That's always going to be true no matter what trajectory the world is heading in.

The point is that, on average, individual experiences are improving, decade by decade. Humanity is doing a remarkable job.

I mean if you focus on the negative and ignore the positive (which is what many people + the media do), you could say it's overall a regressive period. But you could do that (and people have) literally every year for the past 80 years.

Yet, in the grand scheme of things, the world has gotten better in that time. Which is how you know these people are wrong, at least most of the time.

The challenge with positive news is that you have to go seek it out. It will rarely come to you. And then you have to greet it without cynicism, which many are incapable of.

I think it's the opposite

There have always been bumps on the path upward. It's never been smooth. Doesn't change the fact that we're not going to shit, and that we haven't been going to shit for hundreds of years. Quite the opposite.

On average Steven Pinker is at best a fake hyperoptimist-by-aggregate who puts billionaires on pedestals and rewrites history to entrench shitty systems. Sometimes he says smart stuff but he ignores or actively disregards massive problems with a painfully self-serving neutrality.

>(it's all AI cheating now)

My daughter's English professor is now requiring people to hand write their essays during class. So at least there is that.