Taleb: The future will not be cool
salon.com
salon.com
However, I still think this particular essay is insulting drivel. Taleb uses a lot of 10 dollar words to mast his 10 cent thoughts. He wears his vocabulary and enculturation on his sleeve like a badge so that he can pour scorn on neophiles and other people he doesn't like. Now, this may merely be the predjudice of an "autistic" technophile, but I prefer reasoned arguments to intellectual muscle flexing.
He makes a few good points. As the old saying goes: "The more things change the more they stay the same." Some things about society will possibly never change. But his actual argument is so vapid: We still use glasses to hold liquids that we intend to drink? Just like the Mesopotamians? No kidding. But chances are that glass he was drinking out of was manufactured in China hundreds of miles away with techniques wholly unavailable to Mesopotamia and shipped across a distance, inconcievable to a Mesopotamian, and at a price, proportionally less that the price of the rudimentary earthenware mug that a Mesopotamian would use.
Taleb accuses technophiles of not studying history, but I have studied history, and the world has changed, quite a bit.
A black swan event isn't necessarily a low-probability event. It is dependent on the person who experiences the event, if that person does not take into account the possibility for that event to occur, it is a black swan event for that person. For the vast majority of the people, the most recent economic crash was a black swan event, but for a small number of people, it happened like it was clockwork.
In that sense, although your definition was wrong, you're actually kind of right - the reason predictions so often fail is that they do not take into account the unknown, which is basically a tautology, though one probably worth repeating since it's so hard for our brains to actually accept.
History: a black swan was rare to a european. but it was native to australia. the idea labeleing events 'black swans' only makes sense in the context of the story being told from the european perspective, not the anitpodean.
Logically: A black swan is an ebodiment of non-stochastic process or the intrusion of factors outside the stochastic process under consideration. ie, its about uncertainty not risk/probability. the parametrics of risk/probability are therefore irrelevant, in the normal sense (ie, as priors or ex-ante odds, etc). It is equally as non-sensical to call a black swan x or y probability.
TLDR - A black swan is more akin to something from outside the known-state-space. [1]
[1] see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knightian_uncertainty
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[1] Wiki: The phrase "black swan" derives from a Latin expression; its oldest known occurrence is the poet Juvenal's characterization of something being "rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno" ("a rare bird in the lands, very much like a black swan") (6.165).[3]
In English, when the phrase was coined, the black swan was presumed not to exist. ...
Juvenal's phrase was a common expression in 16th century London as a statement of impossibility. The London expression derives from the Old World presumption that all swans must be white because all historical records of swans reported that they had white feathers.[4] In that context, a black swan was impossible or at least nonexistent.
After Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh discovered black swans in Western Australia in 1697,[5] ....
________
So, if you are an Australian the idea of a black swan was completely different (one of a known variety, like a kangaroo vs a wallaby) to the historical use in "the west" (ie, europe/rome/england). The 'Idea' as its used with respect to statistics, now has an Idiomatic meaning, that is not the Australian one, but rather based on the European experience.
The future is going to be new, and different, and it is hard to predict. Your phone (for some definition of phone) can give you answer to nearly any fact based question you can imagine. Right now, in under 500 mSec. The future doesn't look different when its entered into gradually, it looks hugely different when it is punctuated.
So if Taleb really wanted to 'check' on his futurist mantra, he should pick a number, 10 years, 25 years, 50 years. And then 'spend a day' in that time by removing everything in his possessions, environment, and activities that were not created or possible at that previous time.
I would predict that its a matter of opinion as to whether the future is or is not 'cool', most people would agree that the past sucks. :-)
The author seems to think science is 100% computers and space travel; if he is only listening to pop-futurists, this is perhaps understandable. But if you consider the more humble applications of technology, you really see the changes technology brings to our lives. Refrigeration is another good example, and I bet the author has not been to a hospital in a while if he thinks that the way we do medicine hasn't drastically changed since ancient times.
Edit, I should also point out that the main sources of entertainment in the US (TV/Internet/Radio) are all less than 100 years old.
The point is not that the future will be like the past, or that things which exist now simply should not. It's that in Taleb's future, technologists will have recognized that technology should eliminate bullshit (think about the toilet and sewers, some of the best technology that could ever exist!) and make it easier to live a life full of the basic good parts of being human: companionship/sex, food, discovery and knowledge. So the smartphone is not incongruous with his vision of the future at all. It enables you to seek all of those things, and adds relatively little in terms of shitty things (I mean, you have to pay for it and keep it charged, but beyond that it doesn't add a lot hardship.)
When he talks about the lack of literacy in technology circles, I believe he's thinking of literature as a tool for looking at human motivations. So, his theory is that if technologists were to read literature (or were of a mindset to be already interested in literature), they would recognize these motivations, and it would provide a path for changing their focus from stupid social widgets to something that will actually create the future.
It's unfortunate that Taleb had to resort to name-calling and condescension. I like literature too, but that doesn't mean anyone who doesn't is an autistic neomaniac.
What he doesnt say in this book excerpt is that truly disruptive technology is usually around in the labs or experimental form 15 or so years before its disruptive phase. Could you have predicted today's internet from the early ARPANET? I was there and I didnt. Or the iPad from the integrated circuit? Good grief, Ted Nelson demoed Xanadu of a group of us in the 1980's and I didnt see the social implications of the Web.
How many of us still get in cars and commute to work, sit in an office, as we are monitored by our boss, drive home through some awful commute. Then eat some processed food because we didn't have time to go to the grocery store and get some fresh food. I'm sure there are plenty on this site who telecommute and bike, but that's not the norm.
A lot of what is If talked about on this site is really not a big deal: some new library to make some flashy display; or some new iphone/app thingy; or some new way to get eyeballs to look at a web page.
* Electricity keeps me warm in winter, and lets me see things in the dark without flame or moonlight.
* Artificial fertilizers produced with the Haber-Bosch process are currently necessary for food cost to be a minor concern, rather than one of the great overriding imperatives of my life.
* I got the knowledge-equivalent of a CS degree in high school, thanks to having a lot of spare time and an internet connection.
* Books, once outlandishly expensive, were dirt cheap to print by the time I was a child. Reading a lot of them was one of the major influences on my life.
I could name some more -- fast global travel, ubiquitous access to clean water, higher effective wealth because of cheap worldwide shipping, eyeglasses so I can see clearly -- but hopefully I've made my point.
I hate to tell you this, but if you're in a developed country like the US, then take your socioeconomic percentile and call it X. You have a better life in 2012 than the Xth-percentile person of 1950, 1900, 1800, 1600, and on back. There's a strong tendency to compare the average person's life (which, compared to the expectations of a high-IQ person with access to technology and therefore superior alternatives, is admittedly quite shitty) now to the life of an aristocrat in the past, and therefore conclude that things were better, but that's wildly inaccurate.
The malaise comes from a couple factors. First, most peoples' lives are still shitty, and what's becoming more clear is that this is unnecessarily so, thus showcasing the rottenness of human nature. It's no longer the fault of "scarcity". People just fucking suck-- they're greedy, petty, and would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. The useless and counterproductive power structures remain because there are assholes who really like holding power and don't care if they're playing a negative-sum game. We probably have one more violent class revolution (possibly worldwide) in our human story before we make it to the post-scarcity (ca. 2100?) world. Second, technological and economic growth have slowed down (not stopped, but slowed) over the past 30 years due to a lack of investment in basic research. Rather than accelerating toward a singularity, we've gone from 6% growth per year to about 4%. This is a slow patch, no doubt, but at least it's not decline.
