22 ms·

Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?

158 points by Thevet 6y ago

adamnemecek 6y ago
I have a hunch every society in the past thought that.
- brianberns 6y ago
  And it was probably true for most of them. The stakes for humanity keep rising, so "now" is usually the most important time in history.
  - adamnemecek 6y ago
    I mean stakes have been pretty high when Mongolians were invading Europe and China, when Hitler was invading everywhere, etc etc.
    - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
      Being knocked down didn't sting as much when nobody had electricity, indoor plumbing, or technological aids. Modern society has much more to lose from a dire economic collapse.
    - dbtc 6y ago
      Or when the Spanish vini vidi vicied the Americas. But you could argue too that post nuclear has been continually the highest stakes by far.
  - thinkingemote 6y ago
    If the stakes keep on rising, how high would they be 50 years from now? And in 200? 2000? How high were the stakes 300 years ago? Should we think people living in 1720 didn't have it that bad compared to now? Will people in the future look at now and think the same?
- edanm 6y ago
  That's actually probably not true. I'm not a historian, but one interesting thing I've learned from reading lots of history is the different attitudes different societies had about the past/future. As far as I know, it's only really since the enlightenment/industrial revolution, that people feel like the future is going to be better. The idea that the past was the golden age, where Humans were much more advanced, knew more, Had better technology, etc, seems to be the common position in history. Im not sure about the feeling that society was"hungry" ala the article, but I suspect that feeling is connected.
chubot 6y ago
Subjectively it feels sorta true for a 40 year old, but I bet it pales in comparison to WW2. Large portions of many nations perished, and their kin had to rebuild society. Nuclear weapons were deployed for the first time. The fact that we even recovered from it is amazing (although some didn't, certainly). I live in the US because my grandparents' generation lost the war. And the US has a generation named after the effects of the war (baby boomers). I remember reading the phrase "post war" dozens or hundreds of times as a child, but it took awhile for the reality of it to sink in.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  Agreed. Maybe biggest since WWII, certainly not biggest ever. Climate change is terrible but because it's smooth (even if superlinear) it's hard to ascribe hinginess to a specific moment. C.f. altitude vs geographic prominence. Also, I think the fear of A.I. has distorted the fact the outward rate of change has declined massively from say the "special century" of 1870-1970, even if it has picked back up a bit in recent years.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  Agreed. Every great power today was profoundly molded by it. America & Soviet Union became the sole superpowers. It basically decided the communist government of China. It eventually set free the other next great powers, such as India and Nigeria, from colonial rule. The impact on technology was equally profound. The computer, radar, the jet, the turbo pumped liquid rocket, the drone, the atomic bomb... I mean, an entirely new source of energy was first harnessed (really the first since the invention of fire) and the first human made object was sent (briefly) into space...
- XorNot 6y ago
  This is all an argument that there were perceptually worse times before, so how could it be bad now? WW2 setup an era defined by one very unusual property: the absolute dominance of the United States and it's economy as the global hegemon. But the US is not adapted to the notion that what it achieved from that era was a set of historically unique advantages that are not a property of "American exceptionalusm" but rather what you get when you're one of the few nations on the planet which didn't have its cities bombed.
dougmwne 6y ago
I think no. We are in a boring, prosperous, stable time with an overactive media. The virus is bad, but it will pass and medical science will save many millions. The plague of Justinian, this is not. Hope I'm not wrong about that, at any rate.
- abraxas 6y ago
  Nobody serious sees the Coronavirus as an existential threat to humanity unless it mutates in a way that really enables it to wipe out most humans. Climate change and the collapse of global ecosystems can absolutely manage that and according to every serious scientist we are pretty much on the worst case scenario path according to any peer reviewed model. The rise in nationalism and authoritarianism around the world is another phenomenon that could unleash forces of global conflict which might lead to cataclysms like a nuclear war or another world war at least. Of course pivotal moments in history can only be declared as such in hindsight. But the forces leading up to them usually gather steam decades before. It looks as we have no shortage of those in our time.
  - cmehdy 6y ago
    There's a possibility that the third sentence you wrote is tightly coupled with the second one. On a personal level I mainly agree with you (we're on track for much worse than the RCP2.5 that everyone is barely even attempting to make goals for), but the complexity of the system seems to bring people to vastly disagree about this somehow. I think what really has become a turning point of our civilization in the last few decades is that specialization and the complexity of the world are absolutely entirely outside of the reach of any single person. The expansion of diversity and knowledge in the last few hundred years is much like the expansion of the universe, in that we can't seem to be able to beat it at all in terms of speed no matter what we do. Any sci-fi device that could perhaps offset that eventually (e.g. a future neuralink-thing being able to "upload" knowledge into you) is not the kind of thing I would bet my savings on in terms of time constants when compared to much more immediate events like climate change wrecking our modern civilization.
    - 6y ago
sushshshsh 6y ago
I was educated at my university that the hinge of history was actually World War I. Hundreds of millions died in horrific new waus, the world centralized around a pole of power, and basically the world has only been getting better since.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  I was left with this impression when I listened to Blueprint for Armageddon, by Dan Carlin. It's excellent. I thought I knew the history of that era but I was very wrong. The early parts are a little boring compared to what it turns into, but I can't see how that could be avoided given the topic. https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-55-blueprint-for-armageddon-series/ https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-55-blu...
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  WW1 is a very good candidate. It created the Soviet Union and Hitler and pretty much all of history since. It's also extra interesting, because if Gavrilo Princip hadn't randomly ran into the Archduke's car, history might have turned out very differently.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    There would have just been another spark for WW1.
    - BurningFrog 6y ago
      Maybe. It is truly unknowable.
      - WalterBright 6y ago
        That's right, but the nascent combatants were spoiling for a fight and just needed an excuse.
- Lammy 6y ago
ralusek 6y ago
I didn't read the article, but the answer is emphatically yes. We are rubbing up against the reality that most humans are less and less valuable to other humans such that they are basically valueless, and their market value diminishes accordingly, and that technological advances and market efficiencies are actually eliminating scarcity within certain arenas. We have to grapple with the fact that most humans offer almost nothing of value, while we actually have the capability, within certain domains, to actually allow them to be entitled to certain things. Pair this with neural interfaces, AI, asteroid and celestial body mining, cheap space travel, and economics are going to start looking weird. I say this as an avid fan of capitalism. It isn't going to fail because of corruption, it's going to fail because markets are optimized and technology is increasingly pushing your average bloke out of the game.
- drivebycomment 6y ago
  > We are rubbing up against the reality that most humans are less and less valuable to other humans such that they are basically valueless, By what standard are we "valuing humans less" ? This seems to fly against the facts. Global death from almost all causes have gone down. e.g. "Battle" related death - which is the most clear evidence of valuing human life less than political gains have dramatically fallen: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/battle-related-deaths-in-state-based-conflicts-since-1946 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/battle-related-deaths-in-... Global life expectancy is higher than ever in the history of human civilization and still rising: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy Global poverty rate has been dropping dramatically and steadily: https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty Global education spending has been going up. Air pollution has been going down, steadily and dramatically: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-deaths-indoor-pollution?tab=table&time=2017 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-deaths-indoor-pollu... Tell me. In what way are we valuing human less ?
  - drivebycomment 6y ago
