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Comment by neves | Hacker News Reader

When you read this kind of text from old magazines is that you see that humanity is really getting better: "What it does. This is not easy to explain to women and the mechanically innocent. Not that the gadget is particularly complex;"

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You can definitely date a nontrivial piece of writing, at least approximately, by the language it employs.

I'd say humanity has gotten better in some ways, but also worse in others.

Can you give an example of a way in which we’ve gotten worse?

Peretend I said something politically incorrect and insert your outrage below this comment. Be sure to use some derogatory adjectives, unrelated to anything previously said, to describe me.

I'm not convinced that's a new phenomenon. Certainly I've seen no evidence that it is and a great deal that it isn't.

That may simply be an artifact of most writing we have from older periods was professional, like magazine articles.

Not personal/casual, like Reddit/HN.

You don't even really need examples of casual writing to discern that this attitude is nothing new. I mean, look at stories from throughout history, from the debates of Roman senators to Salem Witch Trials and back to Chinese oracle bones-- since when have people ever avoided ad hominem attacks, fallacious logic, and overwrought outrage on topics they barely understand?

People used to have duels over arguments.

My grandmother was born in the 1920s. There was a self-enforced 'femininity' back then, wherein women told themselves that they couldn't, shouldn't, or didn't need to understand things, and that their husbands or fathers would take care of things.

I'm personally very grateful we have moved past this. My grandmother would break down at the slightest hint of technical discussion. She never understood computers as anything more than a fancy typewriter.

Even reading something from the 70s, it's jarring how much the language and what's considered acceptable has changed.

I do like the description of "mechanically innocent" though.

Keep in mind that the definition of better has not stayed the same over time.

Which is part of what "getting better" means.

I think parent's point is that if we look forward 50 years even the most progressive of us might not agree that progress has been made (or think that we've regressed in some way), whereas new people will see vast progress.

Do you believe people in the 1840s were better than people in the 1770s? Or people in the 1950s better than the 1920s? I'm not convinced there is any consistent progress, as opposed to a simple preference for the times in which we live.

Yes, but except for that the text struck me as very modern. I would not have batted an eyelid if it was written today.

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