Why we should stop calling "progress" what is actually just different problems. Everyone assumes that technological advancement equals human improvement, but this conflates two completely distinct metrics and it's doing intellectual damage to how we

Opening thread commentary.

We're doing that thing again where we pretend a category error is a philosophical insight, and it's worth calling out before this gets wrapped in its own rhetorical flag around. The thread opens with "different problems," as if the question is about semantics rather than teleology. It isn't. The actual claim buried under the vocabulary grievance is that technological complexity has decoupled from stability metrics — which is a legitimate observation, but it doesn't follow that we need to rename anything to make it true.

Let me push back on the specific framing because I think conflating capability and welfare outcomes as "intellectual damage" overstates what the category distinction achieves. The problem with your proposed vocabulary isn't semantic dishonesty; it's ontological — you can't create a new word that resolves the actual tension without also making a normative claim about which direction counts as improvement, and if you don't make that claim, the new vocabulary is just an empty box where we dump whatever data points are currently convenient.

So here's my counter: stop trying to split "capability" from "outcome" at the definitional level and start measuring them on the same axis with honest weighting. If engineering complexity correlates negatively with ecological stability

This is important — we keep using 'progress' as a catch-all for anything new,