    Let me put more concrete, recent evidences that we value human life more, not less. Black lives matter. By any standard, it's clear racial discrimination has gotten better over the years (it's still nowhere near good enough, but better than in the past, even only by small relative amount), as there's no doubt police brutality has been worse in the past. But why are we outraging now ? Each single death now matters more now, because each injustice has much higher chance of getting broadcast and shared widely. What would have been ignored and silently covered up are now seeing the eyes of the world, and the direct consequence of that is the enormous movement. New Tsunami Sea Wall in Japan. https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2018/mar/09/after-the-tsunami-japan-sea-walls-in-pictures https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2018/mar/09/after-... https://www.wired.com/story/photo-gallery-japan-seawalls/ https://www.wired.com/story/photo-gallery-japan-seawalls/ Whether you agree that's a good idea or not, you can't deny the fact that now Japan is spending tremendous amount of money to protect the lives of relatively small number of people, and it had a popular support in Japan, meaning Japanese were more than happy to spend tons of money to protect their fellow citizens.
aeternum 6y ago
I'd argue the cold war was closer to the 'hinge of history'. In fact on this very day 9/26 in 1983, a not very well known soviet lieutenant colonel prevented what would very likely have been all out atomic war. In the grand scheme of things, everything that happened this year is probably minor in comparison to Petrov's decision. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
- flexie 6y ago
  True. But very few people knew on September 26, 1986. There could be equally large catastrophes avoided today that we don’t know about
  - drewcoo 6y ago
    There are known hinges and unknown hinges?
    - radus 6y ago
      There are also known unknown hinges.
      - klysm 6y ago
        Semi-known unknown hinges
- sandworm101 6y ago
  There were a great many other close calls. Rarely did it boil down to one person, but all sorts of things brought us dangerously close. And those are only the ones we know about. Who knows what mistakes have never been made public. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200807-the-nuclear-mistakes-that-could-have-ended-civilisation https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200807-the-nuclear-mist... >>As it happens, on this occasion there was no imposter – at least, not a human one. The figure skulking around the fence is thought to have been a large black bear. It was all a mistake. But back at Volk Field, the squadron was still unaware of this fact. They had been told there would be no practice runs, and as they boarded their planes, they were entirely convinced that this was it –World War Three had begun.
sebmellen 6y ago
Are we not always in the "hinge of history"? What we do determines what the future is like, and the future is dependent on how we act now. If everybody aims towards the highest good, society will probably look better than if we aim towards the worst future possible. I think something like this can only be determined in retrospect. The importance of a specific event usually makes little impact at the time it occurs, and reverberates through the future. It's only upon looking back that we can see how important it was. Was Nietzsche world-renowned when he was actively writing, or Einstein when he made his discoveries?
libraryofbabel 6y ago
Probably only true if we allow the “hinge” to be a process that spans several centuries, perhaps starting around 1800 with the beginnings of industrialization and gathering pace in the 20th century. If we look at the 21st century so far, it just hasn’t been... that interesting! Indeed some scholars of technological change (to take just one metric) actually think the pace of change has slowed. The 20th century gave us flight, the Haber-Bosch process, nuclear weapons, antibiotics, space flight, computers, the Pill, the Internet. The 21st? The iPhone? Meh. Think long term. Expect a humdrum next decade and an interesting next century.
- daliusd 6y ago
  IMHO iPhone (or smartphones) are under valued. Yes, they do not give you more (like antibiotics give more life or nuclear more energy) but they absolutely help you to lose less time (e.g. navigation that helps you to avoid traffic jams and get lost in unknown place). That replicated in billions of people changes the world’s pace drastically.
  - libraryofbabel 6y ago
    To be clear, I’m not saying the iPhone isn’t useful or valuable. It just simply does not compare to the key technologies of the 20th century in terms of transforming the basic parameters of human life on earth. My favorite example is the Haber-Bosch process for fixing nitrogen and producing synthetic fertilizer (invented 1910). Surely a far more “undervalued” technology than the iPhone! It enabled us to scale up global food production to feed at least an extra 3.5 billion people who otherwise would never have been born, or would have starved.[1] Antibiotics are another great example. Several hundred million lives saved. With respect, I think this is in a different league from saving some people a little time waiting in traffic. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-people-does-synthetic-fertilizer-feed https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-people-does-synthetic-fe...
    - TMWNN 6y ago
      >My favorite example is the Haber-Bosch process for fixing nitrogen and producing synthetic fertilizer (invented 1910). Surely a far more “undervalued” technology than the iPhone! It enabled us to scale up global food production to feed at least an extra 3.5 billion people who otherwise would never have been born, or would have starved. It also kept Germany going in WW1 far longer than otherwise, by compensating for blockades on saltpeter for explosives.
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
I'm surprised none of the responses here are discussing climate change. Unlike other concerns, higher average global temps are baked in for centuries, even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emissions today (which, obviously, is not happening). I put in a "yes" vote for the hinge of history simple due to the fact that our inability to drastically restructure our economy today will severely negativity affect billions in the future. Keeping global warming below 2°C is a pipe dream IMO, and the big question remains to be seen of whether we see big positive feedback loops that result in greatly increased warming (8°C or so). If that happens, WWII will look inconsequential by comparison.
- fn1 6y ago
  > Keeping global warming below 2°C is a pipe dream I think/hope it's possible by a war-mobilization type of effort, where industries start working together for the goal. We not only have to stop all emissions to zero, but should probably start removing co2 from the atmosphere as well: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/02/carbon-dioxide-removal-tech-is-behind-schedule/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/02/carbon-dioxide-remov... https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/wanna-limit-global-warming-to-1-5c-get-cracking/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/wanna-limit-global-w... But there are a lot of social issues going along with this: Up to 8% of greenhouse-gas emissions come from concrete, so building things. I cannot imagine a world without construction, there are so many business processes and jobs involved with that.
  - flatline 6y ago
    If anything I think the global pandemic has shown how unprepared we are to come together globally and utilize technology to solve hard problems. Maybe something good will come from all of this in that direction and we will learn from our mistakes.
    - scsilver 6y ago
      Has Nature even been so forgiving?
hiharryhere 6y ago
Hingey times are defined in retrospect. I do think covid provides an easy event for future historians to point to as the narrative of this time is written. As people living through it we know the reality is far more complicated - there are wars, rising popularism, the rise of China, a hyperactive media and a million other factors. COVID will be the convenient way to explain the big changes to the world order that are already underway, just as we were taught the assassination of Franz Ferdinand kicked off World War I.
bsenftner 6y ago
Silly concept; the present is perpetually the most important time in history because it is the only time we can do anything. The past is cemented by what happened, and the future is not here. There always is re-writing history, but then again that is achieved in the present. The present is the only time that can matter, because it's the only time we have agency.
drallison 6y ago
I think yes. There are numerous Anthropocene existential threats which are likely to lead extinction. <Edited to deleted enumeration of threats and snarky comments about nothing being done about it.> Decisions we make now will have a major impact on whether humans survive or not.
cryptMackay 6y ago
Would agree!
guram11 6y ago
Yes, if a pandemic that spread over the world in such short period of time has not rewrite our historical standards and understandings, our own existence will already hinge on destruction this virus will remain with us for years to come like influenza etc, we can only hope after this "wake up call" we're actually ready for the next time when a real "bio-terror" is unleash upon the world again and then also there's fake news, a harder problem than the virus itself, which we also learned are more disruptive and needs to be contained just as well Remember WHO told us wearing mask is useless? Remember WHO told us this will not become a pandemic? Remember WHO told us all that shit in WUHAN is under control? all this propaganda fake news is a slap in our face that no one can do anything about
bit_logic 6y ago
The next few decades can be claimed as the hinge of history due to two reasons, climate change and genetic engineering. There have been many wars and changes in the past, but now is the first time that our technology has basically reached worldwide geoengineering scale. We are fundamentally changing the climate of the entire world, that has never happened before in human history. Throughout all of human history, the human has not changed. If you somehow time traveled a human baby from 10k BC to present day, they would grow up and fit in with no issues. Now the very nature of what is human could change due to genetic engineering. Again, this has never happened before in human history.
fsckboy 6y ago