I'm a professional filmmaker. It's what I've always wanted to do. I've also always wanted to make epic fantasy/sci-fi films.
Currently, thanks to 3D animation, Machinima, motion capture, and a bunch of other things, I get to make movies in my bedroom that would have been flat-out impossible 25 years ago, and would have cost in excess of $10,000,000 15 years ago.
So, yeah. Tech has made my life better.
Let's compare: WW2 was the worst war we've ever had; it killed about 60 million people, or about 2% of the world population.
The Spanish Flu in 1918 killed 3%. Smallpox killed 3-500 million people in the 20th century, or about 5-8x as many as WW2.
Or how about the Black Death a few centuries before? Half the European population gone. It wiped out entire Asian cities too.
Vaccines and antibiotics are miracles we take for granted; our ancestors would think us mad.
And we damn need to speed up the development, as antibiotics are starting to fail due to their overuse. We take the life without major pandemics for granted, but we will get a cold wake-up soon if we don't fight to maintain this.
I am in good health in spite of diabetes and 3 minor heart attacks, because of advances in medical technology. I use insulin that was made available the year after my grandfather died from diabetes. I monitor my blood sugar with an instrument that wasn available a couple of decades ago. I have a pacemaker that wasnt available 50 years ago.
I'm alive which is significantly beater than dead.
I'm a translation freelancer whose customers are located in various places around the world; I get my work by email every day, process it using a translation memory that permits me to look up previous translations instantaneously and with the Internet available for instantaneous glossary searches (I no longer even own a paper dictionary - it takes too long to consult it), then send the work back, invoice by email, and receive money into my bank account in Indiana which I access from ATMs here in Budapest. I do all that right from my home, so I can work four hours a day and walk the dog whenever the weather is good, help my kids with their homework when they need it, and in general enjoy my time.
Although I live in Budapest this year (and Puerto Rico for five years, Indiana for three), I talked to my father in Indiana face to face yesterday - I had to cut it off because we were going shopping, but that's fine because I can talk to him any time I want. The week before that I was able to talk to my mom, who just had a hip replacement; fifty years ago she'd simply be an invalid due to inflammatory disease, but with metal joints she's still active and able to walk.
All that against the backdrop of the fact that I grew up in the middle of nowhere on a farm in Indiana. My life then was already incredibly blessed by technology - my grandparents lived twenty miles away, but we still saw them on a weekly basis, which wouldn't have been possible fifty years before that. I was able to go to school because agricultural productivity permitted me that free time.
So yes. Technology has made my life better. It boggles the mind to imagine that people can believe it doesn't.
"After I left finance, I started attending some of the fashionable conferences attended by he new class of technology intellectuals. I was initially exhilarated to see them wearing no ties, as I used to live among tie-wearing abhorred bankers."
"But these conferences felt depressing. It took a while for me to realize the reason: a profound lack of elegance."
Take its message as a humbling lesson: "Technology is at its best when it is invisible."
I don't know that I'll continue to wear a tie for the rest of my life, and I certainly won't expect other people to do so when I become a "higher-up", but I'm not going to dress like a college student for work anymore, no matter what I do. When you go to work the unfortunate reality is that you need to subtly tell other people what they think of you, and dressing well is one of the most time- and energy-efficient ways to do it.
This is a maddeningly vague statement. It sounds like something I'm supposed to agree with, but without at least one concrete example, it could be total bullshit and still sound wise.
The suit is, as one might imagine, armor.
I don't see these as bad things. Unlike real swords, ties aren't hurting anyone. But yes, they go a long way back. There's a lot of legacy, for sure.
Another thing: by creating a strong impression of seriousness, jacket-and-tie creates a false , narcissistic sense of self-worth that can limit the true drive to succeed and that's a sad, sad thing when it happens. It's just an appearance after all.
Taleb may have been referring to certain "conference-whores" [1] who dress up like geeks to fit into the crowd. Hopefully, in science and technology, actions matter more than words and dress up, and that's one of the reasons we like it.
[1]http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/10/13/be-careful-not...
What I've learned, the hard way, is that you have to spend a considerable amount of your work time deciding for other people how they perceive you, and this is a subtle art. If you don't manage your image actively, others will manage it for you. This is as true, if not moreso, in a startup than in a big company. At least the social status rules of large companies (as broken and antiquated as they may be) are documented. In a startup, you often have situations where there are 20 employees who all think they're the alpha dog.
Wearing a suit and tie is a very cheap, efficient way to manage other peoples' impressions of you. Sure, it's silly, but the reward-to-cost ratio is very high. It's a lot cheaper and better than, say, sticking around the office till 9:30 when you finished productive work 5 hours ago.
"Your business suit will probably cost about as much as a computer monitor. You only need it once in a blue moon, but when you need it you’ll be really, really, really glad that you have it. Take my word for it, if I wear everyday casual when I visit e.g. City Hall I get treated like a hapless awkward twenty-something, if I wear the suit I get treated like the CEO of a multinational company. I’m actually the awkward twenty-something CEO of a multinational company, but I get to pick which side to emphasize when I want favorable treatment from a bureaucrat." [1]
Now, obligatory suit-and-tie-wearing can certainly be seen as a form of workplace oppression, but the motivation to positively impress business associates is perfectly valid. On the flip side, dressing down and cursing like a sailor can also be a form of calculated personal branding that conveys the desired impression (confident, powerful outsider) to certain prospective clients in certain situations. [2]
But fundamentally, a suit is exactly what the modern hacker wants: a uniform. I suspect more than a few HN posters have nothing but jeans and monochromatic T-shirts in their closets. A suit is a uniform with four extra pockets and social bonuses.
I find Taleb's opinionated eccentricity very useful, especially when it consists of a mixture of ideas, some of which you totally agree with and some which you totally disagree. Keeps you alert and thinking, instead of blindly swallowing or blindly rejecting everything depending on religious preferences (e.g. iOS vs Android)
Antifragility is perhaps the most important perception-refactoring concept since the selfish gene, and the book deserves to be read purely for that reason.
The book is pretty laudatory of engineers and the tinkering mentality, crediting them for most of the inventions of the past age, rather than top-down science.
Erudition is great. But it is far easier for the engineer to become erudite than for a liberal arts major to become an engineer.
Where Taleb is wrong is that (good) science fiction is not about predicting the future. It is really speculative economics fiction - how would a mix of this kind of intelligent agents and this kind of resource environment work out? The science, futurism and the aliens are merely literary tools to help you get out of a human/today-centric point of view. They are thought experiments which can be sold to the public (at least, the engineering public).
And God, I hate longhand as the primary mode of input. Connecting the iPad to ancient tablets is the kind of wankery one gets from the erudite, I guess :)
(I'm picking very small nits here; "Antifragile" is overall very thought provoking. Highly recommended.)
