A lot of people talk about progress in this way, but it's really just their own aggression expressed in ideological form

But I do think that progress is an actual thing: just look at what the printing press accomplished, and what the internet is in the process of accomplishing. I think that making more information accessible at a lower cost is the core of progress. Who knows where this will take us, but it's made certain things possible that were not possible before. Life expectancies are also longer than they've been. But this kind of progress isn't a moral imperative like the political kind. It's just something that happens as a result of production

But at what psychological costs?

It has greatly reduced: stability, attention spans, empathy, being satisfied in what you have and probably greatly increased depression and anxiety.

All those are key to the psychology of happiness and personal growth.

And since our material well being is already good, and science and tech would still advance, it does seem that happiness and personal growth are much better indicators for progress.

Tech is never the problem.

You are saying "wow this tree has grown to block my favorite chair from the sun. I am a dumb bitch who doesn't understand how trees work. If only there was sun elsewhere. Let me cut down the tree because I cannot be creative and also I am an idiot."

That is you, in my words. :)

Although HN is social media right? So maybe not

You are probably right. But...

But if, as a side effect, it materially increases the number of people who are really able to choose what they do with their lives, and gives them more time to do it, it will be progress.

It is worth keeping in mind that all funding actions are inefficient in one way or another. Most government actions are no more than 40 percent efficient, and real policymakers are aware of this fact and make decisions in its light. In the private sector, a CFO told me many years ago that no more than one in three investments works out.

If half of the money allocated for a universal basic income is wasted on needless "management" makework, provided that there is no actual obstruction or perversion of its universality, such a scheme would be doing well as well as doing good.

It would be the most progress seen since the vacuum cleaner, the refrigerator, the washing machine, and the electric stove made choices possible for millions of people.

At the expense of what?

Somebody has to produce all of the things people need and want. Universal basic income holds out the illusory promise of being able to have things you need and want without paying any cost to have them produced--because you aren't paying any cost (in time and effort) to get the income. That's not progress.

Real progress would be improving technology to make the things people need and want cheaper. Imagine if food were as cheap and plentiful as air. Imagine if modern construction methods made it 10 times as easy to build a house as it is now. Imagine if cars could be cranked out on 3D printers. And so on.

But that kind of progress never happens from the top down. It always happens from the bottom up. No top-down program, whether it's UBI or anything else, will help with that kind of progress. It takes actual people doing actual work.

It was. There was a time you could just walk out and pick it off trees.

Food didn't change. We did.

Progress is not a scalar. It's a vector. You must always ask:

Progress towards what?

For some, yes. Others you had to hunt or catch.

> Food didn't change. We did.

If you mean the human population grew to a point where simple hunting and gathering could not support it, and then food changed after that, that's getting things backwards. Our ancestors invented farming, i.e., a new way of producing food, and then the population grew larger than hunting and gathering could support. So food changed first. Then we changed.

> You must always ask:

Progress towards what?

Yes, agreed. Not everyone would consider our ancestors' invention of farming to be progress, for example.

The best interpretation of your comment is that of course I support progress away from blatant human rights violations and genocide.

Though I do suggest you take extra care with grammatical use of the comma (,). :)

If you want innovation and technology to thrive, you will have to notice that valuing money as highly as it is, is detrimental to progress. And if like you said, UBI reduces the value, that's precisely what can help, right?

And governments pay farmers not to grow grain in the first place. These kinds of problems are solved by removing the top-down policies that create them.

> 2. We have planned obsolescence in electronic devices, to increase profits

To the extent this is a problem (and not just in electronic devices, many products are not built to last any more), it's a problem with corporate governance and is not something that is easily solved. The corporate governance problem is that most stock in publicly traded corporations is no longer owned by individuals, it's owned by mutual funds, since that's where most people's retirement savings are now. So the corporate entities that have to meet long time horizons, which is what enables things like building products to last a long time, rather than focusing on short-term profits, are the mutual funds, not the individual corporations--but the mutual funds don't build anything, they just move money around. The actual corporations that build things have short time horizons because the mutual funds will sell their stock if they don't meet the desired short-term returns.

As I said, this problem is not easily solved; certainly UBI does not solve it. Nor will it improve it, since anyone who depends on UBI for their income is not going to be running a corporation anyway. To the extent UBI affects the incentives of the people running corporations at all, it increases their incentive to take short-term profit, since the long-term effect of something like UBI is to make human labor scarcer and more expensive, which means corporations that build things need to either automate or go out of business--so the executives that run them have more incentive to take short-term profits and then exit with their golden parachutes before the long-term problems surface.

> 3. Closed source technology have made it unreasonably hard for small groups with limited funding to innovate

This is only true to the extent that closed source technology is better and would spark innovation if it were open. I do not see this being the case.

> valuing money as highly as it is, is detrimental to progress

I'm not sure I agree. I think what is detrimental to progress is focusing on short term gain rather than long term stability, particularly of the social institutions that are required for progress to occur in the first place. I don't see "valuing money" in and of itself as much of an effect. Many people who "value money" are willing to work for years on startups in order to get rich, producing much innovation and progress.

