But are people happier and more fulfilled? Are they more able to have a meaning-filled life surrounded by people with whom they have close and lasting relationships?
What should we be measuring when we measure improvement?
What should we be measuring when we measure improvement?
When I was growing up camcorders were expensive so video is limited to special occasions. Have a good amount of pictures but a lot fewer than we have of kiddo. Cameras were more expensive and each picture cost money in film and development. Long distance calls were short and infrequent because they were expensive.
We’ve also built a highly sophisticated surveillance state and generally reduced our basic freedoms and individual rights post-9/11, and despite bumps in the road for this program thanks to Snowden etc, nothing has fundamentally changed and things continue to get worse on this front.
To me, this list of improvements is really just a list of improvements absent broader context which paints a very different & disturbing picture.
Mobile phones are the pinnacle of tech - and also a superb tool for mass surveillance.
https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/reification#:~:text=Re....
So if you feel happy (or miserable) it means just that - that you feel happy (or miserable). It doesn't mean that happiness or misery actually exist literally.
One could argue that abstractions "actually exist literally" without being physical. Gravitational fields don't exist physically but do exist and they're a valid abstraction that's useful to measure. Maybe happiness is a phenomenon that could be useful too (though I would say to a lesser extent.)
A little tangential but... even things that we would say exist physically are not on closer inspection. Does a chair actually exist or is it a platonic ideal that we apply to a collection of atoms assembled to form four legs, seat and a back?
And it's intangible nature does nothing to prevent us from measuring or maximizing aggregate happiness.
I'd say happiness exists exactly as much as chairs, in both cases we are classifying what is, in reality, just a collection of atoms, either as a chair or as a happy person, based on some external measurments
Abstractions are critical to human thinking in science. But not only reification is very different, you can't measure happiness even if you want to. You'll always have to go 'happiness as defined ...' or resort to people self reporting their feelings. Which is fine - I always ask my kids how they feel. I just understand that not only kids and adults may change how they feel next hour but that those feelings are unreliable. If you have kids of your own, you know how many 'tragedies' they lived through by the age of 6.
How is one meter defined?
You claim that happiness cannot be measured, yet in the next sentence you talk about measuring it by self reporting. One unreliable way of measuring doesn't equal to “cannot be measured”.
Now, that doesn't mean that you can't define happiness as you want it and pursue it on an individual level. For instance - walking in the park makes you 'happy' (as self reported feeling). Yoga makes you happy. Meditation makes you happy. Great - go for it.
BUT it's pointless to even attempt to measure 'group happiness' and try to increase it. People make pointless statements and point fingers in on the wrong directions. The article is about technology and I am sick and tired listening to how technology makes people unhappy or happy. Governments are often blamed for policies that make people unhappy. Society is probably blamed the most for people not being happy. It's too materialistic, the goals are wrong, bla-bla-bla.
BTW Here's the exact meter definition - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre
If happiness is not as well defined or well-behaved as we would like it to be, perhaps we can make it better rather than dismissing the problem.
I don't mean to suggest that miserable circumstances don't make you miserable; just that circumstances that are twice as awful don't seem to make people twice as miserable. I suspect that most mediaeval peasants were about as cheerful as most ordinary people today.
Happiness is a proxy for successful adaptation to reality. So yes, if they are successfully adapting to the changing environment, they should be happy. The very least, failing at it will make them pretty “unhappy”.
> We are biological creatures and each one of us chooses to construct meaning of life (or lack thereof) individually.
A weird level of resolution to stop at. We’re also atomic creatures, maybe we shouldn’t care about death? But we’re also conscious creatures that suffer and maybe at least avoiding that is pretty meaningful? I don’t think any nihilist is nihilistic enough to self-immolate for example.
You could DIY your meaning individually, as is the fashionable belief in this age of post-modern, but it’s liable to crumbling tragically with an inopportune contact with reality. Normativity of reality seeking is a strongly built instinct in any species that knows they have to survive in it, and their meaning emerges from this relationship.
Benjamin Franklin, agreeing that “the happiness of individuals is evidently the ultimate end of political society,” offered his vision of Higher Progress: If every man and woman would work for four hours each day on some- thing useful, that labor would produce sufficient to procure all the necessaries and comforts of life, want and misery would be banished out of the world, and the rest of the twenty-four hours might be leisure and happiness.
Also Epicur: "Epicurus believed that the greatest good was to seek modest, sustainable pleasure in the form of a state of ataraxia (tranquility and freedom from fear) and aponia (the absence of bodily pain) through knowledge of the workings of the world and limiting desires. "
Personally, I don't believe that working less (or more) makes people happy (unhappy), but my whole point is that defining your future goals in terms of happiness and attempting to measure it is futile by definition.
This seems like an understudied thing to me.
And yet in retrospect humanity's trend has been of greater ingenuity, connectives, safety and well-being. Sure, it's possible that THIS is the high point and it'll all go down-hill from here, but that's like being a broken clock - if you think every thing will kill you, you will eventually be right.