Eric Falkenstein:
"Another key to understanding Taleb is that he has a French post-modern tendency to write to impress rather than explain. He provides hundreds of loosely related anecdotes, reminding me of the Talmud quote that 'when a debater’s point is not impressive, he brings forth many arguments.' I actually agree with a lot of Taleb, such as the intractability of risk because it is endogenous, and I think he's vaguely libertarian, but he says so many inconsistent things that doesn't mean much (when he's right it's probably a good example of the Gettier problem)."
Gettier problem = whether being right by accident still counts as being right.
http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2012/11/taleb-mishandles-frag...
As much as Taleb swoons over literary culture in this excerpt, and as much of cultural force as Orwell was as a writer; I'm surprised that that Taleb doesn't view Orwell's imagination as a remarkably accurate, in a literary, if not literal, sense, prognosticator.
After all, Orwell's imagination predicted the surveillance society, death of individual privacy, the use of propaganda for social engineering among other things. I may be misinterpreting Taleb's words, "The problem is that almost everything that was imagined never took place, except for a few over-exploited anecdotes...", because it strikes me that he would miss the obvious current reality of Orwell's 'literary predictions' which mostly are very much based on technological achievements such as ubiquitous networks, cheap cameras, cheap and ubiquitous data storage, and so on.
Most of the futuristic crap from 50 and 60 years ago was the product of some uninformed scifi authors who mixed fantasy with technology, marketers creating products of the future to create more brand-awareness (with the ironic consequence that some of those companies disappeared decades ago) and many charlatans who simply had no idea what they were talking about.
For example, food pills wasn't about a rosy cool future, the whole idea started as a theoretical last-ditch effort to curve a future global famine of catastrophic proportions caused by the at the time unprecedented increase in population. Fortunately other "techno-autistics" were able to find a way to increase crop yields (Green Revolution) which is why we still have real food instead of something closer to dry dogfood pellets.
The points that Taleb is making here are best discussed, not by considering technology as artifact alone, but technology for what it really is - a set of artifacts, systems, processes, and artifices that take place in a social milieu and as a two-way relationship with society and civilization. To think otherwise is naive folly, from my perspective. (Please see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_construction_of_technolo... for a primer on this, it's fun reading if you're unfamiliar).
Technophiles (myself included!) will often project things out because they fail to understand that technology does NOT just show up and leave an imprint on the world, deus ex machina style. Instead the world shapes technology back. You can see this for any kind of technology, from the bicycle (Bijker's famous example, shown in the wikipedia article) to the Internet, which has its present design because of the real fears / threats / motivations that abounded during its establishment.
It's the (mostly) impossible nature of this dis-entanglement that throws people off track. In some world of scientist-kings of technocratic technophile dictatorships, yes, we'd have moon bases by now. But that's not how it works, and as a result people - messy, annoying humanity - get in the way. For better or, for often, worse.
The future WILL be cool - I'm still an optimist. But it will be cool in different ways, and maybe for different reasons, than many here on HN might imagine.
Since this thread is already a bit long let me instead just close with a great quote that I reference often. Relevant here.
The plain message physical science has for the world at large is this, that were our political and social and moral devices only as well contrived to their ends as a linotype machine, an antiseptic operating plant, or an electric tram-car, there need now at the present moment be no appreciate toil in the world, and only the smallest fraction of the pain, the fear, and the anxiety that now makes human life so doubtful in its value. There is more than enough for everyone alive. Science stands, a too competent servant, behind her wrangling underbred masters, holding out resources, devices, and remedies they are too stupid to use. – H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (1904)
"Advocates of SCOT—that is, social constructivists -- argue that technology does not determine human action, but that rather, human action shapes technology."
Sounds like another case of people not understanding feedback loops - that A can both determine, and be determined by B.
But people very, very commonly fail to see the embedded social factors in technologies, and are very quick to ascribe autonomy to technology, which is in my mind fallacious. You see this when the news has stories like, "Technology just keeps advancing. How will it change our lives next?" instead of understanding it as part of a relationship between people, their environment, and their artifacts, technology gets put on some magical self-propelling trajectory that just isn't true. Yes, Moore's Law is great - but it's a social/human driver, as is Intel's Tick-Tock, not something innate in technology!
But people tend to miss a lot of other things. Most futurists wouldn't have predicted that computers 1000x more powerful than ENIAC would fit in our pocket. I recall one prediction about a computer the size of ENIAC might fit in a small room. Notice the low resolution displays in most old sci-fi movies. Or how ubiquitous wireless communication would be. Many sci-fi movies with tethered phones, or data transfer with USB-key like gadgets.
It's not that things are subtractive (that's just wishful luddite-like thinking). It's just that things aren't necessarily additive where we think they may be. It may be that in 50 years the web is a lot like how it is today, but nutrition technology has drastically changed so that nutrituous food is tasty and cheap. Or we discover technology to communicate with animals much more effectively.
Technology keeps moving forward. And I think his comment about literary culture reveals his bias.
Your stove may look like a wood burning stove, and your fridge may look like a 50's model. Why? Because when almost EVERYTHING is 3D printed to your specifications, people are free to make things that function in a modern way but look like what they want them to look, rather than how the manufacturer's marketing department deems they should look.
I think transport will be dominated by self-driving vehicles, but again: think of individual styles. I predict quite a few autonomous "horseless coaches" driving around our cities.
Speaking of cities...
My hope is that high speed network access will be everywhere, and population densities will equalize as more and more people prefer to live a rural life even while they do cutting edge professional or academic work. There will still be slums and there will still be poor people, but I think that the majority of people who live in cities will do so because they really want to.
Further out, I can see even things like traditional healthcare completely disappear. Sure, we may always have emergency trauma centers and doctors, but it's not to hard to fathom a time where a colony of self-replicating bio-robots and ongoing genetic engineering work 24 hours a day inside your body to keep it healthy and let you know of any real trouble before it becomes serious.
This is not to say that all these predictions will come true, only that the disappearance of electronic gadgets into the mind and into fabrics, paint, and the air seems inevitable, as does the radical differentiation of physical things like furniture, houses, and vehicles that will certainly come from the 3D printing/replication revolution (if that occurs).
The future will not be as cool as technologists imagine because in the contest of being what it could be, and being what its current inhabits want it to be (especially those in power), the latter wins
It's nothing profound, but it's worth hearing again, and the arguments here underline that. Technology exists to serve humans, and humans haven't changed for a very long time, for better or worse. Any prediction that fails to take this into account will fail. It's an old lesson, but it seems we need to hear these old lessons again, and again, and again.
This is completely wrong. I can think of at least 2 victorian examples imagining the internet: 1, a series of drawings where video telecommunications is imagined, and the other a story I cannot find, written over 100 years ago I believe, about a son and mother communicating from their pods where all the worlds knowledge is accessible, and the son chooses to go "offline".
The smartphone was probably predictable from the early 2000's at the very least.
Having said that I'm not that I currently see any similar major leaps coming in the next decade. More accurate and indoor location data could bring useful (and in some ways almost invisible) functionality to the smartphone.
Thinking about smartphone predictability reveals a pattern that might apply to other technologies: an actual dip in predictability caused by technological progress. If you leave out the always-internet-connected aspects of the smartphone, you still have a very small and portable device with books, amusements, up-to-date reference materials such as maps and encyclopedias, current periodicals, and real time voice and video communication. If the Internet did not exist, the iPhone would still have been a breakthrough product. A web-ignorant but otherwise capable iPhone was theoretically predictable half a century ago, but the technological reality of the intervening decades (ugly low-res screens, huge devices with pathetic capabilities, painfully clumsy input methods) depressed our expectations to the point that when it finally happened, it was something of a surprise.