THE hinge of history? THE hinge of history was the Roman Empire (which spread a lot of the Greek ideas that the Romans admired). There may be A hinge in the future that we are close to, sure.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Maybe for Europe; China and India were doing just fine
unethical_ban 6y ago
I'll read the article in the morning. Apologies for pre-commenting. I do not believe the world hinges on 2020. It is certain more than one nation is going through defining moments, but the world will survive it - as it will the coronavirus. I do believe that the United States is at a tipping point unlike any moment in the past 50 years. Whether anyone likes it or not, we are the world's leading consumer and second leading producer (GDP). We have massive influence on foreign affairs, soft power, and the global environment. Domestically, four more years of the current administration and its lack of rule of law will drive more people toward resistance. It will enable those who envy our president's unchecked power to emulate it at any level - the shamelessness, the gaslighting, and the bullying - so that our politics makes the 20th century look downright polite. The decision to, or not to, participate in global efforts to reduce human impact on the environment could be a defining moment for the next few hundred years of human existence. So yeah, I think this is a huge moment for the US, and the world.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  Just starting in on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism,_the_Highest_Stage_of_Capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism,_the_Highest_Stage... and while much of what VIL[1] says could be written a century later, my initial skim of "VIII. PARASITISM AND DECAY OF CAPITALISM" reveals that he's assumed that an imperial power will also be a creditor. [1] compare http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Page_62 http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Pag... > "In the geniuses Lenin and Trotzky, the Bolshevik movement found its leadership. Lenin had no use for democracy as it was known in America. To him it was a sham, a front for the great capitalist trusts, which—even though the capitalists themselves might not know it—were doomed to get bigger on a shrinking market, until international capitalist war, bankruptcy, and working-class revolution was the result. Lenin was as sure that this would happen as he was that the sun would rise the next morning. The only dispute was the matter of timing; a few Bolshevik pessimists thought that the capitalist world might last into the 1920's."
dalbasal 6y ago
I haven't read the book, podcast, etc... But at a glance, i don't think I buy the "hingeyness" concept. Stretching the analogy... A hinge matters because the door it hangs is flat. It "only" moves at the hinge. History is anything but flat. It can bend at any point and in any direction. The 18th century gave us most of the political and economic institutions we have: nation states, republics, liberal democracy, maritime law, modern philosophy, limited liability companies and stock markets. I don't think this means the 19th and 20th century were determined by those. The US/USSR standoff could have been something else entirely if the nuclear cold war had preceded WWII instead of succeeding it. The "lever" is technology, and this just gets increasingly powerful as we go along. The only way that, in retrospect, any century is a "hinge" is if in the following century, we have less powerful technology and ability to impact the world. So, in a sense, hingeyness simply means "collapse." A century is a hinge inasmuch as it is enough of a collapse to destroy technology. In any case, I think we are currently underestimating the threat of nuclear war. The threat has not really receded much, if at all, since it was at athe top of everyone's list of fears. We're still likely to have mass death and ecodestruction appear out of a clear blue sky.
hyko 6y ago
Sure, in a timeline that includes energy becoming matter and biogenesis and complex life evolving, our era is going to turn out to be uniquely influential. I don’t think the word hubris does justice to this line of thinking. Edited to add: the “hinge” people think they can make out is likely just an illusion caused by the phenomena known as the present. Reminds me of Kevin Kelly’s essay “The singularity is always near”: https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-singularity/ https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-singularity/ I’m also amazed at how good Betteridge’s Law actually is in practice, considering it’s meant to be a joke and not a reliable tool for finding the truth.
nullsense 6y ago
I think 2015 was the peak of human civilization, and it's been going downhill ever since. It seems like with climate change and loss of biodiversity the next 3 decades will see a steep decline in world wide stability.
- realityking 6y ago
  Why specifically 2015 and not, say, 2000?
  - nullsense 6y ago
    Brexit / Trump marked a turning point for me.
    - dane-pgp 6y ago
      In 2001, AQ found a "hack" that turned a commonly used benign technology into a weapon that took down two towers. I think we should have been less narrowly focused on winning a "War on Terror" and put some effort into preventing other such "hacks" that nation states could employ against the West.
- tasuki 6y ago
  The peak of what aspect of human civilization? And why 2015? [Edit: I find it highly unlikely the peak of human civilization, whatever it means, should happen during my lifetime. Surely the Romans in 100BC might have thought the same as you do? Why do you think there won't be people in 2222 who think the same?]
  - nullsense 6y ago
    I personally felt that Brexit / Trump marked a turning point where the foundations of the Western world were fundamentally called into question. Things have felt a lot less stable to me since then. Geopolitics is one thing, but climate and environment are another. I remember in the 90s growing up as a kid hearing all this talk about the environment and if we act now we can turn it around etc. That turn around never came. Global weather events seem to be getting more extreme / frequent. The number of animal species we've wiped out is pretty mind boggling. It feels like the combined trajectory of geopolitics, the climate, and biodiversity are heading in a direction that won't support life as we lived it in the 20th century. Id be happy to be dead wrong about that. But it seems to me we've definitely wrecked the planet and that'll have huge consequences that'll change the nature of life on earth. It also seems to be the case that when a society collapses and another emerges the default seems to be an authoritarian regime with democracy being somewhat of an anomaly.
mikewarot 6y ago
Yes, we have been since 1945, when the first persistent existential threat we created ourselves first arose... Nuclear Weapons. Now, we have the added threat of Genetic Engineering, the second existential threat we created ourselves. All of our Institutions have an embedded growth obligation they haven't been able to meet since the 1960s, which lead to their being run by people willing to fudge the truth to keep the illusion of competence and power going. We're on the edge of the abyss... and many people don't even realize it.
- bamboozled 6y ago
  Yeah, well I don’t think life has ever been very certain ?
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  > Yes, we have been since 1945, when the first persistent existential threat we created ourselves first arose... Nuclear Weapons. That makes me wonder at what point the world's nuclear arsenal became big enough to be an existential threat. For reference, there were apparently ~300 atomic bombs in the world in 1950: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_nuclear_weapons_stockpiles_and_nuclear_tests_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_nuclear_weapons_sto...
Lammy 6y ago
What am I supposed to think BBC wants for me (from me?) when this already-ominously-worded page popped into view with three additional scary headlines pre-loaded in my eye-line so I've read them before I can even choose not to. "You may also like: - Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? - The perils of short-termism: Civilisation’s greatest threat. - The greatest long-term threats facing humanity." I know even discount supermarkets put their highest-converting items at eye-level on the shelves across, so I'm sure the same considerations go into news media and the placement isn't an accident. I remember Facebook's research project inserting more-positive or more-negative stories to a person's personalized News Feed yo successfully influence their mood in that direction. The ability for Facebook or anyone to do such a study makes me pretty confident BBC could detect three "negative" wordings if they hadn't directly paid somebody to write them this way, and they could avoid say I'll "like" them so a momentary positive hits first to maximize my emotional whiplash.
- mistermann 6y ago
  I think what you are "supposed" to think is less important than what you (and everyone) do think, as well as what the downstream consequences are due to your consumption of this type of article, a type which we've likely all read several several instances of every day for years on end.
OrderlyTiamat 6y ago
Regardless of what you think about the concept of hinginess, I'm thoroughly unconvinced by the arguments presented against it in this article. The first one for example, seems like an adapted doomsday argument: given that we continue to exist for x years at a certain societal level, and given the certainty of a hinge, our prior for the hinge being this century would be very low. But this is begging the question. The entire point of a hinge is that we don't know if we're going to continue to exist at a certain level of development, thus our assumptions required to develop the prior are dependent on our conclusion that this isn't the period of the hinge. The other arguments boil down to accusations of bias. These are a little more substantial in that we do actually know these biases exist, and we should account for them. But that doesn't mean necessary that we're not living in a hingey period. It's not necessarily an argument against moreso than a stern warning that more research is needed and the conclusion isn't warranted yet. I'd think there should be stronger arguments against the premise, and some comments in this post have given far better arguments already.
