I think the present is much better than the past along the vast majority of dimensions, and you’re not paying attention to the actual history of what the world was like in the past. Yes, the simplified version of history kids are taught is wrong, but so is the idea that the past was good, actually.
That said, I don’t think I do subscribe to the idea that survival of the fittest is optimal—it’s the result of an optimization process, but not one aligned with what humans want. In the case of humans, our goals and evolution’s goals for us are obviously correlated in evolutionary time, and have diverged. (Ditto for capitalism as an optimization engine; maximizing capital is less and less correlated with flourishing over time.)
At the same time, Goodhart’s law doesn’t say optimization ends up badly, it says that after a certain point the returns grow less and less correlated with the goal. And that means that even when we don’t want further optimization, pushing the opposite direction is almost always making things worse.
I think the present is much better than the past along the vast majority of dimensions, and you’re not paying attention to the actual history of what the world was like in the past. Yes, the simplified version of history kids are taught is wrong, but so is the idea that the past was good, actually.
That said, I don’t think I do subscribe to the idea that survival of the fittest is optimal—it’s the result of an optimization process, but not one aligned with what humans want. In the case of humans, our goals and evolution’s goals for us are obviously correlated in evolutionary time, and have diverged. (Ditto for capitalism as an optimization engine; maximizing capital is less and less correlated with flourishing over time.)
At the same time, Goodhart’s law doesn’t say optimization ends up badly, it says that after a certain point the returns grow less and less correlated with the goal. And that means that even when we don’t want further optimization, pushing the opposite direction is almost always making things worse.