AI may be another area where decades of technological disappointment have narrowed our expectations and reduced our ability to imagine what the future will bring. Someone transported from the 1960s might be better at predicting the future of AI than anyone who lived through the intervening decades.
EDIT: Corrected 20-30 years to a more realistic time span with respect to AI.
That made me think of Bruce Tognazzini (TOG) in "TOG on Interface" (http://www.amazon.com/Tog-Interface-Bruce-Tognazzini/dp/0201.... From 1991, but seems unaware of the existence of the world-wide web):
"I want the United States Library of Congress on my desktop. I want the collections of every major museum in the world available to project against my wall. I want every issue of every newspaper published in the English-speaking world sitting in my laptop.
Is this really too much to ask?"
I remembered that first paragraph as ending in "in my pocket", but, apart from minor technical details (for example, wireless communication allows us to shrink the device even further then laptop size, and he isn't asking for all of Hollywood or even for all radio recordings ever made) I think that is a decent prediction of where we are heading.
That said, Taleb makes a good point when he is talking about the tendency for 'futurists' to get it all wrong. He is touching on one of the major problems of design which is that bad design is always additive, and constantly bolts on extra useless features in order to strive for something 'newer', whereas good design demands subtraction.
The iPhone was released in an era where most nerds still got excited about what Intel was planning to release next year, and yet the most influential computer of the decade didn't even have an Intel processor. By subtracting away the unnecessary, Jobs delivered something that was far greater than the sum of its parts. Most notably, the iOS touch interface was a huge innovation from a human-computer interaction perspective, yet viewed from another perspective all it did was bring us back to an interface that had been used for centuries (I think Taleb can realise the difference between a Phoenician tablet and an iPad, he is referring to the interface).
I think ultimately Taleb is touching on something that Steve Jobs would often repeat, which is that the best objects exist at an intersection of the arts and the sciences. Human nature does not fundamentally change as the years pass, and this is ultimately the limiting factor on successful technologies, and the driving force behind the process of disruptive innovation which continues to favour the less technologically advanced yet more customer-centric (or human-centric) technologies. This is something that is often forgotten in the technology world where it took a completely non-technical liberal arts drop-out in the form of Jobs to help technologists realise that computers ultimately have to be made for real people.
That said, Taleb is writing outside his domain and therefore this piece could have been much better written.
I also like sci-fi.
(Maybe a more interesting question would be: what's so ontologically distinct about science fiction? Why is it specifically excluded from Literature?)
I try to read a few "classics" now and then, and I definitely read more than just sci-fi. I like history, philosophy, biographies, etc., as well. But you touch on something we all have to struggle with: Time. There are only so many hours in the day to read, and every time I sit down to read, I have to make a decision on whether or not what I'm thinking about reading is a good use of my time.
So... I'm going to get a certain amount of raw "escapism", pop-fiction stuff, that I need just to stay sane. That's a given. Now, how much time do I have left to read Homer, or obscure French and Russian "literature"? And to what end? Just to impress hipster douche-bags and self-appointed "intellectuals"? Or because reading that stuff is actually going to add value to my life? Is reading Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina going to do more for me than reading Teach Yourself Haskell in 21 Days or Asimov's "Foundation Trilogy" books, or whatever?
The last few books I've read (other than technical books) include Run by Dean Karnazes, Born to Run by McDougal, The Belgian Hammer by Lee, Eat & Run by Scott Jurek, Racing Through the Dark by David Millar, Slaying the Badger by Moore, Running on Empty by Marshall Ulrich and The Secret Race by Tyler Hamilton. Would I be better off if I'd spent that time reading "literature" instead? I don't know, but I'm sceptical.
OTOH, I have a whole pile of stuff lying here by Nietzsche, Kieerkegard, Hume, Foucalt, etc., that I'm planning to work through. But I'm reading it just because I find it interesting, not because I see it as having any more inherent value than "low brow" literature.
Mostly I would read Tolstoy for the same reason I would read Nietzsche - to break through our regrettable tendency to take the past and its people for granted. It's one thing to read about the ideas Nietzsche developed on a Wikipedia article, it's wholly another to read him in his own words and suddenly find yourself thrust into contact with a whole mind, a living, breathing bundle of thoughts and anxieties and dream, a human being palpably aching to find meaning, caught in the middle of one of the greatest social upheavals of human history. To get a sense, just for a moment, of the sheer enormity of the fact that whole generations of people lived and died without knowing anything of the world we lived in.
19th century literature is special. There is so much heat, passion, confusion, pain and soul-searching in it - it feels so close, yet so far, from the world we live in. For me at least it is humbling and amazing that people like Tolstoy laboured on and left behind such vivid traces of their souls for us to discover and enrich ourselves with.
Edit: I suppose this is a long-winded way of saying that the value of literature is that it helps you develop reverence and respect for the enormous reality and weight of history. Arrogance and shocking stupidity are the natural consequences of not realising your tiny place in history. The best literature breeds deep humility.
Of course that might lead you ask "then why are you planning to read it"? To which I can only say "because it sounds interesting and exactly because I haven't read much Russian literature and I want to broaden my horizons a bit". But I'm not reading it because I want to be able to impress some hipster pseudo-intellectuals, or because it's something you're "supposed" to read. I just want to see what it's all about. Same with Crime and Punishment, which I started recently (but got distracted from and set aside temporarily).
Mostly I would read Tolstoy for the same reason I would read Nietzsche - to break through our regrettable tendency to take the past and its people for granted.
I agree with that, but I find that fiction from (and set in) Victorian era England has been my primary outlet for thinking about and appreciating the past in that regard. That's certainly not to discredit the Russian stuff you speak of, just saying that reading Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or whatever, isn't the only way to tap into that historical perspective.
It's one thing to read about the ideas Nietzsche developed on a Wikipedia article, it's wholly another to read him in his own words and suddenly find yourself thrust into contact with a whole mind, a living, breathing bundle of thoughts and anxieties and dream, a human being palpably aching to find meaning, caught in the middle of one of the greatest social upheavals of human history.
Indeed. I greatly enjoyed reading Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra and have quite a few of his other works on my list.
I wasn't trying to claim that Tolstoy et al are better and more important than anyone else, just trying to counter the suggestion that the only reason to read them is to try and impress people. Faux-reading to try and cultivate a sophisticated appearance is, I think we can agree, just stupid.
Personally if I had a choice between Tolstoy and Saramago or Le Guin, I think I would pick one of the latter. And yes, Nietzsche is the 19th century bomb.com
NB: I read a lot of non-fiction too. An educated person has to have his or her fingers in a lot of intellectual pies I think.
Indeed. I have this dream of learning Latin and most of the associated Romance languages one day, but I haven't gotten very far yet. I was making some headway with Spanish, and then my one Spanish speaking friend kinda disappeared due to marriage, so I haven't been as motivated without anyone to practice with.
And my Portugese speaking friend got deported back to Brazil. :-(
Still, one day...
Might be helpful?
