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Comment by absurdo | Hacker News Reader

I read the original article. I feel like the author of this retort got nerd sniped. “Cracks knuckles”? I can find better things to grind an axe about.

The original article is an opinionated rant. It’s not a scientific or a philosophical treatise, so bringing up things like how diabetes is being cured is far, far outside of the subject matter. So for me this retort is invalid from the get go.

The crux of the original article can be summed up as: “I don’t want to be lorded over by morons who pay their way to live to 200 years.” Hard to argue with that.

In particular I’m amused by this line from the original article:

> I am not looking forward to living in such a world, and indeed I think that such a world might constitute an immense disaster for humankind.

I’d argue the world/humankind is already an immense disaster and things can’t get much worse in any real way. It’s run by sadists and we don’t even know why we are here.

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> I’d argue the world/humankind is already an immense disaster

Not exactly disagreeing because I really don't know any better. But whenever I hear comments like these, I wonder if isolated peoples or medieval/industrial revolution population have/had a better life then we do. We have conveniences that far surpasses anything a king could have just a few decades ago. Our life expectancy and IDH is (almost) monotonically increasing.

I really expect that efficiency growth will make the world converge to a life style where most people don't have to work to survive, but just to acquire luxury goods. I actually think that maybe we could already be at that point if it wasn't for the "sadists that run the world", but I don't think they can prevent it from happening because that will make them make more money too.

So, I really don't know if people criticizing our current state as "an immense disaster" are overly pessimistic or if the people (like myself) thinking that the world is in a never before achieved good state are realistic or uninformed.

I fear deterioration beyond repair, like irrecoverable climate change, because an event like that would really separate the very rich from rest of the population in a way that only one of these two partitions could survive. But I don't think we'll reach that point my lifetime.

My go-to oversimplified answer to this is: people in the past had a poorer material life, but a richer spiritual/purpose-driven one.

I think it’s probably accurate to say that just because we have immense wealth, medicine, etc. that doesn’t necessarily imply we are psychologically healthier or happier. We live in an age of material abundance with a shortage of meaning.

> we have immense wealth, medicine, etc. that doesn’t necessarily imply we are psychologically healthier or happier.

That may make sense if you compare us to a few generations ago because maybe we're almost in a "diminishing returns" phase and our lives aren't significantly better than our closest ancestors. Nevertheless, I'm not sure if we were happier during periods of famine, plague and inquisition. It is still possible to have a "go-to oversimplified answer to this" even for this "go-to oversimplified answer to this".

I’m sure you can pick any individual group of people today and compare them to an individual group from the past, and say that one was happier / less happier than the other.

I am speaking more in general terms, and to make the specific point that just because material conditions are better, that doesn’t imply that psychological / spiritual ones are too.

> But whenever I hear comments like these, I wonder if isolated peoples or medieval/industrial revolution population have/had a better life then we do.

Medieval life was hard. Hard to an extreme that we can’t really relate to, which has opened the door to a lot of fantasizing about the past being better than the present. We like to imagine the past as a version of the present minus the complexities of modern life that we dislike, but past life was full of difficulties that are entirely foreign to us.

It’s hard to even imagine a life where you were one bad farming season away from a year of starvation, one accidental fall away from a lifetime of total disability, or one little scratch away from an infection that ends your life after a period of untreatable agony.

I also think the average modern person doesn’t really understand the level of work and toil that went into basic survival in those times. Today we see people cite trades jobs as back-breaking labor, but a modern trades job is like a vacation relative to something like subsistence farming

I agree with everything you say except the “can’t get much worse” part. I think it can get substantially worse, and death is the primary mechanism that prevents power from centralizing on individuals forever.

Every death is a mini-reset in some way.

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