Quotes About Progress

Optimism is, in the first instance, a way of explaining failure, not prophesying success. It says that there is no fundamental barrier, no law of nature or supernatural decree, preventing progress. Whenever

Although, through the vagaries of international politics, Athens became independent and democratic again soon afterwards, and continued for several generations to produce art, literature and philosophy, it was never again host to rapid, open-ended progress. It became unexceptional. Why? I guess that its optimism was gone.

Amending the 'data', or rejecting some as erroneous, is a frequent concomitant of scientific discovery, and the crucial 'data' cannot even be obtained until theory tells us what to look for and how and why.

An optimistic civilization is open and not afraid to innovate, and is based on traditions of criticism.

If something is permitted by the laws of physics, then the only thing that can prevent it from being technologically possible is not knowing how.

Perhaps a more practical way of stressing the same truth would be to frame the growth of knowledge (all knowledge, not only scientific) as a continual transition from problems to better problems, rather than from problems to solutions or from theories to better theories. This

Those two overarching concerns are these: we Athenians are concerned above all with improvement; the Spartans seek only – stasis. Two opposite objectives. If

The Principle of Optimism All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.

This is what we can achieve when, as Feynman said, we keep learning more about how not to fool ourselves.

We know that achieving arbitrary physical transformations that are not forbidden by the laws of physics (such as replanting a forest) can only be a matter of knowing how. We know that finding out how is a matter of seeking good explanations.

Thus, although the existence of progress in the biosphere is what the theory of evolution is there to explain, not all evolution constitutes progress, and no (genetic) evolution optimizes progress.

The very existence of Athens, however peaceful, is a deadly threat to Sparta's stasis. And therefore, in the long run, the condition for the continued stasis of Sparta (which means its continued existence, as they see it) is the destruction of progress in Athens (which from our perspective would constitute the destruction of Athens).

Unless a society is expecting its own future choices to be better than its present ones, it will strive to make its present policies and institutions as immutable as possible.

Could it be that the moral imperative not to destroy the means of correcting mistakes is the only moral imperative?

everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge.

Whenever we try to improve things and fail, it is not because the spiteful (or unfathomably benevolent) gods are thwarting us or punishing us for trying, or because we have reached a limit on the capacity of reason to make improvements, or because it is best that we fail, but always because we did not know enough, in time.

there is only one way of making progress: conjecture and criticism

One of the consequences of optimism is that one expects to learn from failure – one's own and others'.

Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it – in a decade, a century, or a millennium – we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise?

But one thing that all conceptions of the Enlightenment agree on is that it was a rebellion, and specifically a rebellion against authority in regard to knowledge.

Rejecting authority in regard to knowledge was not just a matter of abstract analysis. It was a necessary condition for progress, because, before the Enlightenment, it was generally believed that everything important that was knowable had already been discovered, and was enshrined in authoritative sources such as ancient writings and traditional assumptions. Some of those sources did contain some genuine knowledge, but it was entrenched in the form of dogmas along with many falsehoods

Bad philosophy before the Enlightenment was typically of the because-I-say-so variety. When the Enlightenment liberated philosophy and science, they both began to make progress, and increasingly there was good philosophy. But, paradoxically, bad philosophy became worse.

the assumption that progress in a hypothetical rapacious civilization is limited by raw materials rather than by knowledge.

one thing that all conceptions of the Enlightenment agree on is that it was a rebellion, and specifically a rebellion against authority in regard to knowledge.