My observations are as anecdotal as anyone else's, but my experience is that there is a moderate negative correlation between someone's raw analytical ability and the capacity to appreciate the kind of ambiguity that good literature carries. Of course there are those rare gems who can juggle both pretty well- Poincare or Mandelbrot for examples.
And most of my personal experiences of very high raw analytical ability comes from academia, people who made through ICPC world finals & are doing their PhDs at top schools, and not startup world- where smart people are of a somewhat different mold.
Now there is nothing negative with not appreciating a broad set of literature, or having a more deterministic/ utilitarian view of life. They are to some extent different personalities and different mindsets.
I appreciate Taleb's world view to a decent extent [1], but I used to actively keep it in my head/ life when I was in pure research/ grad-school mode. Now as I am building shit/ taking big risks, my mindset is much more generic HN'ish view. For instance, earlier I used to read substantially more poetry, literature [2] and biological papers. Now I primarily focus on my core area - stats/ML/AI etc. and general HN stuff.
[1] To the extent of corresponding with him at length
[2] If there is a single book I would suggest to you or anyone else, it would be Kolyma Tales. It is probably the most despairing/ darkest thing I have ever read and made me appreciate human nature a lot more.
could it be that those "rare gems" that you mention--who are both analytical and "creative"--are greater in number than you think--maybe even the majority? for example, the pure-analytical types and the pure-creative types could be a very vocal minority. They stand to gain the most by being divisive.
i also read less for pleasure nowadays as i run my startup. funny that you should mention russian literature. that is my favorite. i will read kolyma tales next based on your recommendation. the last russian work i read was the master and margarita, which was unbelievable. i have my own theories about the russians' views on human nature, but that is not for this thread!
I definitely read more than just sci-fi, but - while I am a fan of Taleb's work - I don't give two shits about his "literary culture". I enjoy "classics" from the Greeks (Plato, Aristotle, etc.); Enlightenment era philosophers, to more contemporary philosophers; history; biographies; science & nature; economics; etc. But I don't see how that makes me any more (or less) cultured than anybody else. There's far too much material out there for anybody to read it all, and we all have to pick our battles.
I guess I'd say my position is that I enjoy and read all kind of literature, but I dislike people who draw boxes around people, and put labels on them, based on what they read. "High brow" and "low brow" and "literary culture" are terms I find to be devoid of almost all value.
Of course Taleb would probably say that I just proved his point...
Every now and then someone nails something. And every now and then someone building a device is inspired by something they read or saw; the form of the once-ubiquitous flip cellphone came from Star Trek's tricorders.
Taleb's theoretical dinner might be woven through with the Internet: did he and his friends decide to have this dinner by making appointments on the phone? Or did they use email? Or Facebook, or even just kinda hooked up via Twitter when one of them tweeted "hey who wants to go to The Grinning Wok with me tonight #omnomnomsogood".
And maybe that choice of restaurant came in part from reviews online? The Internet is no longer cool, this is true. This is because we're used to it. Hell, the tablet I'm typing this on was cool for like a month after I got it; now it's normal. Maybe a little annoying because the onscreen keyboard sucks and the autocorrect is aggressive and occasionally wrong.
The real parts of the future go from "cool" to "normal" very quickly. Impractical stuff stays "cool" in imagination forever.
-- You Save: $13.01 (43%)
I thought the Amazon-affiliate link was a bit Ironic.
-- but it will be 43% off ! [1]
_________
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Edit: link added for future reference: http://xkcd.com/1053/
Basically technical progress moves quite fast in the medium term but slower than you'd expect in the short term, except with surprises. (Nobody saw tablets coming. A move away from the web, to native apps? In this day and age?)
Lost me there. Doesn't even make sense. At a time when people were still hungrily eating meat fresh from the coals, silverware was the least of their worries.
http://www.techi.com/2011/01/ray-kurzweils-tech-predictions-...
Anyway, I've read two of Taleb's books (Fooled by Randomness and Black Swan). Taleb seems to be filled with nostalgia at times. He dreams of a simple, slow life. He regards the news and up-to-dateness of modern mediums mostly as 'noise', and even takes a stab at people that read the newspaper in transit every day.
What is also interesting is that he rails against people that try to predict the future because of black swans, the unknown unknowns. Still, this is the second article by him about the future that I read. And it's just as boring as the last one.
Technophiles have the tendency to exaggerate what change the future will bring, but conservatives like him fill the predictions with good-old-timesness. It's wishful thinking just as much.
(e.g. saying in the 80s that a chess AI beating the top ranked human by 1998 or that the human genome would be sequenced by the year 2000).
Shoes look no different than they did 3500 years ago because they serve a purpose.
Once a technology serves a purpose, there is no need to improve that purpose, unless said technology is to be used in another setting which requires change or improvement... Hence sandals, flip-flops, sneakers, skateboarding shoes, high heels, rollerblades, iceskates, snowshoes. I think author touched on this, kind of... You get my point...
Chairs are the same as they were because panda's aren't sitting in chairs. People are sitting in chairs, and people haven't physically changed since the inception of chairs. So a device that humans use for sitting is not likely to change... But wait, what about lounging chairs, or baby chairs, or high chairs, or stools? I'm sure if a fish needed a chair, it would look like a bed...
Technology is the instantiation of idea's into physicality. This is done for any number of reasons, most of which to solve some type of rudimentary problem. Some become extrusions of ourselves. Human beings are limited in MANY ways, but we are able to identify the limitations and problem solve through technological means.
For example, an iPhone is an extreme technological extrusion, not just a device. Think about a text message. Bear with me here...
A thought you have makes it's way from being a mere THOUGHT, to then being processed by LANGUAGE, which is processed to WRITTEN LANGUAGE, which is expressed through typing on a KEYBOARD, on a TOUCH SCREEN DISPLAY, on a WIRELESS MOBILE DEVICE, and then SENT THROUGH THE AIR to someone else's WIRELESS MOBILE DEVICE, to be READ, PROCESSED, and your thought implanted in that persons mind.
No words were used here. Just transference of thoughts through technological means.
Look at a car... Metal exoskeleton with wheels that can change it's rate of speed at will. Another technological extrusion of yourself. Without you driving, the car doesn't do shit.
Try explaining that to the shoe person 3500 years ago, or your fork friend, or someone even a mere 150 years ago... "Yeah man, instead of walking in 3500 years you'll get into a 2500lb metal box with rubber wrapped wheels filled with air that burns a a flammable liquid in another metal box of moving parts and listens to commands your right foot gives it!"
The internet has allowed people to have access to a network of information no other period in known history has ever had. The library of Alexandria MAY have contained similar amounts of knowledge, but it was in a centralized location that required your physical presence. The internet itself isn't changing the technological landscape, but the access to information the internet provides is. The rate at which thoughts/ideas are physically instantiated is increasing rapidly, as more tools are created by more people having more access to other tools, etc...
In short, what I gathered from this piece is that people should give up looking forward, and be happy right where they are, because our prediction skills suck and change is scary and doesn't always have the best outcome...
I'm sure glad pre-bigbang conditions didn't feel the same way. Or the primordial soup. Or Einstein. Or Edwin Hubble. Or Carl Sagan. Or Nikola Tesla. Or anyone who's ever had an idea and executed it for that matter.
