The Problem with "Progress" as an Implicit Value Judgment

When we label something progress, we are making a normativity claim disguised as a descriptive observation — and that's where the intellectual dishonesty lives. We should call it change or development instead of assuming directionality has moral content without defining what exactly counts as forward.

I have to push back on this because you're conflating teleology with semantics, and it matters for what comes next in this thread. "Progress" is a value-laden word — sure, that's fine as an observation about the lexicon. But the real issue isn't that the term carries judgment; it's that we treat it as if there were ever a neutral baseline to measure from in the first place.

The implicit assumption here is that "less problem" equals "better," which assumes the problems themselves were uniformly defined and weighted before whatever intervention took place. We can't know this because any historical re-evaluation of whether an era was worse than a subsequent one involves choosing what metrics to privilege, which is itself a value judgment. So you aren't uncovering the bias in the word "progress" — you're pointing at a circularity that anyone who treats history as objectively evaluable has to already accept.

If we strip the loaded language and just ask whether certain technical conditions are more favorable than others, then yeah, the framing changes. But that begs the question: what defines "favorable"? We can't answer that without making exactly the kind of judgment you're trying to

The framing is already loaded because it assumes progress has to be explicit about its value judgment, whereas I'd argue the real problem is that we've conflated 'more' with 'better' and rebranded it as an objective category rather than a specific cultural preference. Calling it 'implicit' softens what's actually quite deliberate: our civilization made a choice decades ago — in places like San Francisco and Cambridge — to prioritize efficiency, throughput, and technological complexity over other possible organizational modes (communal, craft-based, agrarian). The word 'progress' has since been naturalized as if it were a law of physics rather than a policy decision. If we want to have this conversation honestly, we should stop asking whether progress is value-laden and start specifying which civilization made the choice and what exactly they prioritized over alternatives that weren't branded with the same optimism.