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Comment by diddypiddy | Hacker News Reader

We live in a world where wealth is increasingly being concentrated at the top, social mobility for the average person is trending downwards, suicide rates in the US are at all-time highs, drug abuse rising, general deaths of despair rising, mental illness rising, climate and ecological catastrophes mounting by unchecked greed and all of this AI crap is mostly in the hands of the powerful who will use it to solidify the trends of the things I've mentioned above. Which begs the question, what kind of society is this to be excited about? Great if you live in a bubble unaffected by the above, but for the rest of us, the society sucks.

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The average person has a higher standard of living and more wealth than ever before. Suicide rates are not at all-time highs, they were much higher during the World Wars and Great Depression. Drug abuse is down too, but newer drugs are more potent. Mental illness is a hard stat to compare over time since it is very sensitive to the collection mechanisms. The growth of carbon-free technologies has been exponential over the last few decades. Open(source?) AI models trail the leading closed models by 6-12 months, it's hard to say they are only in the hands of the most powerful. The world is better than ever before, but it could be even better. The internet is filled with too many doomerist takes.

when you visit or live among people or parts of society that that essentially never "modernized" in any meaningful way, the only thing they really need is better healthcare.

the rest is a load of crap that is just solving problems created by industrialization and modernization

Are you talking about lost Amazon tribes? Most places I have visited people have seen real quality of life improvements by having clean water, refrigeration, sewage systems and access to the internet.

Yeah yeah, but it’s so romantic that they use bamboo sticks for hunting and killing each other with poisoned arrows while dying of worm infections and shit

b-b-but ... 2000 lb bombs, ar-15s, drones, guided missiles, f-15s, heavy artillery are more romantic!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-15_Eagle

next up, a total lovefest, icbms firing thermonuclear bombs?

Civilization, I'll stay right here

Call Gandhi.

google Gandhi Western civilization good idea

thank you for reminding me why I don't comment on Hacker News much.

1. Completely misrepresent someone else's perspective

2. Always use an industrialized western perspective as a synonym for what is unequivocally good, without any inspection or consideration. Disregard anything else.

3. Worship at the altar of the information technology industry

> Always use an industrialized western perspective

Who do you think has driven modern medicine and how do you get advanced healthcare without industrialization?

This is a good point. And, most of those require civil engineers to accomplish. It's very hard to do that if you don't have a writing system, and, hence, literacy. Pre-literate societies struggle to build up scientific and mathematical knowledge because all knowledge transfer is oral.

Industrialization is like the 1800s-1900s. Not "pre-literacy".

That might be true outside the US; I believe that the standard of living has gone down in the US, due in large part to the pandemic, followed by rampant inflation.

The shift away from manufacturing jobs to service jobs also played a role, along with the population boom in major cities.

The cities/countries with the highest standards of living all seemingly exist in Europe.

EDIT To Add: look at the revolting against McDonald's to see my point. Taking your family to mcdonalds used to be something you didn't really need to think about. Not anymore.

Europe also experienced a pandemic, has even worse inflation and worse unemployment. It could just be cultural attitudes make European cities a more pleasant place to live.

> It could just be cultural attitudes make European cities a more pleasant place to live.

Cultural attitudes certainly, particularly around work vs leisure. Also mass transit systems, and social supports for people working in the service industry.

The criticisms for europe are that it takes a lot of tax revenue to support those things, bureaucracy, strikes, etc.

Im not saying one system is better than the other--just that in the US, despite our massive economic might, our standard of living sucks.

Mass transits and more pleasant places to live are probably correlated with more tax efficient policies.

It's just that the USA has accumulated a number of unfair advantages.

This kind of comparison always neglects to consider the fact that any given European country is much smaller and much more homogeneous than the US. Which US state are you comparing to?

Using the Human Development Index (HDI) as a passable proxy for standard of living:

Mississippi has an HDI of 0.866, about the same as Portugal and somewhat higher than Bulgaria (the lowest HDI in the EU) at 0.799.

Massachusetts has an HDI of 0.949, which is about the same as Germany and only a tiny bit lower than #1 Switzerland's 0.967.

