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Author Topic: Progress
Jingles
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posted 09 January 2004 10:36 PM      Profile for Jingles     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
After going 'round and 'round in this moon thread, Mandos says:
quote:
Hmm. Perhaps. I rather thing the fundamental issue is the idea of progress. I happen to think progress exists. I don't think that these 100 years are an anomaly except in that they happened now--I think they follow from what happened before quite well and fit a pattern.

What is progress? Who defines it? Who considers what is progress and what is regress? What happens to those who disagree with the definition?

When Robert Moses decided that progress involved building a freeway through New York City, it certainly wasn't progress for those who found themselves homeless when the freeway came through their neighbourhoods. For those wealthy and privileged enough to be able to use the roads no doubt thought it progress as well: forward to the future of the automobile and its convenience and comfort.

Technological progress is defined by those who benefit from it. If you don't benefit and disagree that whatever is touted as progress is actually progressive, then you are a Luddite, an anti-science reactionary. For the scientific community wanting to renew space exploration, the prospect of big dollar research grants and high profile exposure no doubt make it fit their definition of progress. To someone with more earthly concerns, this definition of progress rings rather hollow.


From: At the Delta of the Alpha and the Omega | Registered: Nov 2002  |  IP: Logged
arborman
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posted 10 January 2004 03:44 AM      Profile for arborman     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Penicillin is progress.
From: I'm a solipsist - isn't everyone? | Registered: Aug 2003  |  IP: Logged
jeff house
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posted 10 January 2004 11:19 AM      Profile for jeff house     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Babble is also progress.
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majorvictory
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posted 10 January 2004 11:41 AM      Profile for majorvictory     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
OVER THE MOON

quote:
Are there senior citizens who need prescription drugs on the Moon? Does the religious right favor a Moon base? How about illegal immigrants, would they be willing to take Moon jobs that Americans don't want?

I'm sitting here trying to figure out what possible reason--other than science illiteracy at the White House--there could be for George W. Bush to announce a plan to build a Moon base. Manned exploration of Mars is even crazier.

As this space pointed out last month, minimum weight at departure from low-Earth orbit for a stripped-down, austere Moon base might be 600 tons, and at current NASA launch prices, it costs $15 billion to place 600 tons into low-Earth orbit. Fifteen billion is NASA's entire budget--and that's just the cost to launch the Moon thing, not to build it, staff it, and support it.

An Apollo spacecraft at departure from low-Earth orbit for the Moon weighed about 45 tons, and the manned part was tiny--astronauts could not stand up or move inside--as most of the weight was fuel. Considering that Moon-base weight would also be mostly fuel, numerous launches firing 600 tons toward the Moon for the purpose of making a base would actually result in little more than a couple of metal huts, some supplies and some antennas. Program cost for the International Space Station, currently losing air pressure, is about $100 billion, and it does not leave orbit. A rough guess would be that to build something about the size of the International Space Station (ISS) on the Moon would cost at least twice as much, $200 billion. And the ISS itself is mainly cramped modules, supplies, and antennas.

What would astronauts at a Moon base do? I haven't the foggiest notion. Note that NASA has not so much as sent a robot probe to the Moon in 30 years, because as far as space-exploration advocates can tell, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, of value to do on the Moon. Geologists are interested in the Moon's formation. If there is ever a fusion reactor to meet the world's energy needs, the "helium three" on the Moon might prove useful, but fusion reactors are decades away from practicality, assuming they ever work. Spending $200 billion on a Moon base that does nothing would be pure, undiluted government waste.



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Michelle
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posted 10 January 2004 11:43 AM      Profile for Michelle   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Jingles, I see your point. Progress is very subjective. I have mixed feelings about space exploration, but I think I'm leaning towards the argument that it isn't an either-or proposition and we should be able to have social justice AND exploration and inquiry simply for the sake of inquiry.

There are so many "useless" things out there that enrich the human spirit. I'm not sure how I feel about the space programs as they are now, since the expense is often justified as military research. I'm sure that's the aim for people like Dubya.

But then there are those who just want to know what's out there. Those who do science for the love of doing science and math and discovering what we can discover, and adding to the sum of human knowledge. I can't convince myself that we have to have achieved social justice before we can engage in this kind of stuff.