But I see no reason to think like that. For example, sure the pandemic sucks but relative to what it could have been, especially in such a connected world, humanity is handling it pretty well. There seems to be resilience in our economies, supply chains, and people - that when they are tested they have bent and strained but not broken. Like a ship that gets rocked but doesn't sink in a storm that's actually a GREAT sign.
I can related to your emotional state though. I remember walking in NYC a few days after 9/11, and seeing a half-completed building on 42nd street and thinking: this will never get finished. Nobody will ever dare come or invest or live in NYC - we're doomed and dead.
That building is worth a billion dollars now and that neighborhood is thriving. It's important to remember that feeling of gloom and realizing that it doesn't always (in fact, most of the time) pan out as we feared the worst.
It's not about present society being a global maximum, it's about present society being a local maximum. The lessons from history are often that things can and do get worse, sometimes for generations, before improving again later. It is absolutely possible (and I would argue probable) that life will get worse for a long while before improving.
Sure. Like I said, you can do this at any point in time and if enough people do that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy so it's better not.
Out of curiosity, I took a look at your submission history (which is vast!) and it's 90% doom and gloom across a vast array of topics. I do think living with such a negativity bias is very disempowering - and not to mention not fun. I don't mean to be stupid and blindly optimistic (I manage risk for a living among other things) but like I said, living with certainty that everything will be terrible will ruin your life.
Like I said, since dawn of man, people had reason to believe what you believe. And those who really believed it would have no reason to build anything, learn anything, invest in anything, have children etc - why do any of that if the world is ending.
But the world is inherited by those who DO do those things - everything we have, everything we are, everything we're investing in - is there because someone in the past believed that the future is worth the work. So just be careful how much of this your let into your psyche because it will lead to you to a dead end
I think it only seems overly negative -because- so many people are blindly optimistic and assume things just get better naturally with no action required on our part. That's why I have such a negative outlook, I can envision the immense work we need to do to address climate change (and many other issues) and I'm seeing such a small amount of work being done that it's basically a rounding error. Watching people reject even the small amount of work required to personally address COVID (a free shot) does not fill me with hope that we can make big changes.
>But the world is inherited by those who DO do those things - everything we have, everything we are, everything we're investing in - is there because someone in the past believed that the future is worth the work
I think this is the disconnect between us. The future is worth the work, but we refuse to work on the future. We instead work harder to prop up the unsustainable present.
EG: you're dismal about covid because some people won't get the shot. But in the 80s/90s you'd be dismal because people weren't practicing safe sex despite AIDS, and you'd draw that line to a depressing conclusion. And yet in reality, somehow the world moved towards a much better place despite those things.
Same with COVID - you are obsessing on a small number of people not getting vax and getting depressed, but you are ignoring for example super-fast vax development, global awareness, willingness of governments to move in and out of different disease control regimes, etc. Those are wildly optimistic things, but you don't let those things encourage you, instead you seem to seek out the bad stuff no matter how small and and form your view on that.
It's not "somehow", you're glossing over the very real losses and very avoidable tragedies (fed by bigotry and fear) that happened during the AIDS crisis, which is my whole point. Progress isn't free and by ignoring the real losses and avoidable tragedies we repeat the same mistakes. That's why we have to confront the uncomfortable parts of the past and present. If we only focus on the superficial elements of success and progress, we make problems more difficult to actually confront.
I don't think we need to get bent out of shape about the aspects of human nature that cause horror and tragedy, since they seem so greatly overshadowed by aspects of the same nature which are driven to continuously improve. The good guys are winning, by a lot.
I don't think you're living up to your name though!
So what level of sacrifice should be required of those that don't make it? Going back to the AIDS example, government involvement was delayed because of bigotry, because it only affected people who didn't make it. Our economy is currently propped up by low wage workers both locally and globally who aren't making it. We don't do a good job at taking care of the sick and the poor. We're doing a terrible job at taking care of the environment. As you both have said, none of this is new, but it doesn't have to be this way. We know how to solve many of society's problems and we choose not to do so. If the core reason for these things is "human nature" and we shouldn't try to change, I don't think I have the defeatist attitude in that case. My attitude comes from seeing solutions that we aren't even trying to do, not that we -shouldn't- try.
>The good guys are winning, by a lot.
I don't see the good guys winning. The good guys currently have the high score, but the bad guys are on the upswing and scoring points on the good guys, who are just standing around.
The same as it has always been for all living things: pain, suffering, and death.
> low wage workers both locally and globally who aren't making it
Pretty sure quality of life is up by pretty much every measure for "low wage workers" both locally and globally.
> none of this is new, but it doesn't have to be this way.
> We know how to solve many of society's problems and we choose not to do so.
You could have made this statement at any point in history, and people might agree with you. If this is the only way it ever has been, why do you think it doesn't have to be this way?
We know in theory. There is a vast, uncrossable gulf between theory and practice, as various communist experiments have shown. There is no known solution to ingroup/outgroup tendency, sociopathy or naked self-interest.
