I found myself nodding along to most of this and really appreciate the positive vision and integration of safety and progress. Two critical comments:
In the last section you basically assert an alternative to the supposed progress/safety tradeoff, one which I prefer. But it left unanswered (and even unasked) a lot of the live questions I have about this topic. It seems like there are broader cultural patterns of (a) overblowing or even completely manufacturing risks, and (b) decreasing our tolerance for risk in a way that is less than intentional. And these often seem like the major source of objections to a pro-progress approach!
Second: there’s also a moral dimension to safety. I doubt if there’s are processes that completely safeguard us from nuclear war, absent enough good people to maintain and man those processes. Our moral excellence in ongoing mastery of the natural world just does demand that we stop lagging in our mastery of ourselves; insofar as that lag is getting worse, that’s a risk that’s probably irreducible.
I found myself nodding along to most of this and really appreciate the positive vision and integration of safety and progress. Two critical comments:
In the last section you basically assert an alternative to the supposed progress/safety tradeoff, one which I prefer. But it left unanswered (and even unasked) a lot of the live questions I have about this topic. It seems like there are broader cultural patterns of (a) overblowing or even completely manufacturing risks, and (b) decreasing our tolerance for risk in a way that is less than intentional. And these often seem like the major source of objections to a pro-progress approach!
Second: there’s also a moral dimension to safety. I doubt if there’s are processes that completely safeguard us from nuclear war, absent enough good people to maintain and man those processes. Our moral excellence in ongoing mastery of the natural world just does demand that we stop lagging in our mastery of ourselves; insofar as that lag is getting worse, that’s a risk that’s probably irreducible.