You're right that a homeless person on the street wouldn't see the value of finding out what the dust from Mars is like while they're starving. But people use that argument for so many other things - like philosophy, art, literature.

I just wish that people would consider finding solutions to poverty and world problems to be "progress" as much as finding ways to land on Mars. I think the problem is, there is too much political will to do one, but not enough to do the other. I want to see both.


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skdadl
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posted 10 January 2004 12:09 PM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
The idea of progress often bugs me mainly because it tempts so many people to write such bad histories of all sorts.

Students of poetics (ie: of underlying structures and forms of writing) through the centuries and through many cultures have tended to agree that imaginative forms, intellectual stances, tend to be cyclical -- that is, we do not so much stand on the shoulders of those who preceded us as both react against them and rediscover/reinvent out of a more distant past.

If the history of Western technology is all you're writing, then thinking in terms of cumulative increments (ie: progress) makes some sense, undeniably -- although even there, some modesty is advisable. The history of plumbing, eg, can easily be shown to have been cyclical -- found, lost, found again and again.

But even technological history is directed by and occurs in the context of -- something else. And one remains convinced, from examining the written record, that that something else runs more in cycles than in straight upward lines.


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Mandos
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posted 10 January 2004 12:52 PM      Profile for Mandos   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
So for me the concept of technological and scientific progress is really defined through the newness of technological/scientific events. This can be applied both personally and societally. The freeway going through NYC is not really technological progress--it can theoretically be some other sort of progress (I would probably disagree), but roads have been done before. They're quite an old concept. If someone had come up with a new idea about roads (or transportation in general) by building a freeway through NYC, then that might count as technological progress.

So you can argue that space exploration has been done before, but in reality there are probably still a large number of discoveries to be made in lift technology, creating living spaces in a vacuum, etc, etc.

But this, to some extent, accompanied by a secondary issue: the matter of expansion, which is tied to the issue of progress. I do not believe that it is necessary sheer cupidity to want humans to expand into space or into any other frontier. I think it is actually quite practical and sensible. The problem is that on Earth, we have run/are running out of ways and places to expand and are thus reaching a critical state where small events are more likely collapse the whole structure of human society. This is inevitable; the only way to reduce the likelihood of total collapse of the system at a critical state is for the system to keep expanding.


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Mandos
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posted 10 January 2004 12:56 PM      Profile for Mandos   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
skdadl: The issue is not that things keep disappearing and reappearing. Of course they do. But the question is, are these simply meanderings, or are they headed somewhere?

Now you may ask, where? To put a long story short, I see it as climbing the Himalayas with a blindfold. You can't see where you're going, but you know which way is up. And yes, it's not very safe.


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skdadl
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posted 10 January 2004 01:03 PM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by Mandos:
are they headed somewhere?

Now you may ask, where? To put a long story short, I see it as climbing the Himalayas with a blindfold. You can't see where you're going, but you know which way is up. And yes, it's not very safe.


Headed. Interesting expression, Mandos.

I have not seen you "headed" with a blindfold, Mandos. You are not climbing the Himalayas in a blindfold. You are climbing in that -- HAT!


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Rufus Polson
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posted 10 January 2004 06:57 PM      Profile for Rufus Polson     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Personally, I don't think it's a co-incidence that government money spent on pure research, education, the arts, and social programs all declined at the same time.
I would suggest that not only is it possible to have such things together, it is nearly inevitable. Societies willing to spend money on such frills as keeping the poor from being homeless do so because they are addressing people's needs and wants and aspirations; it all tends to go together. People need food and shelter--but they have wants and aspirations too, and those are going to have outlets if people are being listened to at all. Which will lead to arts, education, and inquiry for its own sake.

Societies unwilling to spend money on the arts or on those aspects of education not narrowly devoted to vocational training or product development, generally also don't consider the lives of the poor worth anything. It's the same value set suppressing both things.


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Rufus Polson
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posted 10 January 2004 08:34 PM      Profile for Rufus Polson     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Everyone, whether pro-space-exploration or anti-space-exploration, is mostly talking as if NASA were a monolith. But it isn't, it's complex.

