I have to disagree with some of the assumptions here. What I’m about to write is going to be unpopular though, since it goes against the social consensus (by which I mean that updating your belief towards mine will make you less liked on here rather than more). I’m going to comment anyway since I believe these common misconceptions might bring about the destruction of society.
What you’re seeing is not a rational paradox, it’s a psychological problem. Defining thing which are inherent to life as “problematic” and “bad” has the natural consequence of making us dislike life, reality, and ourselves, leading to positions like “having children is bad” and “humanity is a plague on the planet”. Going from enjoying pranks to suffering at the memory of them is not necessarily an improvement, since higher standards have made reality less enjoyable for you. You might argue that higher standards are for the purpose of human enjoyment, and that this is a paradox, but I think that’s the old philosophical idea about “being” vs “becoming”.
There’s no “collective progress” as such. All these things are relative rather than absolute. What you consider as desirable depends on who you are. I believe that a large portion of the population are now mentally unwell, and that the collective effort which seeks to change reality is partly rooted in illness, and thus leading to the same states that illness lead to. If somebody is afraid of words which envoke negative emotions in them, they might consider the censorship of such words to be ‘progress’, but this is merely a collective form of an individual in denial.
There’s nothing bad about tradition, it’s merely stability of some set of values which work. Of course you can come up with alternatives which sound better, but this is because anything is possible in thought. Comparing reality to fantasy scenarios will make reality seem “bad” by comparison, but I think it’s naive to assume that our ideals are realistic or even desirable (I might desire never to work again, but as a symptom of exhaustion or learned helplessness. But the root problem would not be work, but my stance towards it)
The consensus, not born from rationality but from common feelings and impressions, is that technology is good and war is bad. But the thing is that technology improves the fastest under conflict, and that any lack of conflict leads to stegnation (which is why monopolies are undesirable). My point is that the good/bad duality is naive, as ‘good things’ give birth to ‘bad things’ and vice versa.
Finally, it’s possible to avoid any “paradoxes” entirely. It’s possible for me to love myself while trying hard to improve. It’s also possible to compare the current state to a future goal state without suffering from the gap between them. The difference is in the mental framing and in your direction of comparison. Mathematically they might be equal under the duality principle in optimization, but cognitively it’s better to focus on positives than on eliminating negatives, and if the latter becomes pathological, the consequences are dire.
I have to disagree with some of the assumptions here. What I’m about to write is going to be unpopular though, since it goes against the social consensus (by which I mean that updating your belief towards mine will make you less liked on here rather than more). I’m going to comment anyway since I believe these common misconceptions might bring about the destruction of society.
What you’re seeing is not a rational paradox, it’s a psychological problem. Defining thing which are inherent to life as “problematic” and “bad” has the natural consequence of making us dislike life, reality, and ourselves, leading to positions like “having children is bad” and “humanity is a plague on the planet”. Going from enjoying pranks to suffering at the memory of them is not necessarily an improvement, since higher standards have made reality less enjoyable for you. You might argue that higher standards are for the purpose of human enjoyment, and that this is a paradox, but I think that’s the old philosophical idea about “being” vs “becoming”.
There’s no “collective progress” as such. All these things are relative rather than absolute. What you consider as desirable depends on who you are. I believe that a large portion of the population are now mentally unwell, and that the collective effort which seeks to change reality is partly rooted in illness, and thus leading to the same states that illness lead to. If somebody is afraid of words which envoke negative emotions in them, they might consider the censorship of such words to be ‘progress’, but this is merely a collective form of an individual in denial.
There’s nothing bad about tradition, it’s merely stability of some set of values which work. Of course you can come up with alternatives which sound better, but this is because anything is possible in thought. Comparing reality to fantasy scenarios will make reality seem “bad” by comparison, but I think it’s naive to assume that our ideals are realistic or even desirable (I might desire never to work again, but as a symptom of exhaustion or learned helplessness. But the root problem would not be work, but my stance towards it)
The consensus, not born from rationality but from common feelings and impressions, is that technology is good and war is bad. But the thing is that technology improves the fastest under conflict, and that any lack of conflict leads to stegnation (which is why monopolies are undesirable). My point is that the good/bad duality is naive, as ‘good things’ give birth to ‘bad things’ and vice versa.
Finally, it’s possible to avoid any “paradoxes” entirely. It’s possible for me to love myself while trying hard to improve. It’s also possible to compare the current state to a future goal state without suffering from the gap between them. The difference is in the mental framing and in your direction of comparison. Mathematically they might be equal under the duality principle in optimization, but cognitively it’s better to focus on positives than on eliminating negatives, and if the latter becomes pathological, the consequences are dire.