Progress Isn't Natural (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Progress Isn't Natural (2016)

theatlantic.com

31 pointsTomte16 comments

Progress of a sort seems to be speeding up. The first 9bn years things progressed in a leisurely way up to life on earth, then evolution was kind of slow for the first 3bn years till life went multicellular when things speeded up a bit, the in recent times things sped up with writing and technology and it looks like another step up when AI takes off. Not sure how much of that you look at as natural

>Not sure how much of that you look at as natural

All of it. Humans are just a bunch of apes, fully part of nature, and the universe experiencing itself.

That definition of nature leaves little room to make any useful distinctions. Why have the word at all at that point?

The usual order of things is to call natural anything not made by human hand.

9bn? The universe is 13.8bn years old[1], and our solar system is 4.5[2]...

As to whether our evolution and development constitute progress, that's an interesting question. We are self-aware, which seems to be fairly uncommon among terrestrial organisms (or maybe we're bad at spotting it), and we have made some progress in not killing each other quite as much as we used to (though there are a lot more of us, so that may be a wash), and we're making sort of a mess of the planet lately. But I am at least semi-optimistic about our future.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_universe 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System#Formation_and_evo...

Horseshoe crabs look very similar to things things you can find 450 million years ago. Look at the strange crap around the Cambrian explosion and if anything it's slowing down.

Are you referencing "Hallucigenia"?

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/07/science/hallucigenia-camb...

Philosophical take:

From humanity's very biased point of view, if we assume we are smart and conscious -- and that is a severely questionable assumption! -- I view progress / entropy as two kinds:

(1) "Natural", non-directed movement of a system from one stable state to another. The chaos theory outlines these processes fairly well: basically longer periods of semi-stable system which is always on the brink of the chaos but almost never tips over to it, and then sudden cataclysmic changes which are quickly followed by new semi-stable states. This is related to external factors that upset the balance.

(2) "Non-natural", or movements of a system directed by external agents. This is a conscious effort to break the currently existing balance. This implies understanding of the system and its dynamics, it implies dissatisfaction with that current state, and finally it implies understanding how to modify the system in a way that is deemed favorable to the interfering agents.

Since we are not that smart as we think, #2 is almost always inevitably leading to cataclysmic changes because we don't have good enough understanding of the entirety of the system we are trying to modify in our favor. Combine that with the fact that we are always arrogantly thinking that we can grasp everything at once -- or simply don't care and never consider the bigger picture in the first place -- and cataclysmic changes are basically inevitable. They just happen on a longer time scales than we are used to think about.

So "progress" in the way we perceive it today -- related to our so-called "civilization" -- is definitely non-natural. But we are definitely working towards our own end... or at least towards our next evolutionary stage.

I believe that we are already outside of the cycle of natural entropic changes in our own ecosystem and societal systems.

To paraphrase: "Unguided arms races (blindly fumbled through) are bad, because they lead to ground shaking events, not unlike the Cambrian explosion, very obviously followed by the Cambrian extinction event."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian-Ordovician_extinction...

Massive competition leads to a decisive, if catastophic, yet Pyrrhic victory of attrition, perhaps?

Also, I think with: "very biased" to describe point of view is an unnecessary editorialization, , and "severely questionable assumption" I totally disagree with.

> Also, I think with: "very biased" to describe point of view is an unnecessary editorialization, , and "severely questionable assumption" I totally disagree with.

Well, I am questioning our own assumption that we are intelligent and conscious. All we know is our current level, and some of us can imagine a possible higher level. But that might not even describe a "true" intelligence and consciousness.

Because if anything, so far agent Smith from the first "Matrix" movie is right: we act more like a virus and not like mammals.

You can disagree with my wording of course, but do you disagree with the premise?

> Massive competition leads to a decisive, if catastophic, yet Pyrrhic victory of attrition, perhaps?

Yes, this is how it looks like. If there's gonna be some sort of big war where everybody gets to pull out their biggest sticks then it definitely won't at all matter who is gonna win because by the time the "victory" arrives the Earth is probably gonna be an uninhabitable wasteland.

Our military are like that. There might not be anything remaining to fight for but their values will likely compel them to fight until the bitter victory. And it's very likely it will be bitter indeed.

I mean, yeah, I agree. And it's useful to be reminded that it isn't natural lest we take it for granted. But why the strawman setup/teardown at the end:

  Nowadays, unsubstantiated fears of monstrosities created by genetic engineering...threaten to slow down research and development in crucial areas, including coping with climate change.

One could respond that progress is responsible for climate change in the first place. Point being, fears about progress are hardly "unsubstantiated", and it is useful to step back from time to time and think about what we're moving towards.

> Tradition did not give up without a fight. In the closing decades of the 17th century, an intellectual battle occurred between two groups, the ancients and the moderns.

Tradition still hasn't given up and remains a significant force in certain countries.

Who you have to thank for modern progress:

https://www.natureindex.com/country-outputs

Seems like mostly just painting the history of scientific progress, instead of trying to make a point about it. If the author was trying to make a point, it's not supported by anything in the article.

The entire point of this is apparently leading to this bit at the end:

”Nowadays, unsubstantiated fears of monstrosities created by genetic engineering (including, God forbid, smarter people, drought-resistant crops, and mosquitoes that don’t transmit malaria) threaten to slow down research and development in crucial areas, including coping with climate change.

Progress, as was realized early on, inevitably entails risks and costs. But the alternative, then as now, is always worse.”

I found the article a very fun read with a completely disconnected ending. It’s almost like a school assignment where the writer said “Oh, I got my 5 pages. I’m done.”

"Pride comes before the fall", as those damn ignorant ancients were wont to say.

Stupid gits ... right? right?

I’m sure this was very clever (right? right?), but I don’t know what your point actually is.

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