On one hand, it's true that there are a lot of suits involved in NASA who don't give a damn about space exploration--they're either using it as a front for military stuff or counting beans and hoping to advance their bureaucratic careers by generating the maximum positive media coverage (note: not scientific results) with the minimum dollars, or to squeeze as much funding for their departments as possible and build little empires, or whatever.

But most people involved in NASA didn't go to work there to advance the interests of a government administration. They went there because they had the space bug. The scientists and the engineers believe profoundly in exploration, in getting back utterly neato information from those probes, in advancing science, in cool pictures of Saturn, in finding life, in discovering planets around other stars, all that stuff. They want things like to have the Cosmic Background Explorer send back data that leads to major advances in cosmology and physics. That's what they went to work at NASA for, otherwise given their expertise they'd have gone somewhere else and gotten paid better.

And one thing they want so bad they can taste it is to have real people land on another planet. George Bush is doubtless motivated by greed and twisty politics. But the reason a Mars mission is on the table at all for him to push is that dozens of scientists have been coming up with plans for years despite NASA managers saying that there would be no such plans. They've been working on cunning ideas on an unofficial level for years, making projections, coming up with dodges for cutting the costs. The most famous is the send-a-fuel-factory-first dodge, where you send an unmanned reactor that can synthesize fuel from the Martian atmosphere and let it sit there for a year or two before you send the manned craft. That way you can refuel on Mars, and you don't have to lift all the fuel needed to come back all the way to Earth orbit. There remain plenty of major obstacles, though. But specifics aside, my point is that this plan and the constant pushing that have made it a something to talk about at all were a bottom-up resistance of sorts by rank-and-file NASA people and other scientists around the world. OK, so now Bush has seized on it for his own reasons, but that doesn't make things simple, nor does it make the whole deal solely his project or solely the arms contractors' project. It now becomes a messy, complicated mix between the publicity needs of Bush, the greed of the contractors, and the aspirations of space devotees at NASA and elsewhere. Those devotees don't care about Bush--they're pushing their own agenda, and however much you may want to slag it, you have to admit it is not a cynical one. They believe in what they're doing, and they're not pushing it for personal gain.

In the end, I'm sorta neutral. I'm in favour of space exploration, but I'm not at all clear that one hyped megaproject is worth more than a whole bunch of cool probes, space telescopes and interferometers, maybe some research into innovative propulsion, and so on and so forth, which it sounds as if the megaproject will be replacing. I'm not even sure if most of the Mars mission devotees would back a version that meant gutting the rest of the space budget.


From: Caithnard College | Registered: Nov 2002  |  IP: Logged
Rufus Polson
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posted 10 January 2004 08:45 PM      Profile for Rufus Polson     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by skdadl:

But even technological history is directed by and occurs in the context of -- something else. And one remains convinced, from examining the written record, that that something else runs more in cycles than in straight upward lines.

Hrmmm. As a possible synthesis, I tend to think it goes like if you write a loopy squiggle along a paper, with varying sizes. Yes, there's cycles, but. While the bottom of this loop may be lower than the top of the last loop, or even lower than the bottom of the last loop of this one's bigger, still overall the loopies are trending in a direction.

And every time I think how I might have liked to live in (arbitrary period in the past) I think about access to books and dental care, and things like that. Nuh uh.


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nonsuch
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posted 11 January 2004 01:04 AM      Profile for nonsuch     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
What is progress? Who defines it? Who considers what is progress and what is regress? What happens to those who disagree with the definition?

Interesting topic!
I assume you don't mean to talk only about space exploration ....
"Oooo, look! A rock! And you can see it so clearly! Look! There's another one! And another and another!" This is obviously worth every billion the homeless aren't getting. What's a few frozen layabouts, compared to pictures of rocks?

Generally, progress is any step in a direction which leads to a goal that an individual, or a society, considers desirable. This doesn't mean we need to know the ultimate purpose of humanity in order to define progress: we can move toward any number of interim goals. If my personal goal for this year is to write a novel, one page is progress. If our society considers general health and well-being a desirable end, then vitamins and dentistry are progress.