> If the core reason for these things is "human nature" and we shouldn't try to change
We should totally try to change! But we shouldn't expect to succeed, and we shouldn't be surprised or disappointed when awful things happen. We should instead realize that, looking at the past few centuries of history, this is an amazing time to be alive, by every metric. Better to accept humanity the way that it is, space rockets and genocides and all, and realize that it's still a net-positive, than despair that humanity doesn't hold up to some sort of fictional ideal.
Wages are stagnant and certainly haven't kept pace with productivity. They can buy more TVs because electronics are cheaper, but costs for basics are going up. Metrics don't capture "having to pee in a bottle" because of work demands.
>You could have made this statement at any point in history, and people might agree with you. If this is the only way it ever has been, why do you think it doesn't have to be this way?
Was it true in 2500 BC that they had the resources to feed everyone on the planet consistently? 1500 AD? We can feed everyone now, yet people go hungry in the wealthiest nation in the world. Has it been true at any point in history since the industrial revolution where we could provide healthcare and advanced education for everyone in an industrialized nation? It works for many of them, but not the wealthiest one. Are we doing everything we can to solve these problems? I understand life is about prioritizing and understanding tradeoffs, but food and healthcare are among the most basic needs for a healthy individual and education is one of the basic needs for a healthy society.
>There is no known solution to ingroup/outgroup tendency, sociopathy or naked self-interest.
So why do we structure society to encourage and reward these behaviors instead of trying to mitigate their effects?
Wages have never been tied to productivity. They're derived from supply and demand for labour. Gold miners are very productive fiscally speaking, but they don't make any more than coal miners.
> Metrics don't capture "having to pee in a bottle" because of work demands.
Why do you think people shouldn't have to pee in bottles? Or be exposed to dangerous conditions? You seem to be operating from a moral ideal that gives a very clear idea of how things ought to be. Where do you derive it from?
> Was it true in 2500 BC that they had the resources to feed everyone on the planet consistently? 1500 AD?
You'd be surprised how much grain was hoarded by ancient Pharaohs and Medieval Lords. It was likely enough to prevent much of the starvation their populations experienced. We could always feed more people than we do, and people with wealth and power have always preferred expensive trinkets and shows of status to feeding the hungry.
The US is fundamentally build on individual liberty. This idea is in opposition to involuntary social obligation. If a person doesn't want to use their wealth/time/energy to the benefit of others, do they have to? Should you force them? To what degree? Are people entitled to be helped or should they have to ask? People disagree axiomatically on these things.
In absence of an oracle to tell us who is right and who is wrong, and given that we are all morally equal, it seems to follow that no one has a strong case to impose their answers to these questions on anyone else. Why are you so sure that helping people is "right"? Why do you think everyone has to work towards your idea of a "healthy society"?
> So why do we structure society to encourage and reward these behaviors instead of trying to mitigate their effects?
I'd say our current social structure is the best we've got for mitigating these effects. Entrepreneurship allows people to harness their self-interest to the benefit of others. Democracy limits the effects of corruption. This is why our society is able to innovate as much as it does, and therefore prevail in the ongoing competition with other societies and other ideas.
Conspiracy theorists used to be everywhere, but in small numbers and not very homogeneous; now they are plentiful and coordinated enough to lead to outcomes like the Jan 6 insurrection or the vaccine denialism gripping something like 30% of Americans.
The example I like to think about for this is imagine being born in the eastern European bloodlands - Eastern Germany, the Baltics, Poland, Byelorussia or Ukraine around 1895-1900. Things are pretty good up until the Great War starts, which back then you would be old enough to be considered an adult for, and then it is wars, famines, repressions and totalitarianism for the rest of your life as you likely die just short of the Iron Curtain falling. That's a pretty bleak life. Yet many people lived it, and found love and purpose and had families under it and those civilizations as a whole eventually recovered.
That Belarus recovered is not obvious.
The pandemic, with hundreds of thousands of deaths just in the US hasn't had the same sort of coverage. Nor the fact that we haven't had hurricanes in the Gulf but massive flooding everywhere... my response doesn't come from emotion but from the lack of emotion I see in our leaders to the catastrophes.
We haven't even begin to cut emissions enough to slow down the climate catastrophe and I doubt we ever will. While I imagine the US will start protecting its own supply chains I imagine it will act as it always has, protect the wealthiest and best off and leave middle and lower classes to fight for scraps. Just look at our healthcare system, best in the world for the richest, and one of the worst in the western world for lower classes.
Sorry, but where are you living/getting news from because I am jealous and I want to be that isolated.
Literally every new story, list of headlines, broadcast, tweet, and conversation today includes COVID. CNN used to have daily death counts and totals. Every single person's life, from the way we study, work, shop etc has changed because of COVID.
If your thesis is that somehow this big crisis hasn't been sufficiently publicized and people aren't aware, I just have a really hard time connecting to your perspective on the world.
We seem to be designed to not be content with what we have, because that would eliminate motivation to make things better.
If you're going to broaden person to people, I think it's best to narrow to "happier and more fulfilled" in regards to something. Marriage/personal economics/profession/social life/spiritual life/etc.