Social Progress

How can we measure progress in society?

• I said in my Offending People page that the metric for human progress should be at the standard reducing human suffering.

What about maximizing happiness?

• inspiration coming from Ali Abdaal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsT2bBo4XT8&ab_channel=AliAbdaal, maximize long term happiness. Short term is bad because of hedonic adaptation

How do you measure the suffering? $\to$ Maslow’s Pyramid, guarantee physiological and safety needs?

• However, this seems flowed. If you look at some of the most successful people, they are complicated beings because they have been through so much, not even meeting their safety needs. And it is because of their struggles that they’ve become GOATs. But are they happier? But should we optimize towards happier human beings? I am not happy because I am not a GOAT. Also, people get happiness in very different ways.
  • What about people who have made the most impact vs. people who just have become the greatest?
• Measure based on meeting Human Rights

Idea from ChatGPT: Eliminate norms that are harmful. So I guess Utilitarian perspective? Also see Politics.

Going against progress = being a conservative?

Again, depends on what you mean by progress.

I think I had some terrifying thoughts about this through:

• My Take on Capitalism and Consumer Culture
  • “Sometimes I wonder if most companies created today are truly contributing to innovation or stagnation at a global scale. Are we truly progressing or digressing as human species, merely disillusioning ourselves with progress by looking at the growth of the economy when we’re really just making things worse for the poor countries, stripping their land of their resources and bringing it back to our first-world country?”
• My Worldviews → I talk about some ideas about gathering knowledge to advance humanity

I think the controversy around Andrew Tate highlights the biggest dilemma around social progress. About whether we are going forwards as a society of backwards

• Because each person has their own Truth. And so social progress is very subjective to each individual’s worldviews
• Liberals would say he is backwards because progress to liberals is achieving a more Egalitarian society, creating opportunities for all
• People with a more conservative view of family and women will say Andrew Tate is helping social progress by developing stronger young men
  • Note that in the west, Andrew Tate is often called a misogynist, but celebrated in more conservative countries where cultures are completely different, viewing men and women as fundamentally different biological species, and thus have different functions in society
  • This contrasts with the Egalitarian view of man and woman perpetrated by the west

#todo A logical break down of the arguments on both sides when I am bored