One problem is that, if we don't have a long-range plan, our interim achievements can turn out to be regressive - because they progress in the wrong direction, or are too expensive If our ultimate goal is the happiness of the entire human race, we're taking some spectacular detours. If our ultimate goal is to figure out what makes the universe tick, we're probably right on course. If our ultimate goal is to kill everybody we don't like, we're making very slow progress. Whatever direction we choose, progress has a price.
It's possible to progress in two or more endeavours at the same time, but that requires thoughtful, careful allocation of resources. And that only happens if one knows what s/he hopes to accomplish and what resources are available. In other words, difficult-to-impossible for a large number of people acting as a unit.

The other problem is that last weeks's goal - whether achieved or not - usually determines next week's goal. As a species, we're not very good at recognizing our failures, writing off our losses, and changing direction. Instead, we tend to defend bad decisions, long past any possibility of redemption, and keep throwing more effort, material and time away on hopeless projects - just because we've already invested too much.


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Courage
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posted 11 January 2004 04:54 AM      Profile for Courage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by arborman:
Penicillin is progress.

There are those who attribute the use of penicillin antibiotics to the strengthening of certain strains of lethal and illness-causing bacteria, the weakening of our immune systems, and various other health problems related to the ingestion of anti-biotics through the food-chain - in particular from cattle and other large game.


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Michelle
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posted 11 January 2004 09:41 AM      Profile for Michelle   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Really? But wouldn't people have died without them? I always thought it was the MISuse of antibiotics that are responsible for that type of thing - people going to their doctor with a trifling cold virus and demanding antibiotics for it, and the doctors giving in.
From: I've got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell. | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
DrConway
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posted 11 January 2004 09:45 AM      Profile for DrConway     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Michelle and Courage, you're both right.

Antibiotics are a classic example of introducing a new selective agent into the environment bacteria face. As a result, widespread use of such antibiotics has, in effect, been an artificial selection in favor of strains of bacteria which are resistant to the old stand-bys.

This is why doctors these days are reluctant to just "hand out pills", as it were, and why researchers are still finding it fruitful to study new ways to make antibiotics that will be effective against a wide variety of toxic bacteria.

Will tackle the more general topic later.


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arborman
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posted 13 January 2004 05:04 PM      Profile for arborman     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Interesting Discussion of this topic
From: I'm a solipsist - isn't everyone? | Registered: Aug 2003  |  IP: Logged
Agent 204
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posted 13 January 2004 07:46 PM      Profile for Agent 204   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by skdadl:

If the history of Western technology is all you're writing, then thinking in terms of cumulative increments (ie: progress) makes some sense, undeniably -- although even there, some modesty is advisable. The history of plumbing, eg, can easily be shown to have been cyclical -- found, lost, found again and again.

But even technological history is directed by and occurs in the context of -- something else. And one remains convinced, from examining the written record, that that something else runs more in cycles than in straight upward lines.


I don't think we have to choose between cycles and straight lines as a way to explain things. Maybe it's neither, something more erratic- think of a wavy line with lots of kinks. Human history especially is too complex to fit either model, in my opinion.

[added a couple of minutes later]

Whoops, I think Rufus just made the same point. I guess I should've read the entire thread first...

[ 13 January 2004: Message edited by: Mike Keenan ]


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bittersweet
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posted 13 January 2004 09:11 PM      Profile for bittersweet     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
An idle idea, but... One might apply Maslow's hierarchy of needs as a general tool with which to "see" progress. If our nature indeed includes an urge to move through each "quality of life" he listed, then we might look at history through that prism and compare the ages. As far as I know, Maslow intended these levels to describe individual tendencies. The collective mass of humanity--"society"--may have an impulse to fulfill a different level at any given time than those of individuals, or groups, living within it. So collectively, the mean priority might be safety--subsistence needs having been more or less settled, for example--but that orientation may be completely at odds with what some less fortunate, or more fortunate, members may be concerned about.

Physiological Needs
Safety Needs
Needs of Love, Affection and Belongingness
Needs for Esteem
Needs for Self-Actualization

Apparently there are further levels, such as Understanding, Esthetic Appreciation and purely Spiritual needs.


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Jingles
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posted 14 January 2004 12:54 AM      Profile for Jingles     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Generally, progress is any step in a direction which leads to a goal that an individual, or a society, considers desirable.