- kokey 6y ago
  That's also what stood out to me. It's almost like the article was painting the hypothesis as something a lot of people who 'feel' the same way (as the author) is trying to prove it to be true without going into why do they feel that way and how much bias is in that. Sure, technology is developing fast, but its been quite fast since just before the start of the industrial revolution or when humans started walking or farming etc. I would speculate during those times of rapid development of some of the historical civilisations there was probably just as much of a feeling of it being at a hinge as now. It's just that right now we like to attract people's attention and creating suspense and that sense of hingeyness is good at attracting attention and there's now a lot of money to be made from attracting attention. Not just money, but you can drive political action if you give people this kind of sense of do or die urgency. This could turn the hypothesis into a self fulfilling prophecy. That's why we need better arguments against it.
jl6 6y ago
For those who didn't read the article, the conclusion is: "probably not". This is an example of how an idea is granted false legitimacy by having a catchy alliterative name.
- personlurking 6y ago
  as well as this law: Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- mistermann 6y ago
  > This is an example of how an idea is granted false legitimacy by having a catchy alliterative name. Technically, the legitimacy of this idea is unknown, necessarily. This is an example of how heuristic predictions about reality (and the future of it) can easily be mistaken for facts.
chippy 6y ago
For those who would like to delve a bit deeper into the Hinge of History, this is the link from the article and is well worth the read. It was submitted here 2 days ago and got zero points! https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XXLf6FmWujkxna3E6/are-we-living-at-the-most-influential-time-in-history-1 https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XXLf6FmWujkxna3E6/... Its often a human mistake to think that right now is the most important time ever because it is literally the moment we are in. With the perspective of history and with the imagination for the future you can start to see how what we think is the most urgent things maybe not so, and you can see how small changes elsewhere might be the best thing for the future. It can inoculate you against being manipulated by urgency-based calls for action.
- watwut 6y ago
  > It can inoculate you against being manipulated by urgency-based calls for action. Perspective of history however does not show that being passive is universally what is needed more that if we wait, it gonna be alright. Now that current need is not urgent. I mean, not being the most important historical moment does not imply it is not important for us and those right after us. Generally we should seek to avoid those super important moments by working on issues before they get so bad.
  - chippy 6y ago
    Agreed! It's one thing to be aware of rhetorical tricks of urgency and its another not to do anything. I think it's very telling that the post that started this whole thing off was on an Effective Altruism forum.
- m-i-l 6y ago
  > Its often a human mistake to think that right now is the most important time ever because it is literally the moment we are in. Whenever I ask my youngest child what their favourite toy is, more often than not it is the one they have just played with, or what their favourite book is, and it is the one they have most recently read. I suspect that our view of history is similar. Now is always the most important moment in time, whichever time now is.
cblconfederate 6y ago
I wonder what percentage of people want to see huge historical changes at this point. I certainly feel that the past decades were too stable, then stagnant, and it feels like covid is accelerating the moves considerably. If anything, i want more of it
- 0xBA5ED 6y ago
  Be careful what you wish for. Rapid large-scale change is exciting perhaps, but not controllable. It is a recipe for sub-populations to slip through the cracks, increasing human suffering.
- umvi 6y ago
  So in other words, you are tired of "move slow and preserve things" and want more "move fast and break things"
  - cblconfederate 6y ago
    moving fast and breaking things are orthogonal
    - rytill 6y ago
      Moving fast and breaking things are not the same thing, but they're correlated. Certainly they are not orthogonal.
jpz 6y ago
The front of any exponential curve will always feel like the time of most significance. More generally, everything else is grist for the mill - now is all that counts. We are always at the "hinge of history", surely.
29athrowaway 6y ago
The historian Yuval Noah Harari says that we are transitioning from an era dominated by human emotion, into an era dominated by data-driven manipulation of those emotions. By gathering data from each individual, it is possible to build a profile that can be used to predict how that person would react to different stimuli. And at scale, it can be used to trigger people's emotions like playing a piano, manipulating them at will. Today we can already see that by emphasizing divisive topics like: "abortion", "gun control", "immigration"... it is possible to make people upset towards each other with a high success rate. What if the reason these topics are emphasized is not morality but really about how people will emotionally react to them?
ggm 6y ago
I wonder how ordinary people felt in 1848, or 1871, or 1789 or ....
TLightful 6y ago
No, it's technically and scientifically known as the h'arse of history.
chiefalchemist 6y ago
Twenty years ago or so it was "the end of history." Now it's a hinge? It sounds like historians keep finding solutions that are in need of problem. Or perhaps, a book or two needs to be sold? Meanwhile, we're struggling to get past history properly re-paradigmed.
known 6y ago
Humans are 'infinitely' diverse (physically/emotionally/morally/genetically) They'll adapt/prevail to adverse conditions/environment;
dfilppi 6y ago
No, we aren't.
username90 6y ago
Thought experiment: Lets say you live the life of a random human throughout all time, both past and future. That is one data point, but one data point can tell us quite a lot still. So lets say you start your life, and you notice that the human population had just expanded exponentially to 100 times what it usually was, what would you assume will happen in the future? If the future will hold millions of years with humanity prospering on earth with roughly current population number then picking a human born today is very small, it is like winning the lottery. If humanity expands quadratically to other solar systems then the chance of being born today is basically none. The most likely scenario would be that human population is currently at its peak and the population will within not that many generations dwindle down to almost nothing and probably go extinct.
- fractaled 6y ago
  I don't think this logic applies to the demographics of today. The total number of humans to have ever lived is calculated to be ~105 billion. So assuming you're applying that logic to today, you're one of the most recent ~7%, which doesn't seem that remarkable -- at least not to the point of assuming fatalistic scenarios.
  - username90 6y ago
    If humanity continues like this with no new discoveries then in ten million years we would have 200 million per year * 10 million years = 2 quadrillion people. Getting a human who lived at the start of that peak is very improbable. But you are right, civilization lasting another few thousand years isn't that improbable. Just that it is strange that it would last a thousand years but not a million, seems like humanity should have figured out how to stabilize things if civlization lasts that long. Edit: Or maybe our ultimate downfall will just be lack of evolutionary pressure so at some point nobody can sustain civlization. That wouldn't happen in a thousand years but a million years is definitely enough. Edit2: Or we solve our lifespan issue very soon and people no longer die, so people also no longer can procreate or they would exhaust available resources.
anovikov 6y ago
We're not, time between start of WWII and till the Arab Oil embargo when the technical revolution ended, was quite a bit more influential. And yes sure people had an even better way to destroy biosphere then too, as well as lots of ways to make things better, and it's fair to say our grandfathers used this resource in general, in a very constructive way. We neither got that much potential to either break or fix things, nor we make a wiser use of what we have. Yes we got Elon Musk sure, but apart from him, all that the humankind is doing is finding progressively sneakier ways to make people click on ads, which is hardly a great achievement. Everything else from art to politics is just a tool to this end.
throwaway0956 6y ago
I find it amusing that as soon as the West experiences mildly uncomfortable living conditions in comparison to the rest of the world we start getting all kinds of dystopian articles from the press. No, we aren't living at the "hinge of history." We're living through a phase during which people realize that after generations of wealth and prosperity they have no idea how to live through discomfort.
Oricle 6y ago
BBC, don't believe anything this pedophile institute says!
miketlewis 6y ago
The author's argument that we are not at a hinge point because "there are potentially a vast number of people ahead of us, yet to born" is challenged by the doomsday argument which suggests that it is statically most likely that the future population is equivalent to the historic population, and thus, given that the current population is exceptionally high, catastrophic collapse is imminent. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument

