Re:Do we need a better understanding of 'progress'?
by dane-pgp on Thursday June 16, 2022 @08:44AM
(#31765397)
I think this article does a fairly good job of presenting different sides. In particular, I found this criticism very pertinent:
> "you could tell a story where instead of things getting better, what we're seeing is that a lot of what's bad is getting concentrated into unlikely, infrequent but enormously bad events".
It's like a Martingale betting strategy[0] where you turn a system of random wins and losses (like a technological/economic steady state) into one with repeated guarantees wins... until the guarantee fails (e.g. the Singularity, or a global market crash, or nuclear war).
If we're only measuring economic growth and technological capability, and not risk (which is harder to measure, and tempting to underestimate), then we might be running at full speed towards outcomes that even hyperbolic discounting[1] can't justify.
> "you could tell a story where instead of things getting better, what we're seeing is that a lot of what's bad is getting concentrated into unlikely, infrequent but enormously bad events".
It's like a Martingale betting strategy[0] where you turn a system of random wins and losses (like a technological/economic steady state) into one with repeated guarantees wins... until the guarantee fails (e.g. the Singularity, or a global market crash, or nuclear war).
If we're only measuring economic growth and technological capability, and not risk (which is harder to measure, and tempting to underestimate), then we might be running at full speed towards outcomes that even hyperbolic discounting[1] can't justify.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_%28betting_system%2...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_discounting