But what if those goals conflict? Can something which advances, say, the quality of life for a small group of privileged people at the expense of the quality of life of a much larger group be called progressive (actually, the Daily Show made this point in a segment about cell phones/digital cameras. The best show on TV)? Our western/north american lifestyle is a prime example. We have all sorts of technology, access to cheap resources, and clean (relatively) water from the tap. All this comes at the expense of the rest of the world (though some may disagree with this assertion, at least the US military is quite clear and honest in this respect). Is this progress?

Maybe by progress we mean the process by which we desperately try and find a solution or cure for a problem caused by the previous solution or cure. It was progress when clean, healthy cars replaced messy, smelly, and unsanitary horses. It was progress when fast, efficient highways replaced dangerous, slow, narrow laneways. What's next?

I guess what bugs me is that by claiming something like technological evolution "progress" is that it imparts a value on something that it just doesn't have. Only the effects of the technology count, good or bad. In my opinion, the great majority of things claimed to bring progress bring the exact opposite. Maybe it is because the idea of progress in our general understanding is a material progress intimately tied to the evolution of capitalism. All profits are private, and all costs public. The profits are, of course, progress. The costs are not counted.

In a related note, why are Progressives no longer called Progressives? I'll give my opinion on it later.

[ 14 January 2004: Message edited by: Jingles ]


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Tommy_Paine
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posted 14 January 2004 02:50 AM      Profile for Tommy_Paine     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Uninterestingly enough, I do not have a cell phone.

I doubt very much that I ever will ever allow one to own me.

In the last 50 years or so, I think we've made more progress in that time than in centuries previous in trying to better evaluate what progress actually is.

A hundred and fifty years ago, "progress" was measured in how many savages were Baptised before they died of small pox.

We, the main benificiaries of "progress" are by no means pure altruists, but today we are measuring "progress" by a better, more humanitarian standard.

I'd say that was progress.


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Lima Bean
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posted 14 January 2004 10:59 AM      Profile for Lima Bean   Author's Homepage        Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
If I were ruler of the world, I would define progress as successful steps towards universal health and happiness. I would demand that this universality be true, and include all the people in the world, all the plants, animals, insects, and sea-life, and the earth itself, its precise and precious balance, in harmony with the existence of all other things. Every step closer to this ideal would be Progress.
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bittersweet
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posted 14 January 2004 12:22 PM      Profile for bittersweet     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
One tool of progress, and also a gauge of its veracity, is a free press.

"A free press can of course be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad.... Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worse." - Albert Camus


From: land of the midnight lotus | Registered: Apr 2002  |  IP: Logged
nonsuch
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posted 14 January 2004 09:49 PM      Profile for nonsuch     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by Jingles:
But what if those goals conflict? Can something which advances, say, the quality of life for a small group of privileged people at the expense of the quality of life of a much larger group be called progressive... ?

By whom? It can be, and is, called progressive by the people who are made richer, safer or more comfortable.
Everything comes with a price-tag. Everything is defined according to whether one profits or pays. To have a definition that you can live with, you need to choose a point of view. There are maybe a dozen possible roles for a human living through any historical event. Each role has a different point of view, a different set of desirable outcomes; a different definition of progress.

quote:
Maybe by progress we mean the process by which we desperately try and find a solution or cure for a problem caused by the previous solution or cure.

Often, if not always, yes.
Well, see, if you were drunk and fell into a ditch on your way home, every foot you managed to crawl out would be progress, from your own point of view, even if someone else said, "He shouldn't have fallen in. Hmph! Real progress would be to get rid of his kind altogether." Everything we experience is the result of something that happened before - whether that was a mistake or not, our own fault or not.

quote:
I guess what bugs me is that by claiming something like technological evolution "progress" is that it imparts a value on something that it just doesn't have .... Maybe it is because the idea of progress in our general understanding is a material progress intimately tied to the evolution of capitalism. All profits are private, and all costs public. The profits are, of course, progress. The costs are not counted.

That sounds like Marylin Waring. You're right, of course. The biggest problem is that all goals are set by the most aggressive, most selfish, least altruistic members of the species. The second biggest problem is that the rest of us can never get our act together to stop them in time.

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