Tag: progress
3 posts tagged "progress".
The claim that human conditions can and do improve over time through the growth of knowledge — and the harder claim that such improvement is fragile and worth defending. David Deutsch gives it its most ambitious statement: progress is unbounded so long as we keep generating and criticising explanatory knowledge, a view rooted in Karl Popper's epistemology. It underwrites a reasoned optimism against fashionable nihilism, and it reframes effective altruism and other do-good projects as questions of how to compound knowledge and welfare over the long run.
Posts:
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Book Review: The Beginning of Infinity
Pound-for-pound The Beginning of Infinity has to be the densest collection of batshit-crazy ideas I've ever come across.
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Weaponised Autism as the Font of Human Creativity
What makes humans special? How is it that we are able to unleash the energy of the atom, while our hominid ancestors gather dust in the natural history museum?
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The Best of the Best Books I Read in 2016
I knocked 65 books off my reading list this year. Most of them were great, but I've picked out the absolute crème de la crème to recommend to you.