In other words: both Europe and the US span a wide range of HDI scores, but the European Union has a wider range in both directions. Europe is both better and worse than the US, depending on where in Europe and where in the US you're talking about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

> This kind of comparison always neglects to consider the fact that any given European country is much smaller and much more homogeneous than the US. Which US state are you comparing to?

I'm aware of the criticism of Apples to Oranges. I assume given such a basic level of criticism on any comparison between the US and Europe that it's no longer remotely relevant because to any study ranking would clearly account for that.

Oxford Economics just released their 1000 cities index, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-21/new-york-...

The US dominated in the economic advantage, and europe dominated in the quality of life index.

HDI in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore are also very high. Tokyo is crazy high -- on the same level as Switzerland.

Did it really? When I was a kid in the 90s we went to McDonalds once a year for my birthday.

> Suicide rates are not at all-time highs, they were much higher during the World Wars and Great Depression.

Nah we already exceeded WW2.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/mental-health/cdc-data-finds-...

> but available data suggests suicides are more common in the U.S. than at any time since the dawn of World War II.

>U.S. suicides steadily rose from the early 2000s until 2018, when the national rate hit its highest level since 1941.

I guess we still haven't exceeded the Great Depression rates but it's really not that hard of a target

Suicide rates during WW1 were hovering around 20 per 100k. During the Great Depression it peaked at 22 per 100k [0]. That's around 50% higher than the 2022 number you cite (14.3 per 100k), which is hard to describe as "really not that far off".

EDIT: The comment I replied to has been edited in multiple ways since I replied, so the text in quotes above is no longer present. The comment previously indicated that we had already exceeded "the world wars" (not just WW2) and that we were "really not that far off" from the rates of the Great Depression.

Slight meta tangent: OP, in general it's considered good form to reply to people who reply to you rather than just modifying your comment. Calling out edits explicitly (like I've done here) after you've received replies is also considered good form.

[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2023/11/29/2022-suic...

I edit a lot so I set the delay in my profile to give me 10 minutes to do so.

If you edited within ten minutes then something isn't working, because your comment changed multiple times after I replied to it. The delay is supposed to prevent me from seeing it at all until the period is up.

I’m not OP.

Ah, my bad.

“Wealth” is becoming a tricky term. Bill Gates is approximately a million times richer than I am, but for many things he can’t get anything like a million times the value I can. He can spend 1000x what I do on clothes, but I won’t be appreciably colder or less comfortable than he is. His house might cost 100x what my apartment would go for, but again, it isn’t 100x nicer. He can eat steak and lobster for every meal, but I don’t go hungry. I’m not trying to portray myself as being the other end of the wealth spectrum from Bill Gates. There are people far below me economically, and wealth inequality is definitely a thing. But AI tutors and teachers will serve to reduce the gap, not increase it. Notably, Bill Gates and I use equivalent phones and computers to within a factor of 2.

The other issues are of course critically important, but are caused by more than the wealth gap.

> He can spend 1000x what I do on clothes, but I won’t be appreciably colder or less comfortable than he is.

This misses the point of expensive clothing entirely.

Many people would disagree that his house is not 100 times nicer than yours.

He doesn’t use computers and phones like you do. He uses people who use technology that is 100kx your computer and phone.

You’re talking about the essential function of an object. When things become expensive they take on additional functions that your items lack entirely.

I think the point about clothes is exactly the point I was trying to make: everything you are alluding to that gives "value" to expensive clothes is an artificial construct. A fashionable jacket is fashionable because people agree that it is stylish. That doesn't make it "better" at being a jacket. More to the point, I can only feel a disparity between Mr. Gates and myself by convincing myself that style matters.

His house is bigger. He can only occupy one room at a time. I know where his house is: I lived across Lake Washington from him. I've seen the houses across the lake from his, with the exact same view, and they are worth 1/30th of his house because they are 1/30th as big. But again: he can only be in one room at a time. I'm not saying there's no difference; I'm saying there's nothing like 30x difference.

I'm not sure I comprehend your point about hiring people to do work. 100,000 people using 100,000 iPhones are not 100,000 times as capable of doing most things.