===============================
TL;DR Technologies are idea's that solve problems. The future is unpredictable. Problems of an unpredictable future are also unpredictable. Hence, why people are shit predictors of the future technological climate. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
Yes, the pleasures of life (wine, music, books, sex, spiritual experience) don't change all that much and therefore we use a lot of old technologies in daily life, so it can appear like there's nothing new... but there will be more people able to afford them, and they will be much less impeded by the stupid shit that clogged up peoples' lives in pre-technological times. Just to continue Taleb's example: in the 21st century, a lot of people get to drink wine of (by historical standards) exceedingly high quality. Three millennia ago, wine existed but the vast majority of people never got to drink any.
Many of the modern applications that have managed to survive today came to disrupt the deleterious effect of the philistinism of modernity, particularly the 20th century: the large multinational bureaucratic corporation with “empty suits” at the top; the isolated family (nuclear) in a one-way relationship with the television set, even more isolated thanks to car-designed suburban society [...]
I'm going to stop there with the quote. His point is valid, but I think there's something missed when people rip on suburbia. Yes, it's outmoded and wasteful and somewhat ugly, but the Levittowns were a lot better than the "company towns" of early-industrial hell, and those were a lot better than being a serf on a medieval enclosure, in a time when it wasn't uncommon for a peasant to have his head cut off by a knight (knights were more like warlords than the noble paladins of romance). People tend to compare the experiences of average people now against those of an elite in the past and conclude that things were better, but that's not fair. The 1800-era analogue of a bored suburbanite of 50th-percentile social status (only one car!) was not an English baron, but someone who started work at seven in the coal mines.
People rip on suburbia now because it's outmoded, but it wasn't always this way. Urban freeways are called "parkways" because the vision of Robert Moses (in hindsight we say, "That fucker!", but he was very respected in his time) was for them to be park-like roads for an automotive elite. In the 1920s, suburbia was very much in. The suburban lifestyle, with lots of driving, was designed for the rich and handed down, over a couple of decades, to the working classes in a watered-down form. The result now, almost a century later, is that "suburbia" is no longer cool because the low-quality suburbs of the poor have killed the image of the concept.
Oddly enough, has anyone ever noticed how rich people suburbs aren't called that? The Hamptons isn't "suburbia". The Woodbury towns out there are "charming little towns" rather than suburbs, because the rich people who live there have enough time to make zoning rules that keep a quaint little street or two alive. These people aren't morally superior for having houses in high-price towns that still have walkable main streets as opposed to "suburbs". They're just richer.
One thing I find interesting is that Ted Kaczynski (Unabomber) wrote an essay about technology and alienation, while most of his complaints were of the industrial-era society, not the technological society we evolved into. He was miserable because, in spite of his extreme intelligence and adept writing, he had no real influence in a world run by corrupt corporate institutions. So he went out and killed people in order to effectively force the New York Times to publish his rant. If he had waited 15 years and not killed people, he would have had the public access and attention he craved. He might have trolled a bit, but no one would have died. Technology was just about to solve many of the problems that had him so upset-- that he blamed on industrial society.
My view of technology and progress is that it's nearly monotonic in "goodness", but that the old humanity we're now trying to distance ourselves from is quite tenacious and willing to use technology toward pre-technological purposes, and so the long-term convergence toward democracy that we'd like to see doesn't come nearly as fast as we'd like. For example, one might like to believe that, in an electronic world, old-style industrial pressures like taking orders from managers, showing up in an uninspiring white-box office during certain hours, and writing TPS reports would vanish... but human nature is a certain way and power likes to maintain position, so the transition is actually taking decades rather than the hours that it "should". The result of this is that the technological push toward a better world appears to collapse into an unsatisfying half measure and people end up having to use technology in uninspiring ways (e.g. getting to write code, but still having to take orders from non-technical executives or "product managers"). That's not technology's fault. That's an artifact of humans being slow to improve themselves.
I'm not so sure. Those pleasures all continue to exist but except for wine, the way we enjoy or practice most of these would be alien to people of 100 years ago. It's not the concepts that change but their expression.
Throw two 20-somethings from 1912 into a common modern scenario of doing shots before you go out, hitting a nightclub full of techno music, laser lights and people 'grinding', then coming home and indulging in some pre-maritial anal sex (just to be safe) and you might as well have thrown them on a different planet.
Life in 100 years will seem similarly bizarre and intense to us now. I think the author of the article has a certain notion of what 'cool' is but I think radical changes in expression and society are also 'cool' - they're just not jetpacks or spacesuits.
I think it's easy to overestimate the difference between people in the past and ourselves. The lack of shame with which people pursue their pleasures now may be different, but it's silly to think people 100 years ago didn't enjoy getting smashed and having sex.
Who knows in 50 to 100 years time how people will generalise our current culture and compare it to however people are then.
One main difference that stands out for me is that the type of behaviour patterns described by the OP above (booze, grind, etc.) would be classed as "typical" from today's point of view, the "flapper" behaviour pattern above wouldn't have been "typical" in that usual sense of the word in those times (would it probably be tame from today's stand point?). Anecdotally, it would have been, at best fringe, and dare I say, restricted to (perhaps) the wealthy.
Someone also mentioned roman orgies. That would have been restricted to the wealthy, upper class too and would not have been classed as "typical"?
Therefore, the OP's point, namely, " the way we enjoy or practice most of these would be alien to people of 100 years ago. It's not the concepts that change but their expression." is relevant IMO.
And usually that is where clash of the generations originate from?
Also, I don't think there's a time in history when alcohol/drug use and premarital anal sex weren't common. All of that is ancient. People tend to think of sexual norms in the 1837-1967 era (and even then, only middle-class and higher, and more in polite myth than actuality) as "traditional" but that's not how things "always" were.
This is not how modern twenty-somethings actually behave, except for blatantly stereotypical hipsters.
I think this is pretty naive or at the least, a simplistic way of viewing technology. In the early 20th century, people in the US were using rational ideas to promote terribly racist and oppressive social practices. Suburbs and urban policy may have been an improvement for some, but they also greatly contributed to the death of urban cores, which lead to decades of poverty for the people who couldn't get out of those areas. The two world wars demonstrated how technology can be used for incredible death and destruction. Technology now is enabling global competition that puts a great deal of strain on the blue collar middle class in developed nations who used to have manufacturing jobs, meanwhile other countries get rich using their low wages and lack of labor and workplace safety standards to be more competitive.
Don't get me wrong, I am not a luddite. I think it's fine to say that over the longer term, technology improves things. It's possible the people who lost their manufacturing jobs can eventually get higher-skilled jobs that allow them (and our society) to produce more advanced goods, and the people overseas will eventually be able to demand higher standards. People are noticing that living in an urban area has a lot of advantages over suburbs, and cities are springing back to life. But to gloss over the bad periods in between by saying that technology is monotically good is simply not an accurate viewpoint.
[0] One can make an argument about "economic bads", because economic growth isn't necessarily an indicator of humanitarian progress. However, I've seen no data to indicate that the proportion of economic bads has increased, so it wouldn't have a differential effect that would nullify observed growth.
Locally speaking, there are horrible uses of technology that occur all the time, but people have been doing awful things to each other since there were humans, and I think it's hard to blame that on technology itself. So what I'm really saying is more restricted: that the march of technical progress has been, for the world, positive more than negative over almost any measurable timescale.
