ChadReed
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ChadReed has not written any posts yet.
This is a very well-written piece that asks a lot of interesting questions. I probably won't be able to go through all of it right now, but I wanted to respond to a few initial points, and hopefully, my response is at least half as coherent as your original post.
I agree that the metric for 'progress' is mostly amorphic, but if we accept the simplified version of what's been described as 19th-century progress, I think we're mostly doing a good job. Some of what has been called mistakes here seem to be generally successful to me.
That technology would lead to world peace
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- That technology would lead to world peace. Enlightenment thinkers such
I think perhaps, as humans, we want morality and happiness to overlap when this is rarely the case. Self-sacrifice is definitely a limited resource, but if most people believed it to be a moral duty, the human race would likely be better off. The problem with the self-sacrificial strategy is the problem of defection in any game.
If we could convince a sufficient amount of people to sacrifice their personal resources and time, then the average cost of self-sacrifice could go down enough that more people would be willing to do it and we would all be better off. But there will always be those that defect for personal gain. In the... (read more)
I generally agree but also find that people also accuse people of nitpicking or excessive nuance when trying to defend ideas that feel true but are logically weak.
I find the critical distinction between rigor and nitpicking to be whether the detail being argued about is critical to the foundation of any of an argument's premises.