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> humans are the best off we have ever been This is too broad to be true. It's easily disproven with a single counterexample. I could guess what you actually

> humans are the best off we have ever been This is too broad to be true. It's easily disproven with a single counterexample. I could guess what you actually meant, but the tiny details in sentences like these change so much meaning I better let you clarify if this was an important point you're making. Especially since you seem to be aiming to dismiss concerns about people who are not safe, I think it's important you be more specific.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
Ok here are some of the areas where we are better off than ever looking at humanity as a whole: * Infant mortality * Life expectancy * Maternal mortality * Global poverty * Opportunities for women * Global literacy * Ability to control pain * Knowledge Here is a more concrete example. Imagine you are going to be born as a baby girl in a random family on earth. In what other time would you have a better chance of having a decent life?
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  Thank you for clarifying, this is much easier to have a discussion about. I have two open questions, I won't try to make a counterclaim (that 2019 is worse), but I can point out where your position feels hollow to me and needs to be shored up. 1) If I accept what you're saying that for the average person life is better in 2019 than in 1950, that doesn't generalize to all humans. My assessment is that life has been pretty good for the average human regardless of the time period, and good governance is more about how bad we let it get for the marginalized few than how good it is in the average case. 2) You listed things that are better for the average human... Are you claiming that there is not an equal (or larger) set of things that's worse? For example: depression, loneliness, anxiety. If your children are all living but you rarely speak to them and are cripplingly lonely, is that a better outcome than having 7 children, four of whom died, and you live in an intact healthy family unit? (Also, as a side note knowledge is not monotonically increasing with "progress". The Catholic Church tried and partly succeeded at destroying all native language books in Central America, and replaced them with books that seemingly include much less knowledge. Social knowledge loss is one of my biggest concerns with modernity: More knowledge accessible to any individual, less knowledge stored in the overall system. Less culturally usable knowledge for most individuals. Another example: we're probably only just getting back to the same level of total beer making knowledge that was embodied in the system before the mass market beer system.)
  - sincerely 8y ago
    > If your children are all living but you rarely speak to them and are cripplingly lonely, is that a better outcome than having 7 children, four of whom died, and you live in an intact healthy family unit? Yes, unless you have an extremely convincing argument that being lonely is worse than being dead.
    - erikpukinskis 8y ago
      Ok, I'll try: being lonely hurts and being dead doesn't. What's your argument that it's better?
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
    >My assessment is that life has been pretty good for the average human regardless of the time period. Here is where we fundamentally disagree. My assessment looking at history is that life for the average human, especially, the average female human, was horrible. I would guess our current 10th percentile is better off than the 50% percentile in the past. The average human was a farmer. They had to do hours of back-breaking labor. They were many times just a bad harvest away from starving. They were routinely preyed on by the more powerful. A significant portion had personally lost a child/spouse/parent due to childbirth. They were illiterate. Child marriages and involuntary marriages were the general rule. The distinction between you and elite was directly coded into law.
    - ionised 8y ago
      A lot of what you are talking about here is still the case in much of the world. In other parts of the world where it is no longer true, it will absolutely make a comeback unless we can halt and reverse the damage being done by the levels of inequality we have.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago

Ok here are some of the areas where we are better off than ever looking at humanity as a whole: * Infant mortality * Life expectancy * Maternal mortality * Global poverty * Opportunities for women * Global literacy * Ability to control pain * Knowledge Here is a more concrete example. Imagine you are going to be born as a baby girl in a random family on earth. In what other time would you have a better chance of having a decent life?

erikpukinskis 8y ago
Thank you for clarifying, this is much easier to have a discussion about. I have two open questions, I won't try to make a counterclaim (that 2019 is worse), but I can point out where your position feels hollow to me and needs to be shored up. 1) If I accept what you're saying that for the average person life is better in 2019 than in 1950, that doesn't generalize to all humans. My assessment is that life has been pretty good for the average human regardless of the time period, and good governance is more about how bad we let it get for the marginalized few than how good it is in the average case. 2) You listed things that are better for the average human... Are you claiming that there is not an equal (or larger) set of things that's worse? For example: depression, loneliness, anxiety. If your children are all living but you rarely speak to them and are cripplingly lonely, is that a better outcome than having 7 children, four of whom died, and you live in an intact healthy family unit? (Also, as a side note knowledge is not monotonically increasing with "progress". The Catholic Church tried and partly succeeded at destroying all native language books in Central America, and replaced them with books that seemingly include much less knowledge. Social knowledge loss is one of my biggest concerns with modernity: More knowledge accessible to any individual, less knowledge stored in the overall system. Less culturally usable knowledge for most individuals. Another example: we're probably only just getting back to the same level of total beer making knowledge that was embodied in the system before the mass market beer system.)
- sincerely 8y ago
  > If your children are all living but you rarely speak to them and are cripplingly lonely, is that a better outcome than having 7 children, four of whom died, and you live in an intact healthy family unit? Yes, unless you have an extremely convincing argument that being lonely is worse than being dead.
  - erikpukinskis 8y ago
    Ok, I'll try: being lonely hurts and being dead doesn't. What's your argument that it's better?
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
  >My assessment is that life has been pretty good for the average human regardless of the time period. Here is where we fundamentally disagree. My assessment looking at history is that life for the average human, especially, the average female human, was horrible. I would guess our current 10th percentile is better off than the 50% percentile in the past. The average human was a farmer. They had to do hours of back-breaking labor. They were many times just a bad harvest away from starving. They were routinely preyed on by the more powerful. A significant portion had personally lost a child/spouse/parent due to childbirth. They were illiterate. Child marriages and involuntary marriages were the general rule. The distinction between you and elite was directly coded into law.
  - ionised 8y ago
    A lot of what you are talking about here is still the case in much of the world. In other parts of the world where it is no longer true, it will absolutely make a comeback unless we can halt and reverse the damage being done by the levels of inequality we have.