughts now below in the hope it will help with identifying the crux.)
None of the comments so far have engaged with your road trip metaphor, so I’ll bite:
In your Progress Studies as Moral Imperative post it sounds like you’re concerned that humanity might just slow the car down, stop, and just stay there indefinitely or something due to a lack of appreciation or respect for progress. Is that right?
Personally I think that sounds very unlikely and I don’t feel concerned at all about that. I think nearly all other longtermists would probably agree.
This first thing your Moral Imperative post made me think of is Factfulness by Rosling et al. Before reading the book in 2019 I had often heard the idea that roughly “people don’t know how much progress we’ve made lately.” I felt like I heard several people say this for a few years without actually encountering the people who were ignorant about the progress.
In the beginning of Factfulness Rosling talks about how a bunch of educated people on a UN council (or something) were ignorant of basic facts of humanity’s progress in recent decades. I defer to his claim and yours that these people who are ignorant of the progress we’ve made exist.
That said, when I took the pre-test quiz at the beginning of the book about the progress we’ve made I got all of his questions right, and I was quite confident in essentially all of the answers. I recall thinking that other people I know (in the EA community, for example) would probably also get all the questions correct, despite the poor performance on the same quiz by world leaders and other audiences that Rosling spoke to over the years.
I say all this to suggest that maybe Progress Studies people are reactionary to some degree and longtermists (what you’re calling “EA/XR” people) aren’t? (Maybe PS people are used to seeing a lot of people in society (including some more educated and tech people) being ignorant of progress and opposed to it, while maybe EA people have experienced less of this or just don’t care to be as reactionary to such people?) Could this be a crux? Longtermists just aren’t very concerned that we’re going to stop progressing (besides potentially crashing the car—existential risk or global catastrophic risk), whereas Progress Studies people are more likely to think that progress is slowing and coming to a stop?
(Context note: I read this post, all the comments, then Ben Todd’s question on your AMA, then your Progress Studies as Moral Imperative post. I don’t really know anything about Progress Studies besides this context, but will offer my thoughts now below in the hope it will help with identifying the crux.)
None of the comments so far have engaged with your road trip metaphor, so I’ll bite:
In your Progress Studies as Moral Imperative post it sounds like you’re concerned that humanity might just slow the car down, stop, and just stay there indefinitely or something due to a lack of appreciation or respect for progress. Is that right?
Personally I think that sounds very unlikely and I don’t feel concerned at all about that. I think nearly all other longtermists would probably agree.
This first thing your Moral Imperative post made me think of is Factfulness by Rosling et al. Before reading the book in 2019 I had often heard the idea that roughly “people don’t know how much progress we’ve made lately.” I felt like I heard several people say this for a few years without actually encountering the people who were ignorant about the progress.
In the beginning of Factfulness Rosling talks about how a bunch of educated people on a UN council (or something) were ignorant of basic facts of humanity’s progress in recent decades. I defer to his claim and yours that these people who are ignorant of the progress we’ve made exist.
That said, when I took the pre-test quiz at the beginning of the book about the progress we’ve made I got all of his questions right, and I was quite confident in essentially all of the answers. I recall thinking that other people I know (in the EA community, for example) would probably also get all the questions correct, despite the poor performance on the same quiz by world leaders and other audiences that Rosling spoke to over the years.
I say all this to suggest that maybe Progress Studies people are reactionary to some degree and longtermists (what you’re calling “EA/XR” people) aren’t? (Maybe PS people are used to seeing a lot of people in society (including some more educated and tech people) being ignorant of progress and opposed to it, while maybe EA people have experienced less of this or just don’t care to be as reactionary to such people?) Could this be a crux? Longtermists just aren’t very concerned that we’re going to stop progressing (besides potentially crashing the car—existential risk or global catastrophic risk), whereas Progress Studies people are more likely to think that progress is slowing and coming to a stop?