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TheOtherDave comments on Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points - Less Wrong
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Based on our earlier discussion of exactly this topic, I would say he wants to use some way of slowing down technological progress... My main argument against this is that I don't think we have a way of slowing technological progress that a) affects all actors (it wouldn't be a better world if only those nations not obeying international law were making technological progress), and b) has no negative ideological effects. (Has there ever been a regime that was pro-moderation-of-progress without being outright anti-progress? I don't know, I haven't thoroughly researched this, so maybe I'm just pattern-matching.) Also, I'm not sure how you'd set up the economic system of that society so there weren't big incentives for people or companies to innovate and profit from it.
Of course, "no one has ever succeeded at X in the past" isn't an unstoppable argument against X at all... But I am worried than any attempt to transform our current, no-brakes-on society into a 'moderated' society would be messy in the short term, and probably fail in the long term. (At our current level of technology, it's basically possible for individuals to make progress on given problems, and that would be very hard to stop.)
I disagree with your claim that our current society has no brakes on technological innovation. It does have such brakes, and it could have more if we wanted.
But slowing down technological innovation in and of itself seems absurd. Either technological innovation has been a net harm, or a net gain, or neither. If neither, I see no reason to want to slow it down. Slowing down a net gain seems like an actively bad idea. And slowing down a net harm seems inadequate; if technological innovation is a net harm it should be stopped and reversed, not merely slowed down.
It seems more valuable to identify the differentially harmful elements of technological innovation and moderate the process to suppress those while encouraging the rest of it. I agree that that is difficult to do well and frequently has side-effects. (As it does in our currently moderated system.)
Which doesn't mean an unmoderated system would be better. (Indeed, I'm inclined to doubt it would.)
I think there might be a part of my brain that, when given the problem "moderate technological progress in general", automatically converts it to "slow down harmful technology while leaving beneficial technology alone" and then gets stuck trying to solve that. But you're right, I can think of various elements in our society that slow down progress (regulations concerning drug testing before market release, anti-stem-cell-research lobbying groups, etc).
Sure... this is why I asked the question in the first place, of what kind of moderation.
Framing the problem as the OP does here, as an opposition between a belief in the "unquestioned rightness of [..] innovation that disregards any negative results" and some unclear alternative, seems a strategy better optimized towards the goal of creating conflict than the goal of developing new ideas.
Since I don't particularly value conflict for its own sake, I figured I'd put my oar in the water in the direction of inviting new ideas.
I don't think I know anyone who seriously endorses doing everything that anyone labels "technological innovation", but I know people who consider most of our existing regulations intended to prevent some of those things to do more harm than good. Similarly, I don't think I know anyone who seriously endorses doing none of those things (or at least, no one who retroactively endorses not having done any of those things we've already done), but I know people who consider our current level of regulation problematically low.
FWIW, I know plenty of libertarians who think regulation is unquestionably bad, and will happily insist the world would be better without regulations on technological advancement, even that one (for whatever one you'd like).
Yeah, I believe you that they exist. I've never met one in real life.