My apologies then; it’s likely I misinterpreted you. Perhaps we are on the same page.
My answer to your question depends on the definition of progress. I prefer to taboo the term and instead say the following:
When society or someone or whatever changes from A to B, and B is morally better than A, that’s a good change.
However, sometimes good changes are caused by processes that are not completely trustworthy/reliable. That is, sometimes it’s the case that a process causes a good change from situation A to B, but in some other situation C it will produce a bad change to D. The example on my mind most is the one I gave earlier—maybe the memetic evolution process is like this; selecting memes on the basis of how nice they sound produces some good changes A-->B (such as increased acceptance of homosexuality) but will also produce other bad changes C to D (I don’t have a particular example here but hopefully don’t need one; if you want I can try to come up with one.). Goodhart’s Curse weighs heavily on my mind; this pattern of optimization processes at first causing good changes and then later causing bad changes is so pervasive that we have a name for it!
I do believe in progress, in the following sense: There are processes which I trust / consider reliable / would defer to. If I learned that future-me or future-society had followed those processes and come to conclusion X, I would update heavily towards X. And I’m very excited to learn more about what the results of these processes will be so that I can update towards them.
I am skeptical of progress, in the following different sense: I consider it a wide-open question whether default memetic evolution among terrestrial humans (i.e. what’ll happen if we don’t build AGI and just let history continue as normal) is a process which I trust.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of clarity about what those trustworthy processes are exactly. Nor do I have a lot of clarity about what the actual causes of past moral changes were, such as acceptance of homosexuality. So I am pretty uncertain about which good changes in the past were caused by trustworthy processes and which weren’t. History is big; presumably both kinds exist.
My apologies then; it’s likely I misinterpreted you. Perhaps we are on the same page.
My answer to your question depends on the definition of progress. I prefer to taboo the term and instead say the following:
When society or someone or whatever changes from A to B, and B is morally better than A, that’s a good change.
However, sometimes good changes are caused by processes that are not completely trustworthy/reliable. That is, sometimes it’s the case that a process causes a good change from situation A to B, but in some other situation C it will produce a bad change to D. The example on my mind most is the one I gave earlier—maybe the memetic evolution process is like this; selecting memes on the basis of how nice they sound produces some good changes A-->B (such as increased acceptance of homosexuality) but will also produce other bad changes C to D (I don’t have a particular example here but hopefully don’t need one; if you want I can try to come up with one.). Goodhart’s Curse weighs heavily on my mind; this pattern of optimization processes at first causing good changes and then later causing bad changes is so pervasive that we have a name for it!
I do believe in progress, in the following sense: There are processes which I trust / consider reliable / would defer to. If I learned that future-me or future-society had followed those processes and come to conclusion X, I would update heavily towards X. And I’m very excited to learn more about what the results of these processes will be so that I can update towards them.
I am skeptical of progress, in the following different sense: I consider it a wide-open question whether default memetic evolution among terrestrial humans (i.e. what’ll happen if we don’t build AGI and just let history continue as normal) is a process which I trust.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of clarity about what those trustworthy processes are exactly. Nor do I have a lot of clarity about what the actual causes of past moral changes were, such as acceptance of homosexuality. So I am pretty uncertain about which good changes in the past were caused by trustworthy processes and which weren’t. History is big; presumably both kinds exist.