>> To the extent this is a problem (and not just in electronic devices, many products are not built to last any more), it's a problem with corporate governance and is not something that is easily solved. The corporate governance problem is that most stock in publicly traded corporations is no longer owned by individuals, it's owned by mutual funds, since that's where most people's retirement savings are now. So the corporate entities that have to meet long time horizons, which is what enables things like building products to last a long time, rather than focusing on short-term profits, are the mutual funds, not the individual corporations--but the mutual funds don't build anything, they just move money around. The actual corporations that build things have short time horizons because the mutual funds will sell their stock if they don't meet the desired short-term returns.As I said, this problem is not easily solved; I see where you are coming from, and it makes sense. But you have to admit that the focus of this practice is to increase profits more than increasing value for customers. And that's a consequence of money being of more importance than solving a problem. So the store of value (money) is more "important" than the value the product is supposed to create.. I haven't been really eloquent here but I hope you get where in coming from, even if I might be a bit naive

>>certainly UBI does not solve it. Ofc, it won't. It'll just serve as a buffer instead of socialised Healthcare, housing and more, right?

>> Nor will it improve it, since anyone who depends on UBI for their income is not going to be running a corporation anyway. To the extent UBI affects the incentives of the people running corporations at all, it increases their incentive to take short-term profit, since the long-term effect of something like UBI is to make human labor scarcer and more expensive, which means corporations that build things need to either automate or go out of business--so the executives that run them have more incentive to take short-term profits and then exit with their golden parachutes before the long-term problems surface.

after this short term effect dies down, we would have more efficient corpos in the long tern, right?

And its all gonna "go to the moon" until there's a looming recession and suddenly all the worthless things lose a bunch of value.. (this is my first market cycle, and I see this with NFTs)

>> This is only true to the extent that closed source technology is better and would spark innovation if it were open. No, better or worse aside, walled gardens make it harder to try new things.

>> I'm not sure I agree. I think what is detrimental to progress is focusing on short term gain rather than long term stability, particularly of the social institutions that are required for progress to occur in the first place. I don't see "valuing money" in and of itself as much of an effect. Many people who "value money" are willing to work for years on startups in order to get rich, producing much innovation and progress. Interesting, but I disagree. Imo startup founders who succeed in the long run often place greater importance on creating value for their customers than they value the concept of money. Ofc they still care about it, because, well, obviously

I'd like to thank you for taking the time to reply so thoroughly

Not as long as the governance issue I described exists, no. Things would get worse on average over time but nobody would have any way to fix that.

> its all gonna "go to the moon" until there's a looming recession and suddenly all the worthless things lose a bunch of value

I don't know what you mean by this. There is nothing that guarantees that wealth creation will continue.

> I'd like to thank you for taking the time to reply so thoroughly

You're welcome! And thank you in return for taking the time to read my posts and respond thoughtfully.

I don't know the reasoning behind this, would love to understand in depth, but you're probably right.

>> don't know what you mean by this. I'm taking about how when everyone had excess cash (not excess value) then they spent it on things like NFTs, while a part of the craze saw new money buying NFTs like old money buys yatchs (to get into an exclusive club), a lot of people followed the hype by putting their money into an "asset" that has lost staggering amounts recently as a recession looms ahead because it mostly solves no real problem and creates no real value.

Nice talking to you!

I agree about the goal.

But technology isn't what makes housing near reasonable places to live(employment, good community, etc) expensive.

So given socialized medicine, good public transportation and affordable housing takes us quite close to basic income - when a single adult needed to needed to work less than full time to provide for a family. That is possible in some places in Europe.

And those are centrally managed things.

So it's a combination of bottoms-up and top-down.

In a free market, housing prices are determined by supply and demand. Since location is a key factor in housing, supply is usually restricted at some point, which drives up prices in places that are in high demand. (Technology that enables remote work can help with this, though, by reducing the need for high demand in particular locations.)

However, housing in current developed societies is not a free market. There are many top-down restrictions that artificially restrict supply, and there are government policies like printing money for mortgages that artificially inflate demand. This drives up the price of housing everywhere, but it's at its worst in areas that are already in high demand.

So the best way to improve housing prices, across the board but especially in high demand areas, would be to remove the artificial effects on supply and demand and let the free market work. Which is bottom-up, not top-down. Top-down is hurting, not helping.

> given socialized medicine, good public transportation and affordable housing

Which either don't exist, or only exist because people are willing to pay for them anyway and don't feel gouged by the taxes required--which means that in those societies, those things would exist even in a free market, because people would pay for them anyway. So even where top-down supposedly works, it only works because it's not needed--it's "imposing" things that people would freely choose anyway. That's not an argument for top-down; it's an argument against it.

