Our culture is dominated by an ideology of progress, called progressivism, which conflates purportedly inevitable progressions along trendlines (especially ones that amount to an increase in taxable activity, or increased economic mobilization) with the solution of problems and people’s lives getting better. Because it’s an ideology, progressives worship progress rather than having honest propositional views on it amenable to evidence; enough evidence might cause a personal crisis, but they don’t have the virtues of lightness or specificity about it.
In practice progressivism is a job creation scheme for elites. The jobs created have to be constituted to manage problems, rather than solve them; solving problems destroys jobs. Oddly, if you wanted to slow down the rate at which we solve our proximate problems using AI or increase AI capacities, the best option available short of revolution or radical dissidence en masse might be to make “AI Progress” an important positive policy goal and try to persuade elites that it’s important to get those metrics up.
Those seem like attempts to extend the useful life of the current regime by trying to organize around doing more of the things that originally won it legitimacy, rather than to productively criticize or supersede it. Sometimes you should patch up an old thing rather than buy a new one, sometimes this is false economy because the cost of upkeep is higher than the amortized cost of replacement, and sometimes you’re driving around in an explosive death trap or breathing mold every day making you sick when you should really just get a safe new car or house built from scratch.
I would put Tyler Cowen in the same category, accepting things like GDP as the best politically available target to organize around, but trying to persuade people to do good rather than bad things to raise the GDP.
Progressivism seems like a third degree simulacral procession from Whig Theory of History, which is at least a theory. Whig Theory of History relates to progress as a contingent claim to be asserted about aggregates, which is meaningful because it lawfully decomposes into constituent facts we care about. Progressivism seems to inherit the emotional loading of the term as a given and then situate intentions relative to it.
Progress Studies and Works in Progress seem to be relying on “progress” as something whose value & reality is uncontested even if its specific meaning is unclear and the rollout is uneven.
Our culture is dominated by an ideology of progress, called progressivism, which conflates purportedly inevitable progressions along trendlines (especially ones that amount to an increase in taxable activity, or increased economic mobilization) with the solution of problems and people’s lives getting better. Because it’s an ideology, progressives worship progress rather than having honest propositional views on it amenable to evidence; enough evidence might cause a personal crisis, but they don’t have the virtues of lightness or specificity about it.
In practice progressivism is a job creation scheme for elites. The jobs created have to be constituted to manage problems, rather than solve them; solving problems destroys jobs. Oddly, if you wanted to slow down the rate at which we solve our proximate problems using AI or increase AI capacities, the best option available short of revolution or radical dissidence en masse might be to make “AI Progress” an important positive policy goal and try to persuade elites that it’s important to get those metrics up.
Institutional recommendations are shaped by implicit constraints like “don’t reduce headcount” and “don’t invalidate your department’s premise,” internalized as limits on what’s thinkable: https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/parkinsons-law-ideology-statistics/#diagnosis
Calling for X produces jobs doing the opposite: https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/openai-makes-humanity-less-safe/
Neoclassical (progressive) economics tries to quantify “total value,” and then maximize it, which in practice means maximizing transaction volume: https://substack.com/@benhoffman700141/note/c-237461608
A much deeper dive into the same thing: https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/the-domestic-product/
To what extent do you think this manifests in the progress studies movement, in the sense of the cluster(s) coordinated around https://rootsofprogress.org/ or https://worksinprogress.co/ ?
Those seem like attempts to extend the useful life of the current regime by trying to organize around doing more of the things that originally won it legitimacy, rather than to productively criticize or supersede it. Sometimes you should patch up an old thing rather than buy a new one, sometimes this is false economy because the cost of upkeep is higher than the amortized cost of replacement, and sometimes you’re driving around in an explosive death trap or breathing mold every day making you sick when you should really just get a safe new car or house built from scratch.
I would put Tyler Cowen in the same category, accepting things like GDP as the best politically available target to organize around, but trying to persuade people to do good rather than bad things to raise the GDP.
Are we sure that those are examples of progressivism rather than using the same word to describe themselves?
Progressivism seems like a third degree simulacral procession from Whig Theory of History, which is at least a theory. Whig Theory of History relates to progress as a contingent claim to be asserted about aggregates, which is meaningful because it lawfully decomposes into constituent facts we care about. Progressivism seems to inherit the emotional loading of the term as a given and then situate intentions relative to it.
Progress Studies and Works in Progress seem to be relying on “progress” as something whose value & reality is uncontested even if its specific meaning is unclear and the rollout is uneven.
I am not sure, which is why I asked Benquo for his take ¯\(ツ)/¯