Regarding 1), if I were to guess which events of the past 100 years made the most positive impact on my life today, I’d say those are the defeat of the Nazis, the long peace, trans rights and women’s rights. Each of those carries a major socio-political dimension, and the last two arguably didn’t require any technological progress.
I very much think that socio-political reform and institutional change are more important for positive long-term change than technology. Would you say that my view is not empirically grounded?
Sure it is, but I know a lot more about myself than I do about other people. I could make a good guess on impact on myself of a worse guess on impact on others. It’s a bias/variance trade-off of sorts.
I’d say the two are valuable in different ways, not that one is necessarily better than the other.
If you understand economic and political history well enough to know what’s really gotten you where you are today, then you already have the tools to make those judgments about a much larger class of people. Actually I think that if you were to make the arguments for exactly how D-Day or women’s rights for instance helped you then you would be relying on a broader generalization about how they helped large classes of people.
Good call. I’d add organised labour if I was doing a personal accounting.
We could probably have had trans rights without Burou’s surgeries and HRT but they surely had some impact, bringing it forward(?)
No, I don’t have a strong opinion either way. I suspect they’re ‘wickedly’ entangled. Just pushing back against the assumption that historical views, or policy views, can be assumed to be unempirical.
Is your claim (that soc > tech) retrospective only? I can think of plenty of speculated technologies that swamp all past social effects (e.g. super-longevity, brain emulation, suffering abolitionism) and perhaps all future social effects.
Any technology comes with its own rights struggle. Universal access to super-longevity, the issue of allowing birth vs exploding overpopulation if everyone were to live many times longer, em rights, just to name a few. New tech will hardly have any positive effect if these social issues resolve in a wrong way.
I’m not sure it’s possible for me to distinguish between tech and social change. How can I talk about women’s rights without talking about birth control (or even just tampons!)?
Regarding 1), if I were to guess which events of the past 100 years made the most positive impact on my life today, I’d say those are the defeat of the Nazis, the long peace, trans rights and women’s rights. Each of those carries a major socio-political dimension, and the last two arguably didn’t require any technological progress.
I very much think that socio-political reform and institutional change are more important for positive long-term change than technology. Would you say that my view is not empirically grounded?
It’s better to look at impacts on the broad human population rather than just one person.
Sure it is, but I know a lot more about myself than I do about other people. I could make a good guess on impact on myself of a worse guess on impact on others. It’s a bias/variance trade-off of sorts.
I’d say the two are valuable in different ways, not that one is necessarily better than the other.
If you understand economic and political history well enough to know what’s really gotten you where you are today, then you already have the tools to make those judgments about a much larger class of people. Actually I think that if you were to make the arguments for exactly how D-Day or women’s rights for instance helped you then you would be relying on a broader generalization about how they helped large classes of people.
Good call. I’d add organised labour if I was doing a personal accounting.
We could probably have had trans rights without Burou’s surgeries and HRT but they surely had some impact, bringing it forward(?)
No, I don’t have a strong opinion either way. I suspect they’re ‘wickedly’ entangled. Just pushing back against the assumption that historical views, or policy views, can be assumed to be unempirical.
Is your claim (that soc > tech) retrospective only? I can think of plenty of speculated technologies that swamp all past social effects (e.g. super-longevity, brain emulation, suffering abolitionism) and perhaps all future social effects.
Any technology comes with its own rights struggle. Universal access to super-longevity, the issue of allowing birth vs exploding overpopulation if everyone were to live many times longer, em rights, just to name a few. New tech will hardly have any positive effect if these social issues resolve in a wrong way.
Fair. But without tech there would be much less to fight for. So it’s multiplicative.
I’m not sure it’s possible for me to distinguish between tech and social change. How can I talk about women’s rights without talking about birth control (or even just tampons!)?