2. What do you think needs to be done to achieve those goals?

We will all probably agree on 1. But disagree on how to achieve those goals

The separation of powers in the west has been a pretty good at being resiliant to change with a kind of meta-stability, and also facilitating growth. Dynasties provided stability for milennia, but somehow prevented humans from making any of the post-enlightenment discoveries from the last 300 years anywhere else, and over hundreds of millions of lives. Out on a limb, but I actually suspect in the 19th century as a conseqeuence of mass literacy, we figured out how to create the equivalent to internet viruses, but in language, and use them to spread variants of mental illness. Metaphorically, our current conflicts closely resemble the consequences of ideological botnets weilded by some very unsavory characters. One way to free minds from it is to inculcate them with the idea that everywhere there is life, it is evident that it was not meant just to struggle and suffer, but it was created with an intent for it to thrive. This is really meta, but I'd say logically we need to get upstream of materialism if we're going to find ways solve material problems, and if we don't, we're just going to stay in solipsistic loops that justify our will to power. The view of the world that is predicated on an identity founded on being oppressed by other people is really a perverse form of materialist worship, where it doesn't believe in creation or intent, but it does believe in its inferiorized self relative to the idealized (evil) object it sees its identity reflected in. The view has allowed itself to be defined by (and relative-to) its own peak experience, and one that was negative. This is heresy, surely, but it seems worth it given the alternatives.

Anyway, I'd say the thing to do is, make new stuff, discover new things, and if you can't, find a way align with those who are. This meta stuff is just articulating how to untangle some of the underlying morass of beliefs that I think are getting in the way of thriving life.

Rather than agreeing on the framework of "progress means increasing GDP and productivity", you could say "progress means total families" or "progress means a growing number of independent, self-sufficient communities". Is it radical to think that to some, progress might mean _more countries_?

I find hard to believe that anyone would put that in front of more basic needs like food, safety, home.

Sure, once basic needs are satisfied, our goals start to diverge, and rely more on our subjective views of the world.

But is the world even close to that? Should we disregard basic needs as a solved problem that we don't even think about anymore?

Spring-of-nations happened because at the time many people got their basic needs covered and started looking for higher needs to fulfill.

But as with salary raises, people quickly take better conditions as the new normal.

I agree with you that we have had progress, and it's been net good by far. But I was answering to someone who its answer to the question "What would look like progress to you?" was something that is multiple levels above of what we consider basic needs today.

The whole point of progress studies is that, in the long term, the best way to improve whatever we consider today "basic needs" is to "grow the pie" as fast as we can

I don’t believe purely growing the pie will fix it. Human beings looove to look at relative quality of life. And feel much better if everybody is equally poorer rather than higher baseline, but even higher extremes.

For example my country in Soviet era was piss poor. But people managed to get by and find happiness. Nowadays we live much much much better in absolute terms. Even baseline. Yet many people are lost in rat race drowning in instagram envy.

Do you have some data to back that up? Or any study?. My hypothesis is that most of those people think the world is mostly a zero-sum game, and they think the best way to improve their lives is to redistribute wealth more uniformly.

> For example my country in Soviet era was piss poor. But people managed to get by and find happiness.

I'm sorry, but that's an euphemism for dying and suffering. And be mindful that you, or your family, have survivorship bias. There are studies that show correlations between happiness and GDP

I am from Venezuela, sadly, my memory is fresher. My dad needlessly died before hand because the government decided that a local pandemic (pre covid, 2017) didn't exist, the pandemic was in conflict to their statistic goals, so they acted as if it didn't existed and let it roll without restrains. And there were more common dramas like family and friends malnourished, and criminals rampaging the city (BTW, one time they entered into my house armed and tied me up while they robbed, and multiple times robbed my family's small businesses with guns). There are 2 main reasons why criminality exploded in the last decade, the economy shrunk more than 50%, and criminals weren't punished, in fact, some were even armed as guerrillas in favor of the ruling party. The line between police and criminal was as blurry as ever, I've never seen a police acting like thugs so shamelessly without any care, they knew there was no punishment whatsoever

P.S. Venesuela is a truly sad case. Yet another example what leftist economical miracles lead to. Unfortunately too many people in West still wish that upon themselves :D

But I think I see your point now, for the people currently beyond that line, subjective views of the world dominates their desires, so the axis where we want progress are now more diverse among individuals, and progress in one axis tend to harm progress on other axis, hence why there's more conflict

People have subjective views of how they define progress too. For me, splitting the pie equally sounds like retrograde soviet nostalgia. I don't believe equally sharing the pie makes the world any better. Productive people (actually productive) should get bigger piece of the pie than slackers. On top of that, functioning market is important to find ideas that work. Otherwise it's straight to failure of central planning.

So I think our difference relies in how much our happiness is tied to relating to others

And I'm not sure how we can answer that. But I do feel my happiness rarely relies on relating to others, instead it relies more in socializing (laughing out loud or playing games with friends), and by making progress towards my moralistic goals, mostly with the point of view centered at society, our species, or all life beings

I authoritarianism in vogue? Can you get the fuck off my democracy? :)

> When someone tells you they represent change, what they tend to mean is they're here to take your stuff,

You are the villain of Delicate Tendrils.

Yes we are legitimately coming to take your things. Yes, this is what we mean. How else could you interpret it?