Comment by dmitrybrant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmitrybrant | Hacker News Reader

I have a mostly Pinkerian view of the modern world, which is to say that by nearly all metrics, the world is better today than it has ever been, and is continuing to improve.

Will we go through local minima while on the path towards absolute upward progress? Of course we will. Right now we might be in a local minimum. Maybe we haven't reached the bottom of the current local minimum yet. Maybe we won't reach it during this generation. But we will get through it.

The other thing is that we simply can't predict societal progress simply by pointing to current trends and extrapolating to the next 5, 10, etc years. Think about the following:

70 years ago, there wasn't a single artificial satellite in the sky. 50 years ago, there wasn't a single personal computer in anyone's home. And 20 years ago, there wasn't a single smartphone in anyone's pocket. All of the above happened within a single human lifetime. I'm saying that it's taking shorter and shorter intervals of time for society to completely transform itself, and we simply can't know what the next transformation will be. For me, that's a prospect worthy of excitement instead of dread.

> I have a mostly Pinkerian view of the modern world, which is to say that by nearly all metrics, the world is better today than it has ever been, and is continuing to improve.

I think that's what most of us forget: the world has VASTLY improved in the past 50 years for the average person on the planet. The life prospects of the poorest half of the world's people are a lot rosier now than in the past, what, thousand years? Advances in telecommunication and public health and global transportation of essential goods has advanced most of the least advantaged parts of the world to life-altering levels. Child mortality, pestilence, starvation, all are significantly diminished. I think that's what Pinker posits, and it's hard to dispute his numbers or conclusions in terms of how the prospects for billions of people have improved a great deal.

But to the American lower and middle class, who enjoyed the post-WWII economic boom, the future seems less gleeful. But the decline they now bemoan didn't happen overnight. Diminishing opportunity among unskilled workers in the US began in the 1970s, and anyone paying attention back then saw that it was time to change career plans and get away from unskilled work, especially in those parts of the country where employers were already migrating away. More of that decline was sure to come, and sure enough, it did.

I feel for them, but that ship has been sinking for decades. The time to head for a lifeboat was 1990, not 2022.

> by nearly all metrics, the world is better today than it has ever been

Maybe. But if that's the case, we're talking about humans only, which account for only a small part of the biosphere. Most other species are suffering more and more.

And even if we're only considering humans, we are materially better off, because we have access to more "things". But are we happier? It doesn't look like it.

> it's taking shorter and shorter intervals of time for society to completely transform itself

Yes, that's true. The problem is that we have a hard time keeping up with change. Social media for instance is a huge transformation of society, and it happened too fast for us to adjust and regulate it.

> For me, that's a prospect worthy of excitement instead of dread.

I don't share that thought, but I envy you.

You “by all metrics that are people centric”.

If you look at the other 99.99999% of species, the world is exceptionally bleak.

Mass death everywhere, total ecosystem collapse, etc.

I'm not denying climate change, but that's... a bit hyperbolic, with a bunch of silly absolutes. Mass death everywhere? Wildlife is thriving in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.[1] The world has been getting greener with more plant life because of the increased CO2 in the atmosphere.[2]

Total ecosystem collapse? Which ecosystem? Why? Again, I'm not denying any of the human impact to our climate, and I agree that many ecosystems will change, and it will be our fault, but I don't think it's productive or healthy to think of it with such bleakness.

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/060418-ch... [2] https://phys.org/news/2020-01-planet-greener-global.html

The greening of the planet isn't indicative of health. When water shortages and lack of snow melting dries up rivers, the land changes. Warming and acidification of the oceans hits offshore too. This is expected to be noticeable from the 2030's.

Ecology needs a balance. Life overall is pretty resilient, but the changes are faster and more impactful than over millions of years.

It's not like we take notice how much destruction humans do, but interesting any rationale is used to justify it, rather than address root causes.

Not against optimism, just that these temporary effects obscures what's really happening.

... which is eventually (probably sooner than later) going to effect humans.

Overall, yes, the median person on the planet is materially better off. But that is the past, and was in many ways due to a great long period of relative peace and globalisation. The 50s and 60s had great optimism about new scientific advancements making life better for the next generations. Nuclear, space, all kinds of automation, television. The late 80s and early 90s had great optimism about the end of the cold war, the world coming together, end of history. Late 90s had great optimism about the internet bringing people together and massively boosting productivity, with robots automating a lot of boring manual tasks.

But what to be optimistic about now? Do you really have a positive, optimistic vision of US 2050 or Europe 2050? What is it? What kind of a world are we actually building and going towards?

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