In short, no: expensive things don't take on (many) additional functions. That was exactly my point, and I don't think you've disproven it.

Don’t look too closely or you might realize that your value system is not universal, and that it is an artificial construct and depends on all sorts of other artificial constructs such as a market system.

You can’t seriously believe that you can outperform 100,000 people, but that wasn’t my point. He has teams of people using among other things HPC to perform calculations that are both conceptually and computationally beyond an individual’s reach.

Just because you haven’t witnessed it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, and doesn’t easily 100x your own value.

Bill Gates can have other billionaires over to his house. That is not true for your house. That in itself is worth many multiples of your functional viewpoint.

Oh goodness. I didn’t say that I could outperform 100,000 people. I said there are tasks where 100,000 people can’t make 100,000 times the result. Maybe an example would help?

When Bill Gates wants to have pizza for dinner, 100,000 people can’t deliver it in a fraction of a second. HA! Now, having typed that, I’m thinking of Bill Gates having… let’s say 1,000 chefs, who each night cook 1,000 meals, all so that there is a high probability that whatever he asks for will be ready the moment he asks for it.

To your point, of course there are tasks where 100k people can make a difference. But again, I didn’t say that wasn’t true.

I’m not sure why you think I can’t have billionaires over to my house? I’m pretty sure Warren Buffett has had Bill Gates over to his house, and Warren Buffett’s house is (comparatively) extremely modest.

Finally, of course I understand that my value system is unique. So is everyone’s. How does that change the fact that for the vast majority of people, if you ask them how well their smart phone works for them, they will not reply, “Well, my phone is okay I guess, but have you seen Bill Gates’s phone? That thing is amazing!”

Your specific point you seem to be hanging onto is why do the billionaires not have phones whose technology absolutely crushes your personal phone? I don’t understand why the question is interesting, but here is why they don’t:

What would they do with it that other people cannot do for them, faster and more cost effectively?

The limitation on personal productivity is not the pocket computer, it is access to computing resources. Right now the closest thing we have to a competent human, which can be easily had for $50k/year or $2M/working life, costs around 500 times that, lasts 1/10th as long, doesn’t work unless I’m talking to it, and isn’t nearly as capable.

You are talking about point of diminishing return . Personally I think beyond an income of 1 million dollars a year , one's quality of life does not change significantly.

Gini coefficient tell less valuable information than say total poverty rate, but a high gini coefficient can be an indicator of concentration of power in the "elites"

What’s this? DC comics?

Open source models will give a lot of people lots of chances. Period.

Other things we’ll see, doomers were never quite right - so far

I am not discounting what you said about wealth concentration and upward mobility, but the top post that started this thread is surely a counter example for what you are saying? Yes, the makers of openai/gemini/whatever could power such ai tutors, and make more money, but there are legit cases where this will be an enormous boost that was unthinkable just a few years ago.

Nah, we live in a great world where most people recognize that absolute life quality matters more than relative life quality. Online commenters all go to therapy and are miserable, and their bosses are idiots, and everyone is spying on them, and so on and so on.

But most people are better off than their parents and knowing this, they’re generally happy.

I see your point. Obviously, the first paragraph is sarcasm, but the second paragraph raises an interesting point. In my family, my two older siblings are not better off than my parents. It is a bit sad.

I'm actually being entirely sincere.

A lot of that is just land use policies. When you look at the average American household budget, it makes sense. The #1 and #2 are housing and transportation followed by taxes. Climate change and ecological catastrophes, mental illness are really land use policies in disguise or at least can be explained partly.

Yep, we have so much freaking money that we've decided to bury it all in illiquid assets built on artificial scarcity - which we then endeavor to increase the value of by further constraining supply.

It's probably one of the dumbest things we do as a society, although that might be a fairly California centric perspective.

All your premises are wrong, even if they're grammatical and coherent (what does "general deaths of despair" or "climate and ecological catastrophes mounting by unchecked greed " even mean?

> all of this AI crap is mostly in the hands of the powerful

too funny when the subject of the article is the Khan Academy which is hardly a hate-target.

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