cross-posted from niplav.github.io

Peter Thiel likes to distinguish between Progress in Bits (new algorithms, network protocols, user interfaces…) and Progress in Atoms (transportation speed, energy usage, material abundance…). I propose a third category: Progress in Qualia.

It is not clear how one might want to measure Progress in Qualia: the necessary instruments are not quite there yet. Therefore I'm mostly reduced to speculation, but speculation also has it's place.

I will be trying to find examples of broad developments that impact many people a little (an aggregative "normally distributed" view), and qualia in the logarithmic tail that might out outweigh other types of qualia in importance (an outlier-focused "log-normally distributed" view).

Humans
- The world economy has been experiencing a huge surge in growth over the last ~200 years
  - This has made humanity (and most individual humans) much richer. This has had the effect of humanity becoming much larger: growing from ~1 bio. in 1800 to ~8 bio. now. That means there's many more human qualia.
  - This has also caused the average lifespan to rise from ~25 years to ~70 years, causing many more qualia specific to humans of old age relative to the qualia of younger people (though this is likely tampered by the subjective speedup of time as one ages). The qualia of older people might have a lower energy parameter, and the variance in younger people is higher. If old age persists for longer, chronic pains might weigh more strongly, and we're potentially missing large amounts of suffering at the end of life (since there is no selection for energy expenditure close to death).
  - Individual wealth has been rising, when ~90% of people were in extreme poverty in 1800, today only ~10% are. This has a remarkably small effect on self-reported happiness. In the best case I'd guess that happiness is logarithmic to material wealth, in the bad case I'd guess that it is linear in the beginning and then tapers off, and in the worst case I think it's purely positional to the society around you.
    - It might be that humans are now much more protected from very bad events such as the death of a child or long-lasting parasite & disease burden, which usually weighs extremely heavily on the quality of the life of a person, and happened far more often in the ancestral evolutionary environment.
- Anesthetics and analgesics are hu

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