Love it, I'm a rabid fan of David Deutsch and think he's essentially answered these questions, so for fun I'm going to take a stab at them below.
The definition of “progress”: Increase in wealth, which is "the set of possible transformations." This occurs through knowledge growth, which was described by Karl Popper as a process of conjecture and refutation.
How to measure progress: Again, how do we measure the number of possible transformations? When the Wright brothers discovered flight, they opened a new set of possible transformations. (I wonder - w
1Chris Leong2yI think that there is some value in this frame, but I guess I see this as
limited to the context where we're generally replacing bad problems with a less
bad problems.
I guess it would seem a bit blase in a context where we take a problem that is
only kind of bad and replace it with something that is a catastrophe.
So my tendency would be much more cautious about the potential to create new
problems.
Love it, I'm a rabid fan of David Deutsch and think he's essentially answered these questions, so for fun I'm going to take a stab at them below.
- The definition of “progress”: Increase in wealth, which is "the set of possible transformations." This occurs through knowledge growth, which was described by Karl Popper as a process of conjecture and refutation.
- How to measure progress: Again, how do we measure the number of possible transformations? When the Wright brothers discovered flight, they opened a new set of possible transformations. (I wonder - w
... (read more)