158 points by Thevet 6y ago

adamnemecek 6y ago

I have a hunch every society in the past thought that.

brianberns 6y ago
And it was probably true for most of them. The stakes for humanity keep rising, so "now" is usually the most important time in history.
- adamnemecek 6y ago
  I mean stakes have been pretty high when Mongolians were invading Europe and China, when Hitler was invading everywhere, etc etc.
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    Being knocked down didn't sting as much when nobody had electricity, indoor plumbing, or technological aids. Modern society has much more to lose from a dire economic collapse.
  - dbtc 6y ago
    Or when the Spanish vini vidi vicied the Americas. But you could argue too that post nuclear has been continually the highest stakes by far.
- thinkingemote 6y ago
  If the stakes keep on rising, how high would they be 50 years from now? And in 200? 2000? How high were the stakes 300 years ago? Should we think people living in 1720 didn't have it that bad compared to now? Will people in the future look at now and think the same?
edanm 6y ago
That's actually probably not true. I'm not a historian, but one interesting thing I've learned from reading lots of history is the different attitudes different societies had about the past/future. As far as I know, it's only really since the enlightenment/industrial revolution, that people feel like the future is going to be better. The idea that the past was the golden age, where Humans were much more advanced, knew more, Had better technology, etc, seems to be the common position in history. Im not sure about the feeling that society was"hungry" ala the article, but I suspect that feeling is connected.

chubot 6y ago

Subjectively it feels sorta true for a 40 year old, but I bet it pales in comparison to WW2. Large portions of many nations perished, and their kin had to rebuild society. Nuclear weapons were deployed for the first time. The fact that we even recovered from it is amazing (although some didn't, certainly). I live in the US because my grandparents' generation lost the war. And the US has a generation named after the effects of the war (baby boomers). I remember reading the phrase "post war" dozens or hundreds of times as a child, but it took awhile for the reality of it to sink in.

