Ask HN: Do you believe we are in a particularly chaotic time period?

Having faced some personal chaos in life I don't think its more or less chaotic.

Its just the information overload environment produces more triggers. Reduce news and social media off consumption and it feels much less chaotic.

Info overload especially constantly looking at problems above the pay grade/skill level are just going to screw with the head.

Think about your first job, did you try to understand or solve everything the team faced when there was chaos? Initially you might try, but over time you settle into a role where you fit and tune other things out.

These days whenever I feel the urge go down some social media/news generated rabbit hole, I just open Khan Academy or ChatGPT and start talking/looking up some solved problem. Not the unsolvable stuff. It turns out more satisfying than consuming news or social media stuff. Other option is a good game. Changes my mood a lot.

No. Times are always changing.

How is it now more chaotic than the smartphone and internet revolution combined with the war on terror?

How was the internet revolution more chaotic than the fall of the iron curtain, and its aftermath?

How was the fall of iron curtain more chaotic than the cold war?

How was the cold war more chaotic than WW2? etc etc

The only thing that makes this time seem chaotic is that you see more of the details.

The US was almost overthrown by a Coup in 1933.[1] There were huge civil revolts in the clashes between organized labor and the Donor class since the start of the Industrial Revolution. There have been organized systems of repressing most of humanity for all of recorded history, and I don't expect it to change any time soon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

Depends on how far back you zoom out to see. 20, 30 years or so? Definitely. A couple of centuries? Not particularly.

"The 500 Year Delta" was about the convergence of technological and social change. That preceded Y2000.

Either things have changed further since Y2K, or we are still watching that play out. No doubt a major source of chaos is ad-driven (quantity of clicks/attention versus quality) media and their consequent, mostly unchecked, overrun by bots.

LLM's are a factor not in that work, and its effects are still playing out.

I believe that the very concept of meaning is being challenged by such "derivative" work. We used to write to create and convey meaning, not just to produce "a reasonable facsimile."

Change is accelerating, challenging our human reasoning and belief/value systems to cope.

Absolutely. The closest analogy is the social upheaval and changes in societal institutions resulting from the printing press. Read Clay Shirky's "Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable" for a sketch of the impact of the internet.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20052407

https://www.edge.org/conversation/clay_shirky-newspapers-and...

I think not much more chaotic, but more stuff is happening, and it's happening faster (maybe not as much as it feels, because the internet amplifies visibility a lot more than it amplifies the actual rate of notable events).

Compared to what?

Compared to the last 1000 years? No. Last 10 years? Maybe a little bit more.

No, we just are not adapting to changes well enough. Everything has changed since Y2K and it has been 24 years so far, this is called future shock.

Peak capitalism spawned a lot of chaos - it was probably the period of time where tech significantly dropped quality of life. I'm not talking about the tyranny of jobs. I'm talking 10 year old boys blowing glass, slave tier wages, monopolies, 100 hour work weeks, families of subsistence farmers being outpriced into bankruptcy. Communism, fascism, genocide, mass famine emerged from this. Things were worse because people thought, "How bad can things get?" Capitalism later silently evolved to be less free market, because full blown capitalism is unsustainable. But as time goes on, we forget these lessons and optimize for growth.

There's a correlation between economic inequality and political instability. Money buys power. When someone controls both money and politics, the only response by the unpowered is violence.

Inequality triggers because of technology. We're seeing a tech boom lately. This triggers waves in economic and political stability, which triggers waves of violence.

Recent lockdown, crypto, and climate change adds more ripples - so you're looking at overlapping waves of change soon.

e.g. Arab nations are highly dependent on oil and are screwed if oil prices drop, but the Russian war bought them a few more years of stability, which they invest into other things. So the waves can overlap in ways that counter each other.

Yes. Certainly not a uniquely chaotic time period, but we've left a stretch of time that was unusually calm (relatively speaking). The chaotic period we've entered seems even more chaotic by contrast. We're only at the front end of it, though. In a few years, I predict, we'll be wistfully reminiscing about how calm things are right now.

Yes, but there is still much to be optimistic about.

Yes. It’s the end of zero interest rates after 23 years because the baby boomers are retiring and drawing down their savings and has caused a white collar recession. The world is de-globalising - trade wars between the US and China. Climate change is hitting us. Birth rates are declining in Europe and Asia which causes all sorts of problems.

Honestly not anymore than we have in general been. There really isn't anything that much more special going on in the word.

Nope. Everything is more or less as usual on a global scale. History always repeats itself.

The only difference is that now everything has more visibility because internet.

That’s why it looks and feels like it is a special time. But it’s not.