In my view, the best case for “rowing” is something like: “We don’t know why, but it seems to be going well.”
I don’t buy this, for reasons Ben West mentions. On the other hand, I think there’s a pretty strong adjacent argument that progress is good because it means a) agents with power will have more and more of a say in the world (to fulfill their own preferences) and b) the number of agents with power have historically been increasing.
In that regard, both wealth and technological growth can be viewed as a metric for the increase of individual freedomto choose to satisfy their own preferences. To argue that this is fundamentally bad/uncertain, you need to appeal to second-order considerations like a) people don’t know what they want, or b) collective action problems, and our prior should somewhat be against second-order considerations changing the sign of first-order ones. Though of course this can be overridden if the theoretical or empirical evidence is strong enough.
I don’t buy this, for reasons Ben West mentions. On the other hand, I think there’s a pretty strong adjacent argument that progress is good because it means a) agents with power will have more and more of a say in the world (to fulfill their own preferences) and b) the number of agents with power have historically been increasing.
In that regard, both wealth and technological growth can be viewed as a metric for the increase of individual freedom to choose to satisfy their own preferences. To argue that this is fundamentally bad/uncertain, you need to appeal to second-order considerations like a) people don’t know what they want, or b) collective action problems, and our prior should somewhat be against second-order considerations changing the sign of first-order ones. Though of course this can be overridden if the theoretical or empirical evidence is strong enough.