Conversation

Reasoning about risk and progress is in the discourse is really sloppy, even among smart people who have been deploying arguments about both for years. There is basically no necessary relationship between risk trajectory and progress trajectory. The 2x2 is full.
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A definition of “progress” implied here is “integral of quality of life” So if QoL is constant, progress has a constant positive slope. If QoL varies around a hedonic-treadmill zero set-point, with positive > negative, wobbly progress that is unhappy in proportion to wobbliness.
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This feels unintuitive because of hedonic treadmill effects. Shouldn’t constant-slope progress be tied to increasing QoL? No because QoL is only felt to increase if it is faster than rate of hedonic adaptation, and this needs high *nonlinear* rate of progress (not shown).
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Unhappiness, otoh, is related to volatility in QoL because departures from hedonic adaptation set-point is experienced as misery. The green band is preparedness: the amount of volatility we can absorb. Yellow is graceful degradation. We feel some nausea/anxiety. Red is anomie.
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There’s cleanup of definitions and integral/derivative relationships required here (the model is loosely analogous to Schmidhuber interestingness/beauty model) but phenomenonology is: - progress/decline asymmetry - risk/progress distinction - hedonic adaptation - system range
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System range is important. The reason volatility in perceived subjective QoL gets linked to green/yellow/red ranges of objective systemic conditions of preparedness/degradation/collapse is that civilization is *designed* around expected rate of hedonic adaptation.
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Of course here we must ask “whose hedonic rate?” The answer is “the rate acceptable to the rich/powerful” which is much higher than for poor/weak because their local green/yellow bands are much wider. So society gets driven at the rate set at the top.
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