If we could quantify an individual's suffering, then we could look at two metrics: the sum of all suffering on the planet, and the average individual suffering on the planet. While I would probably agree that for 1st-world countries these numbers have gone down, I'm just not sure if the same can be said for the global population. It's also unclear whether technology was just ineffective here or actually contributed to the problem.
Even as far as our current dreams of technotopia are concerned, it's important not to forget just how dependent they are on people working and living in what many of us consider abhorrent conditions.
If our use of technology made it so that every human on the planet had to do less work overall then I might be convinced that it was "good" as opposed to "hard to say", but it seems like we want ourselves to do as much if not more work with each new advance, as if work and production of stuff is the ultimate measure of our lives.
There was no extreme poverty during the second half of the industrial revolution?
The Irish Great Famine never happened?
In the late 1800's, 16million people /didn't/ immigrate to America, because the jobs they had were better and paid more than the shit factory jobs we had?
You have got to be kidding. What we call "extreme poverty" today would have seemed like luxury to almost every human being who has ever lived. The difference today is not that there are a billion people who live in extreme poverty; it's that there are a billion who are living at a first world standard of living. That is a far higher fraction of humanity than ever before; I would be surprised if even a small fraction of a percent of all of humanity in 1800 lived at what would then have been considered a "first world" standard of living. (Not to mention that what qualifies as a first world standard of living today has, in many respects, never existed before--what qualified as "first world" in 1800 would, in many respects, be considered "extreme poverty" today.)
How do you think people lived in sub-Saharan Africa in 1800? Living at bare subsistence level is exactly how almost all humans who have ever lived, lived.
Wikipedia says, "In 1820, the average European worker earned about three times what the average African did. Now, the average European earns twenty times what the average African does."
That's not because Africa has gotten poorer. It's because Europe (and America) have gotten enormously richer through huge increases in productivity. As in, now 1/7 of humanity gets to live in "first world" conditions, in--wait for it--Europe and America.
Do you have any references for that claim?
My understanding is that whereas (sub-Saharan) African people by and large used to be farmers and were generally able to grow enough food, drink enough water, build adequate shelter, and make enough clothes, that since colonization (which got going in earnest in 1880) the continent was basically shoehorned into modern industrial society and that now many Africans are dependent on whatever foreign aid they can get and are no longer self-sufficient.
What I'm saying is that if you went to Africa in 1800 I don't believe you would see today's stereotypical child in rags with ribs sticking out of his chest and a swollen belly, but again, if you have a reference that says colonization (or its later rejection) did nothing to change poverty in Africa it would be interesting to read it.
Wikipedia summarizes the conventional view. Africa's GDP increased 2x since the mid 1800's, Europe's increased by 20x.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(P...
See this book to see roughly how these estimates are computed: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/9264022619/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
What I'm saying is that if you went to Africa in 1800 I don't believe you would see today's stereotypical child in rags with ribs sticking out of his chest and a swollen belly...
And if you go to Africa in 2012 you probably won't see this, although it was quite common worldwide in the 1800s. If you want to see this, you basically need to go to a war zone, the bush, or maybe Zimbabwe.
The lack of self-sufficiency in Africa, where it exists, is not a product of colonialism; it's a product of post-colonialism. It's not politically correct to say so these days, but you can see from the Wikipedia page that yummyfajitas referenced that Africa's GDP was basically constant until 1820, then grew at an increasing rate up until 1973, and is now tapering again. I.e., it grew fastest under colonialism. What stopped the growth was that when colonialism was stopped, nothing workable was put in its place; instead Africa was handed over to corrupt dictators who had no ability to or interest in governing properly.
There's another factor too: if you just have a plot of land that is able to provide food, water, clothing, and shelter for yourself without any actual registered trade you actually contribute nothing to the GDP. My understanding is that this self-sufficiency was basically destroyed by colonists.
If GDP has grown, which means the sub-continent is largely more productive now in capitalist terms, and therefore self-sufficiency levels have not changed but rather increased, why is it so dependent on foreign aid when it wasn't - as far as I am aware - in 1800?
Also, while post-colonialism obviously left the place in ruins, I think it's quite clear that you can't have post-colonialism without colonialism.
I guess at the end of the day I don't consider poverty to be measured in dollars and cents but in actual day-to-day quality of life, and I have a hard time believing that for the percentage of the population living in "extreme poverty" (less than $1.25 per day - note that dollars and cents matter more when you don't have other ways to provide for yourself), things were as bad when they had their own land and were self-sufficient. Unless you have something that clearly says, "No, life there has always been hell." It's not that I'm unwilling to believe something different, it's just that I want to hear it from someone who really knows about the history of how people lived at the time.
You might be surprised to discover that people don't actually like "self sufficiency" very much. In fact, they attempt to escape it as fast as they can, typically by migrating from rural areas to urban slums. Strangely, Africans enjoy capitalist luxuries like mobile phones and antibiotics just as much as westerners do.
Africa is "dependent" on foreign aid simply because they nowadays their population desires colonial luxuries like education and running water, whereas before colonialism they didn't know such things existed.
(Note: I was not one of the downvoters; I don't have enough karma to downvote, but even if I did, I would not have downvoted your post. I didn't see yummyfajitas' posts as being condescending, but "condescending" is subjective, so I would have left it to yummyfajitas to respond if he felt so inclined.)
"what you call ... the rest of the world calls"; "You might be surprised to discover"; "people don't actually"; "In fact"; "typically"; "Strangely"; I think you get the idea. All of this made me feel terrible.
At the end of the day, I basically am not convinced that life is as good or better than subsistence farming for the people in question. I was under the strong impression it was worse now because they don't have enough food and so it's below subsistence level (especially without foreign aid), but like you said elsewhere, I guess we can't know for sure. Anyway, thanks for your time pdonis, it was kind of you to respond here.
I think there's a bit more to it than that. If African countries were governed competently, they would need much less foreign aid in order to have education and running water and mobile phones and antibiotics and so on. The reason they aren't governed competently is, as I said before, that the people who got rid of colonialism didn't put anything else working in its place.
Matters for what? For looking at absolute wealth, it doesn't matter at all. Africa's GDP now is higher by a factor of almost 4, according to that Wikipedia page, than it was in 1820. The fact that Europe's is higher by a much larger factor doesn't change that.
For analyzing root causes, yes, the disparity matters a lot: it tells you that the "first world" has done a much better job of making people richer. Which might lead one to think about what that huge increase in GDP is built on. Perhaps a desire to have something more than bare subsistence, combined with an understanding of the kind of economic, social, and cultural environment that's needed to make that happen?
There's another factor too: if you just have a plot of land that is able to provide food, water, clothing, and shelter for yourself without any actual registered trade you actually contribute nothing to the GDP.
And you are also at bare subsistence level. Yes, you are providing food, water, clothing, and shelter for yourself; but you are providing nothing else. If you're satisfied with having nothing but the bare amount of food, water, clothing, and shelter necessary to sustain your life, then I guess you'd be OK with that. But if that were the case, how would you be able to post here?
My understanding is that this self-sufficiency was basically destroyed by colonists.
No, it was changed by colonialism from bare self-sufficiency to the ability to export large quantities of food and raw materials. When colonialism ended, all the infrastructure needed to continue that level of productivity was still there. The post-colonial governments squandered it.
