Hacker News Reader

Comment by dpflan | Hacker News Reader

OK, systemic inequality and systems manipulated by the wealthy (The details of the stolen items is sadly entertaining). Is the world moving in a direction of more of this or less of this? I’m genuinely curious about how society will change in the next decade: the internet is a double edged sword allowing near instant sharing of information that can change one’s understanding and beliefs very quickly. We see the negative edge of the sword slicing through society, dividing it into polarized groups. We see the positive edge cutting away at deception and illuminating discrepancies. I can’t see what is happening in societal change at the macro level, what should I be reading or looking at?

View on HN

I'll re-iterate what strikelaserclaw said and add: maybe looking at it on a 10 year basis is too short?

Humans have now about 20-30 year generations, so I think it's fair to judge our progress as a species in at least multiples of this.

I'm in my mid 30's and kids these days are way nicer to each other than they were when I was a kid. Bullying, making fun of kids of silly differences, etc is way down. I think the future long term, and in a two step forward one step back kind of way, is going to be better than it is now.

I would say the average person has more chance at justice today than at any other time in history. I think for your last question, it really depends on if you are an optimist or pessimist about humanity in general, i for one think humanity will move forward in a positive way eventually.

My feeling is this is true for the legal system but there seems to be rising inequality due to entirely legal causes.

Another equally valid hypothesis would be that people have better information and thus to fight these more, and also these get noticed more than before. It is also possible that the absolute number of such cases have gone up despite the rate per capita has gone down, given the population growth. Unless someone does a careful analysis, we just can't determine the frequency based on anecdotal evidence.

Perhaps. But it’s still pretty bad in many cases.

Go back far enough, and whole masses in Europe were legally bound to their land, hardly people at all in terms of law or culture. They could not marry without their lords permission, would change hands with the land, and would legally become a fugitive if they left the land without permission.

Human history is really bad on the whole, even the bad parts that exist today are often less mild or less common than what preceded our current era.

Go back further, and that's not the case.

Prior to that you’ve got the massive slave states of the Roman Empire or various Greek poleis, plus the mass killings of various wars causes by different empires in different times and places. Do recall that the Mongols killed 11% of the world’s population. And even with the collapse of some of these slave states and massive empires, the resulting chaos and uncertainty drove the population into the exact same feudal arrangements that I described before.

If you want to go back further, it’s estimated that 40-50% of adult fatalities in hunter gatherer societies were caused by murder, based off of historical evidence and study of modern hunter gatherer population.

There really aren’t that many eras you can point to that are really much better than the present for a typical human being. There are plenty of times that are better for the kind of person who writes history books, but that is a very different proposition.

Where can I read more about murder in hunter gatherer societies? That sounds fascinating

I can’t recall where I read that 40% number, unfortunately. And boiling such a wide range of social experiences down to a single number is eventually going to get me in a lot of trouble with anthropologists.

Here’s a decent breakdown of the evidence for various state and non-state ancient societies[0]. Obviously there is some significant overlap between state and non-state societies, but in general the violent death rate in ancient societies is really high compared to even the 1800s, an era we consider violent by modern standards.

0: https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-e...

Your statistics for adult mortality in hunter-gatherer societies is contradicted by this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25434609

That study indicates that violence-based mortality is high in a few hunter-gatherer societies, but not in all of them, and also not in societies adjacent to these.

This is a hotly contested subject in anthropology, so it will be pretty easy to find dueling sources about the precise rate of violent death in various pre-agriculture societies.

And you know what? It doesn't matter. The exact percentage of the population that got murdered is only one portion of the basic thesis that the present is the best time for the average human being to be alive ever. While the typical ancient adult may or may not have been murdered, the average ancient human would be dead before their 15th birthday due to disease (most common), malnutrition, or predation.

The worst countries today for infant mortality are in central Africa, with countries like Chad, Nigeria, and Somalia averaging a heart breaking ~11% mortality rate for those under the age of five. While I wouldn't run around shouting "this is fine and we should do nothing about it" compared to the entirety of human existence this is an astounding stat. There are royal families a few centuries ago that did worse than 11%.

No, these benefits are not evenly distributed. All in, you'd much rather be born in the US or the EU than in say, Chad. And quality of life does not improve linearly; you would much rather be a hunter gatherer than someone in an ancient Greek polis, where you were both more likely to be enslaved and where you'd probably live an even shorter and more disease ridden life. But if you had to pick any point in time to be a random, average person, now is the best time in all of human history to pick.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com