Comment by schoen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by schoen | Hacker News Reader

While I found this quite interesting, and I'm as concerned about some of these trends as the next person, I was eerily reminded of some of John Robbins's stuff graphing meat consumption against incidence of diseases and his kind of casual thinking about causation. We have so many datasets available now that it's so easy to graph things against each other and notice things that may be coincidentally related, or even causally related, and then tell some kind of story about where the relationship came from. And I remember that there's even a funny web site that tries to underscore the difficulty in reasoning from these associations.

http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

In this case, the n-grams chart really exemplified this for me. There are so many influences on the frequency of a word, including lexical substitution of a word by its synonyms, changes in spelling, and increased or decreased interest in a topic regardless of whether that interest is positive or negative.

For example, check out the long-term decline in avarice in America! It's profound!

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=avarice&year_s...

Oh, wait, maybe we just stopped using the word "avarice" rather than the concept. :-)

Or, during this Second Gilded Age, our society actually started to become less atomized:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=atomized&year_...

... or maybe we just moved away from calling the phenomenon that.

We have so many datasets available now that it's so easy to graph things against each other and notice things that may be coincidentally related, or even causally related, and then tell some kind of story about where the relationship came from.

Yeah, it's a fun website -- but you could say that about just about any claimed correlation.

Meanwhile, for those who have been around long enough to have a sense for the 'barometric' changes he's talking about -- the shift in the basic, underlying "we're-all-in-this-together" ethos has been not just noticeable, but profound. Probably a lot more work needs to be done to find a solid statistical basis behind this observation (if this is at all possible).

But by and large (aside from the singe n-gram example, which I agree smells like cherry-picking), it's not like his arguments are simply frivolous.

> Meanwhile, for those who have been around long enough to have a sense for the 'barometric' changes he's talking about -- the shift in the basic, underlying "we're-all-in-this-together" ethos has been not just noticeable, but profound. Probably a lot more work needs to be done to find a solid statistical basis behind this observation (if this is at all possible).

I need to see some very solid evidence before I change my assumption, which is that people have always felt this as they get older, because we romanticize our memories of youth and we are uncomfortable with the societal changes that younger generations inevitably introduce.

Fair point - it's very tricky to measure.

I should also have been more careful to more clearly distinguish spurious correlations from correlations where both things are related to a third factor (which I think is probably often the case in John Robbins's graphs and somewhat plausibly here).

> the shift in the basic, underlying "we're-all-in-this-together" ethos has been not just noticeable, but profound

Depends on your value of "we."

There is certainly lower solidarity/interest in public life among the straight white landowning Christian men from good families who used to participate in things like freemasonry and Rotary.

On the other hand, both the left and right have been adding previously marginalized demographics to their constituencies and platforms.

I don't think there's any less solidarity going around. My intuition is that more people than ever have their voices heard and interests represented in public life. But rather than one line of solidarity across the center of the political spectrum, we now have two disjoint lines reaching from each party's center to what used to be its marginalized fringes. (Not just in ideology, but in identity).

We also just aren't in this together so much anymore. The rise of coastal cities means the country is increasingly split between (at least) two totally distinct patterns of geography, economics, culture, built environment, and lifestyle. The correlation between population density and vote share on the latest electoral map is staggering.

Why don't you hop into Sugihara's method and see for yourself?

My hunch is that the thing that most frequently trickles down in the trickle down economy is DEBT. I imagine distrust follows close behind.

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