I have a hard time believing that for the percentage of the population living in "extreme poverty" (less than $1.25 per day - note that dollars and cents matter more when you don't have other ways to provide for yourself), things were as bad when they had their own land and were self-sufficient.
You and I can't make this judgment. Only the people themselves can. As yummyfajitas points out, many of them appear to be opting for modern conveniences over bare self-sufficiency. That indicates to me that if they were dropped into the same circumstances as their ancestors in 1820, they would not be pleased.
As, for example, in England or Europe in the early 1800's. (I believe that by the early 1800's this was already somewhat less common in the USA, but that is largely due to the fact that the population of the early USA was almost entirely self-selected immigrants who came there determined to be self-sufficient, and because the USA was so sparsely settled.)
The right way to put that is "Yet today only a billion people live in extreme poverty." What we call "extreme poverty" today was the norm throughout the world until the 20th century.
Bear-baiting is not coming back. If you don't know what it is, learning about it might upset you, which is my point.
Polio is confined to portions of the world instead of stalking the globe. Same with malaria. Smallpox is gone entirely.
Even more dramatic, there are places on the Earth now where people think it is a terrible, horrible tragedy if even a single child under three dies. Those people think it equally tragic if even a single mother dies in childbirth. Children in those regions are named before they're even born because it is expected as a matter of course that they will get to use those names!
It has been said that the past is a foreign country. Well, it is certainly inhabited by foreigners, people whose mindset was shaped by circumstances we shy from remembering. The mother of three children who gave birth eight times. The father of four children, the last of whom cost him his wife. Our minds are largely free of such horrors, and not inured to that kind of suffering. That is the progress of technology. That is what is improving the human race.
It is a long, long ladder, and sometimes we slip, but we've never actually fallen. That is our progress.
I think these examples would once have been widely regarded as weird, surprising, and non-superficial.
For example, wearing a spacesuit in one's living room (unless the living room were in space) would be weird. That shit can't be comfortable.
America elected a black president in 2008
I don't find this to be "weird". Don't get me wrong: I'm very glad that it happened, and it came about decades before I believed it would.
What's "weird" to me is that, for four hundred years in this society, and millennia in many others, people were mistreated because of something as ridiculous and meaningless as skin color. It's almost astonishing to me that it took the world so long to collectively learn that this racist bullshit that dominated nearly every national culture for centuries was, in addition to being immoral, logically indefensible to the point of being insanity. Until World War 2 established racism to be a Very Bad Thing That Kills Millions, there were highly respected intellectuals in the US and UK who firmly believed white, Nordic people to be inherently superior.
Racism I would lump in with changing fashions, in that racial preferences evolve over time. Being Irish is now a prestigious heritage on the U.S. East Coast, and northeastern politicians have been known to "convert" to Irish Catholic culture. This was not the case for Irish people 175 years ago: we were reviled and seen as subhuman.
What I hope to see in the future is a world that is largely free of racism, and I don't find that weird. It seems to me that, if the world becomes more prosperous, the mindless and competitive impulses that allow racism to exist will dissipate. Nationalistic racism (which was far from limited to Germany, Italy, and Japan; just read "White Man's Burden") grew up in a time when the world was believed to be fundamentally zero-sum, and people had to invent pseudoscience to justify colonial robbery, and to galvanize their troops with an inflated sense of both their mission and their prospects.
A black president is not weird. Obama is also a great president, and would be an extremely strong contender for the job with any skin color. What's weird is the idea that a president being black even could be considered "weird", although you'd be absolutely right to point out that it has been considered such by most of America. I even remember hearing intelligent and not especially racist people saying ca. 2007 that this country "wasn't ready for a black president". Well, it was and is.
The internet gives ubiquitous access to unprecedented amounts of information.
I don't find that to be "weird", under the restricted definition of the word that I've been using, so much as a case of extreme prosperity. You're right that it's "surprising and non-superficial". If you think of technology in linear terms, you will always be shocked by what actually comes forth.
The huge decades-long rise in crime in the US peaked around 1992 or so, and has been mysteriously plummeting ever since.
I think that I could give a plausible explanation for that, although it would make this reply a lot longer. Actually, I would argue that there are several explanations. It's just hard to know which is the right one, hence the "mysterious" nature of it. It is a "small data" problem that you get any time you have a time series (because so many different kinds of events occur in time and are, sometimes accidentally, intercorrelated through time). When you're a historian, there are too many explanations that are plausible to tease out "the one".
As for the general weirdness, technological progress will accelerate, and post-scarcity society will be surprising, welcome, and (as you correctly pointed out) non-superficial. One might call that "weird". It just wouldn't match the much more limited definition of "weird" that I had in mind.
I believe that this, even if technically correct, is a huge understatement. The Internet short-circuited the feedback loop humanity as a whole had in creating and processing knowledge. Both the "sharing speed" and number of people involved in any topic had risen by several orders of magnitude. For the first time in history, humanity can solve problems as a whole, like a one big brain. I expect many more amazing things to come out of this just because the speed of information transfer risen so dramatically.
>> The huge decades-long rise in crime in the US peaked around 1992 or so, and has been mysteriously plummeting ever since.
> I think that I could give a plausible explanation for that, although it would make this reply a lot longer. Actually, I would argue that there are several explanations.
Just to underline that this is a really interesting topic: Freakonomics[0] guys believe that one of the main causes is the legalization of abortion in the United States[1]. They made some convincing arguments for that, and it's one of the most reasonable (if controversial) theory I have heard so far.
[0] - http://www.freakonomics.com/books/
[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_ef...
You're saying that the future will be cool, but your disagreement with him is more in the definition of the word cool than with his point. When he says cool, he means what you're calling weird. This is all semantics, more or less. (Right?)
Another point you make is that Taleb misses the important fact that in the future (hopefully) a far greater number of people will get to enjoy these pleasures. I think this is important, and the biggest weakness with the article. Taleb seems to argue from the perspective that either a) there's no substantive cultural or societal difference between the West and East or b), the West will continue to be dominant. But in reality, the future may look radically different from today, not because of technology, but because a different (and much larger, of course) group of people will be using and furthering the technology.
I addressed your 3rd point in another comment.
This, I think, is key. I mean, notice all the old guys whining about how the '60s and '70s were so much better... notice how it's mostly white men saying that? that's 'cause, well, yeah, it was better for white men back then. I am not trying to say that 'white privilege' doesn't exist or anything, but it's no longer absolute. I've probably worked for as many asians as white folks, and I've even worked for a few women.
Hell, half the studies on stagnating wages since the '70s talk about 'wages for working men[1]' and then go on to complain that unemployment levels for men are also way higher; and they are right, but they are missing the point, that men now have to compete with people we didn't have to compete with before. So yeah, we've got to try a little harder than we did then.
I mean, the point is that things have gotten dramatically better for people that are not white and male; I'd say things have probably gotten better overall (though, that's pretty subjective; I might feel different if I was one of those now unemployable white men.)
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/22/the-uncomfortab...
Nitpicking, I know, but it's really quite the opposite. Three millenia ago, wine existed, but it wasn't always very good wine. However, if you lived in a region where you could grow wine-grapes (or wine-grade rice, plums, whatever your culture used for alcohol), you almost definitely did.