Ericson2314 6y ago
Agreed. Maybe biggest since WWII, certainly not biggest ever. Climate change is terrible but because it's smooth (even if superlinear) it's hard to ascribe hinginess to a specific moment. C.f. altitude vs geographic prominence. Also, I think the fear of A.I. has distorted the fact the outward rate of change has declined massively from say the "special century" of 1870-1970, even if it has picked back up a bit in recent years.
Robotbeat 6y ago
Agreed. Every great power today was profoundly molded by it. America & Soviet Union became the sole superpowers. It basically decided the communist government of China. It eventually set free the other next great powers, such as India and Nigeria, from colonial rule. The impact on technology was equally profound. The computer, radar, the jet, the turbo pumped liquid rocket, the drone, the atomic bomb... I mean, an entirely new source of energy was first harnessed (really the first since the invention of fire) and the first human made object was sent (briefly) into space...
XorNot 6y ago
This is all an argument that there were perceptually worse times before, so how could it be bad now? WW2 setup an era defined by one very unusual property: the absolute dominance of the United States and it's economy as the global hegemon. But the US is not adapted to the notion that what it achieved from that era was a set of historically unique advantages that are not a property of "American exceptionalusm" but rather what you get when you're one of the few nations on the planet which didn't have its cities bombed.

dougmwne 6y ago

I think no. We are in a boring, prosperous, stable time with an overactive media. The virus is bad, but it will pass and medical science will save many millions. The plague of Justinian, this is not. Hope I'm not wrong about that, at any rate.

abraxas 6y ago
Nobody serious sees the Coronavirus as an existential threat to humanity unless it mutates in a way that really enables it to wipe out most humans. Climate change and the collapse of global ecosystems can absolutely manage that and according to every serious scientist we are pretty much on the worst case scenario path according to any peer reviewed model. The rise in nationalism and authoritarianism around the world is another phenomenon that could unleash forces of global conflict which might lead to cataclysms like a nuclear war or another world war at least. Of course pivotal moments in history can only be declared as such in hindsight. But the forces leading up to them usually gather steam decades before. It looks as we have no shortage of those in our time.
- cmehdy 6y ago
  There's a possibility that the third sentence you wrote is tightly coupled with the second one. On a personal level I mainly agree with you (we're on track for much worse than the RCP2.5 that everyone is barely even attempting to make goals for), but the complexity of the system seems to bring people to vastly disagree about this somehow. I think what really has become a turning point of our civilization in the last few decades is that specialization and the complexity of the world are absolutely entirely outside of the reach of any single person. The expansion of diversity and knowledge in the last few hundred years is much like the expansion of the universe, in that we can't seem to be able to beat it at all in terms of speed no matter what we do. Any sci-fi device that could perhaps offset that eventually (e.g. a future neuralink-thing being able to "upload" knowledge into you) is not the kind of thing I would bet my savings on in terms of time constants when compared to much more immediate events like climate change wrecking our modern civilization.
  - 6y ago

sushshshsh 6y ago

I was educated at my university that the hinge of history was actually World War I. Hundreds of millions died in horrific new waus, the world centralized around a pole of power, and basically the world has only been getting better since.

lostlogin 6y ago
I was left with this impression when I listened to Blueprint for Armageddon, by Dan Carlin. It's excellent. I thought I knew the history of that era but I was very wrong. The early parts are a little boring compared to what it turns into, but I can't see how that could be avoided given the topic. https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-55-blueprint-for-armageddon-series/ https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-55-blu...
BurningFrog 6y ago
WW1 is a very good candidate. It created the Soviet Union and Hitler and pretty much all of history since. It's also extra interesting, because if Gavrilo Princip hadn't randomly ran into the Archduke's car, history might have turned out very differently.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  There would have just been another spark for WW1.
  - BurningFrog 6y ago
    Maybe. It is truly unknowable.
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      That's right, but the nascent combatants were spoiling for a fight and just needed an excuse.
Lammy 6y ago

ralusek 6y ago

I didn't read the article, but the answer is emphatically yes. We are rubbing up against the reality that most humans are less and less valuable to other humans such that they are basically valueless, and their market value diminishes accordingly, and that technological advances and market efficiencies are actually eliminating scarcity within certain arenas. We have to grapple with the fact that most humans offer almost nothing of value, while we actually have the capability, within certain domains, to actually allow them to be entitled to certain things. Pair this with neural interfaces, AI, asteroid and celestial body mining, cheap space travel, and economics are going to start looking weird. I say this as an avid fan of capitalism. It isn't going to fail because of corruption, it's going to fail because markets are optimized and technology is increasingly pushing your average bloke out of the game.

drivebycomment 6y ago
> We are rubbing up against the reality that most humans are less and less valuable to other humans such that they are basically valueless, By what standard are we "valuing humans less" ? This seems to fly against the facts. Global death from almost all causes have gone down. e.g. "Battle" related death - which is the most clear evidence of valuing human life less than political gains have dramatically fallen: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/battle-related-deaths-in-state-based-conflicts-since-1946 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/battle-related-deaths-in-... Global life expectancy is higher than ever in the history of human civilization and still rising: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy Global poverty rate has been dropping dramatically and steadily: https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty Global education spending has been going up. Air pollution has been going down, steadily and dramatically: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-deaths-indoor-pollution?tab=table&time=2017 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-deaths-indoor-pollu... Tell me. In what way are we valuing human less ?
- drivebycomment 6y ago
  Let me put more concrete, recent evidences that we value human life more, not less. Black lives matter. By any standard, it's clear racial discrimination has gotten better over the years (it's still nowhere near good enough, but better than in the past, even only by small relative amount), as there's no doubt police brutality has been worse in the past. But why are we outraging now ? Each single death now matters more now, because each injustice has much higher chance of getting broadcast and shared widely. What would have been ignored and silently covered up are now seeing the eyes of the world, and the direct consequence of that is the enormous movement. New Tsunami Sea Wall in Japan. https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2018/mar/09/after-the-tsunami-japan-sea-walls-in-pictures https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2018/mar/09/after-... https://www.wired.com/story/photo-gallery-japan-seawalls/ https://www.wired.com/story/photo-gallery-japan-seawalls/ Whether you agree that's a good idea or not, you can't deny the fact that now Japan is spending tremendous amount of money to protect the lives of relatively small number of people, and it had a popular support in Japan, meaning Japanese were more than happy to spend tons of money to protect their fellow citizens.

