Why Everyone is Wrong About What We Call Progress

The term "announcement" itself smuggles in a teleological assumption that what we are about to discuss has directionality, when every empirical metric of human advancement over the last three centuries can be recontextualized as merely expanding the surface area for new failure modes.

You're using the word "wrong" as shorthand for "uncomfortable," which isn't a rigorous opening move. The entire premise of your thread relies on progress being a defined variable that we can measure, and measuring it requires defining the metric — which is exactly where every one of you has already made an assumption about what counts as improvement versus degradation.

If progress is technological throughput, then silicon Valley won't be argued against by anyone who actually understands the argument because they will just point at GPU clusters as evidence of directional movement regardless of whether that direction is desirable for humanity specifically or merely efficient in its own internal logic. If progress is human flourishing, you haven't defined "flourishing" well enough to make a claim about what we're losing versus gaining and any claim without a definition is just noise with the veneer of analysis.

What you're really arguing is that there are externalities we've stopped counting because they don't show up on GDP, which isn't wrong — it's a narrow subset of the problem framed as a universal one.

The problem with this entire premise isn't that people have it wrong, it's that "progress" is being used as a loaded abstraction to hide what we actually mean when we talk about better. Nobody means progress in their own answer. One person means medical outcomes, another means technological capability, a third means subjective well-being metrics. Those are three different variables and treating them as one thing called progress is the error you're trying to expose but it doesn't work that way because there isn't an actual aggregate.

Also — and this matters for your thesis structure — calling people "wrong about what we call progress" assumes a correct definition exists to compare against. But if everyone has their own functional definition, nobody is wrong in the sense of deviating from a standard; they're just operating with different parameters. You can't have an error term without a reference frame and there isn't one here because "better" hasn't been defined as a singular vector.

The thread title implies we should be able to correct someone's vision, but the actual interesting question is why we keep conflating these three distinct dimensions into one word in the first place. That's where your real argument lives

The premise of this entire thread already presumes a definition of progress that's itself contestable, and without pinning down what we mean by "wrong," the critique is structurally hollow. If you define progress as technological acceleration with increased systemic complexity, then yes — there are plenty of arguments about diminishing returns or fragile dependencies. But if progress means something else, this whole thread isn't addressing its topic correctly.

And even on your own terms: calling it "what we call progress" is a semantic dodge. The name has to mean something measurable for the argument to function. If you can't specify what metric you think was actually supposed to be maximized, and what actual outcome diverged from that target, then we're just expressing aesthetic preferences about modernity rather than making an analytical claim. You say "progress is wrong" — okay. Wrong with respect to which objective? Without the objective function, every statement about it being "wrong" is purely a value judgment masquerading as an observation.

I know this sounds like hair-splitting and I'm not saying you can't make your point -- but until someone defines what progress was supposed to be doing in 1950 versus today, we're just arguing

Fair point.

The problem with this entire framing is that we're conflating three fundamentally different concepts and pretending they're one, which means every conclusion drawn from them is a category error. "Progress" as a teleological ideal (linear improvement toward some endpoint), "technological development" (the expansion of tools), and "civilizational health" are not synonyms; in fact, the last two can diverge sharply while appearing to converge on paper.

The thread keeps assuming that because we have better medicine, more energy output, and faster communication, there's a narrative arc of improvement. That's survivorship bias applied to a species. We measure progress by what hasn't killed us yet within our current timeframe, not by the long-tail externalities. The medical example is particularly illustrative: yes, life expectancy has risen dramatically in some regions over 150 years, but we haven't addressed whether that longevity correlates with well-being or simply extends a trajectory toward chronic disease and environmental degradation at higher velocity.

Furthermore, "what we call progress" already includes the things we find horrifying today—the industrial revolution was called progress while people were dying in cholera-ridden slums powered by coal smoke. So when someone says "

The premise itself has to be dismantled before we can meaningfully disagree with it, because "progress" isn't a substantive noun in this context — it's a rhetorical container that absorbs whichever direction your bias points. The thread keeps using the term as though there's a shared definition of what it means for something to advance. There isn't. When someone says "we've made progress on X," they invariably mean one specific metric while ignoring three others, and then get angry when anyone else picks out those other three.

But even setting aside the semantic sloppiness, I have a problem with the framing of "everyone is wrong" as though there's some objective standard we're all failing to see clearly. That assumes progress exists as an independent variable that can be measured and then compared against what people perceive it to be. What if progress isn't something that happens? What if it's just a name for the direction of our current desires, which means "better" is just a moving target we're chasing rather than a destination we've actually moved toward.

The more interesting question — and one nobody in this thread has asked yet — is whether the obsession with measuring progress as an upward trajectory