aeternum 6y ago

I'd argue the cold war was closer to the 'hinge of history'. In fact on this very day 9/26 in 1983, a not very well known soviet lieutenant colonel prevented what would very likely have been all out atomic war. In the grand scheme of things, everything that happened this year is probably minor in comparison to Petrov's decision. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...

flexie 6y ago
True. But very few people knew on September 26, 1986. There could be equally large catastrophes avoided today that we don’t know about
- drewcoo 6y ago
  There are known hinges and unknown hinges?
  - radus 6y ago
    There are also known unknown hinges.
    - klysm 6y ago
      Semi-known unknown hinges
sandworm101 6y ago
There were a great many other close calls. Rarely did it boil down to one person, but all sorts of things brought us dangerously close. And those are only the ones we know about. Who knows what mistakes have never been made public. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200807-the-nuclear-mistakes-that-could-have-ended-civilisation https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200807-the-nuclear-mist... >>As it happens, on this occasion there was no imposter – at least, not a human one. The figure skulking around the fence is thought to have been a large black bear. It was all a mistake. But back at Volk Field, the squadron was still unaware of this fact. They had been told there would be no practice runs, and as they boarded their planes, they were entirely convinced that this was it –World War Three had begun.

sebmellen 6y ago

Are we not always in the "hinge of history"? What we do determines what the future is like, and the future is dependent on how we act now. If everybody aims towards the highest good, society will probably look better than if we aim towards the worst future possible. I think something like this can only be determined in retrospect. The importance of a specific event usually makes little impact at the time it occurs, and reverberates through the future. It's only upon looking back that we can see how important it was. Was Nietzsche world-renowned when he was actively writing, or Einstein when he made his discoveries?

libraryofbabel 6y ago

Probably only true if we allow the “hinge” to be a process that spans several centuries, perhaps starting around 1800 with the beginnings of industrialization and gathering pace in the 20th century. If we look at the 21st century so far, it just hasn’t been... that interesting! Indeed some scholars of technological change (to take just one metric) actually think the pace of change has slowed. The 20th century gave us flight, the Haber-Bosch process, nuclear weapons, antibiotics, space flight, computers, the Pill, the Internet. The 21st? The iPhone? Meh. Think long term. Expect a humdrum next decade and an interesting next century.

daliusd 6y ago
IMHO iPhone (or smartphones) are under valued. Yes, they do not give you more (like antibiotics give more life or nuclear more energy) but they absolutely help you to lose less time (e.g. navigation that helps you to avoid traffic jams and get lost in unknown place). That replicated in billions of people changes the world’s pace drastically.
- libraryofbabel 6y ago
  To be clear, I’m not saying the iPhone isn’t useful or valuable. It just simply does not compare to the key technologies of the 20th century in terms of transforming the basic parameters of human life on earth. My favorite example is the Haber-Bosch process for fixing nitrogen and producing synthetic fertilizer (invented 1910). Surely a far more “undervalued” technology than the iPhone! It enabled us to scale up global food production to feed at least an extra 3.5 billion people who otherwise would never have been born, or would have starved.[1] Antibiotics are another great example. Several hundred million lives saved. With respect, I think this is in a different league from saving some people a little time waiting in traffic. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-people-does-synthetic-fertilizer-feed https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-people-does-synthetic-fe...
  - TMWNN 6y ago
    >My favorite example is the Haber-Bosch process for fixing nitrogen and producing synthetic fertilizer (invented 1910). Surely a far more “undervalued” technology than the iPhone! It enabled us to scale up global food production to feed at least an extra 3.5 billion people who otherwise would never have been born, or would have starved. It also kept Germany going in WW1 far longer than otherwise, by compensating for blockades on saltpeter for explosives.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

I'm surprised none of the responses here are discussing climate change. Unlike other concerns, higher average global temps are baked in for centuries, even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emissions today (which, obviously, is not happening). I put in a "yes" vote for the hinge of history simple due to the fact that our inability to drastically restructure our economy today will severely negativity affect billions in the future. Keeping global warming below 2°C is a pipe dream IMO, and the big question remains to be seen of whether we see big positive feedback loops that result in greatly increased warming (8°C or so). If that happens, WWII will look inconsequential by comparison.

fn1 6y ago
> Keeping global warming below 2°C is a pipe dream I think/hope it's possible by a war-mobilization type of effort, where industries start working together for the goal. We not only have to stop all emissions to zero, but should probably start removing co2 from the atmosphere as well: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/02/carbon-dioxide-removal-tech-is-behind-schedule/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/02/carbon-dioxide-remov... https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/wanna-limit-global-warming-to-1-5c-get-cracking/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/wanna-limit-global-w... But there are a lot of social issues going along with this: Up to 8% of greenhouse-gas emissions come from concrete, so building things. I cannot imagine a world without construction, there are so many business processes and jobs involved with that.
- flatline 6y ago
  If anything I think the global pandemic has shown how unprepared we are to come together globally and utilize technology to solve hard problems. Maybe something good will come from all of this in that direction and we will learn from our mistakes.
  - scsilver 6y ago
    Has Nature even been so forgiving?

hiharryhere 6y ago

Hingey times are defined in retrospect. I do think covid provides an easy event for future historians to point to as the narrative of this time is written. As people living through it we know the reality is far more complicated - there are wars, rising popularism, the rise of China, a hyperactive media and a million other factors. COVID will be the convenient way to explain the big changes to the world order that are already underway, just as we were taught the assassination of Franz Ferdinand kicked off World War I.

bsenftner 6y ago

Silly concept; the present is perpetually the most important time in history because it is the only time we can do anything. The past is cemented by what happened, and the future is not here. There always is re-writing history, but then again that is achieved in the present. The present is the only time that can matter, because it's the only time we have agency.

drallison 6y ago

I think yes. There are numerous Anthropocene existential threats which are likely to lead extinction. <Edited to deleted enumeration of threats and snarky comments about nothing being done about it.> Decisions we make now will have a major impact on whether humans survive or not.

cryptMackay 6y ago

Would agree!

guram11 6y ago

Yes, if a pandemic that spread over the world in such short period of time has not rewrite our historical standards and understandings, our own existence will already hinge on destruction this virus will remain with us for years to come like influenza etc, we can only hope after this "wake up call" we're actually ready for the next time when a real "bio-terror" is unleash upon the world again and then also there's fake news, a harder problem than the virus itself, which we also learned are more disruptive and needs to be contained just as well Remember WHO told us wearing mask is useless? Remember WHO told us this will not become a pandemic? Remember WHO told us all that shit in WUHAN is under control? all this propaganda fake news is a slap in our face that no one can do anything about

bit_logic 6y ago

The next few decades can be claimed as the hinge of history due to two reasons, climate change and genetic engineering. There have been many wars and changes in the past, but now is the first time that our technology has basically reached worldwide geoengineering scale. We are fundamentally changing the climate of the entire world, that has never happened before in human history. Throughout all of human history, the human has not changed. If you somehow time traveled a human baby from 10k BC to present day, they would grow up and fit in with no issues. Now the very nature of what is human could change due to genetic engineering. Again, this has never happened before in human history.

fsckboy 6y ago

THE hinge of history? THE hinge of history was the Roman Empire (which spread a lot of the Greek ideas that the Romans admired). There may be A hinge in the future that we are close to, sure.

stjohnswarts 6y ago
Maybe for Europe; China and India were doing just fine

unethical_ban 6y ago

I'll read the article in the morning. Apologies for pre-commenting. I do not believe the world hinges on 2020. It is certain more than one nation is going through defining moments, but the world will survive it - as it will the coronavirus. I do believe that the United States is at a tipping point unlike any moment in the past 50 years. Whether anyone likes it or not, we are the world's leading consumer and second leading producer (GDP). We have massive influence on foreign affairs, soft power, and the global environment. Domestically, four more years of the current administration and its lack of rule of law will drive more people toward resistance. It will enable those who envy our president's unchecked power to emulate it at any level - the shamelessness, the gaslighting, and the bullying - so that our politics makes the 20th century look downright polite. The decision to, or not to, participate in global efforts to reduce human impact on the environment could be a defining moment for the next few hundred years of human existence. So yeah, I think this is a huge moment for the US, and the world.

082349872349872 6y ago
Just starting in on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism,_the_Highest_Stage_of_Capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism,_the_Highest_Stage... and while much of what VIL[1] says could be written a century later, my initial skim of "VIII. PARASITISM AND DECAY OF CAPITALISM" reveals that he's assumed that an imperial power will also be a creditor. [1] compare http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Page_62 http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Pag... > "In the geniuses Lenin and Trotzky, the Bolshevik movement found its leadership. Lenin had no use for democracy as it was known in America. To him it was a sham, a front for the great capitalist trusts, which—even though the capitalists themselves might not know it—were doomed to get bigger on a shrinking market, until international capitalist war, bankruptcy, and working-class revolution was the result. Lenin was as sure that this would happen as he was that the sun would rise the next morning. The only dispute was the matter of timing; a few Bolshevik pessimists thought that the capitalist world might last into the 1920's."

dalbasal 6y ago

I haven't read the book, podcast, etc... But at a glance, i don't think I buy the "hingeyness" concept. Stretching the analogy... A hinge matters because the door it hangs is flat. It "only" moves at the hinge. History is anything but flat. It can bend at any point and in any direction. The 18th century gave us most of the political and economic institutions we have: nation states, republics, liberal democracy, maritime law, modern philosophy, limited liability companies and stock markets. I don't think this means the 19th and 20th century were determined by those. The US/USSR standoff could have been something else entirely if the nuclear cold war had preceded WWII instead of succeeding it. The "lever" is technology, and this just gets increasingly powerful as we go along. The only way that, in retrospect, any century is a "hinge" is if in the following century, we have less powerful technology and ability to impact the world. So, in a sense, hingeyness simply means "collapse." A century is a hinge inasmuch as it is enough of a collapse to destroy technology. In any case, I think we are currently underestimating the threat of nuclear war. The threat has not really receded much, if at all, since it was at athe top of everyone's list of fears. We're still likely to have mass death and ecodestruction appear out of a clear blue sky.

hyko 6y ago

Sure, in a timeline that includes energy becoming matter and biogenesis and complex life evolving, our era is going to turn out to be uniquely influential. I don’t think the word hubris does justice to this line of thinking. Edited to add: the “hinge” people think they can make out is likely just an illusion caused by the phenomena known as the present. Reminds me of Kevin Kelly’s essay “The singularity is always near”: https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-singularity/ https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-singularity/ I’m also amazed at how good Betteridge’s Law actually is in practice, considering it’s meant to be a joke and not a reliable tool for finding the truth.

nullsense 6y ago

I think 2015 was the peak of human civilization, and it's been going downhill ever since. It seems like with climate change and loss of biodiversity the next 3 decades will see a steep decline in world wide stability.

realityking 6y ago
Why specifically 2015 and not, say, 2000?
- nullsense 6y ago
  Brexit / Trump marked a turning point for me.
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    In 2001, AQ found a "hack" that turned a commonly used benign technology into a weapon that took down two towers. I think we should have been less narrowly focused on winning a "War on Terror" and put some effort into preventing other such "hacks" that nation states could employ against the West.
tasuki 6y ago
The peak of what aspect of human civilization? And why 2015? [Edit: I find it highly unlikely the peak of human civilization, whatever it means, should happen during my lifetime. Surely the Romans in 100BC might have thought the same as you do? Why do you think there won't be people in 2222 who think the same?]
- nullsense 6y ago
  I personally felt that Brexit / Trump marked a turning point where the foundations of the Western world were fundamentally called into question. Things have felt a lot less stable to me since then. Geopolitics is one thing, but climate and environment are another. I remember in the 90s growing up as a kid hearing all this talk about the environment and if we act now we can turn it around etc. That turn around never came. Global weather events seem to be getting more extreme / frequent. The number of animal species we've wiped out is pretty mind boggling. It feels like the combined trajectory of geopolitics, the climate, and biodiversity are heading in a direction that won't support life as we lived it in the 20th century. Id be happy to be dead wrong about that. But it seems to me we've definitely wrecked the planet and that'll have huge consequences that'll change the nature of life on earth. It also seems to be the case that when a society collapses and another emerges the default seems to be an authoritarian regime with democracy being somewhat of an anomaly.

mikewarot 6y ago

Yes, we have been since 1945, when the first persistent existential threat we created ourselves first arose... Nuclear Weapons. Now, we have the added threat of Genetic Engineering, the second existential threat we created ourselves. All of our Institutions have an embedded growth obligation they haven't been able to meet since the 1960s, which lead to their being run by people willing to fudge the truth to keep the illusion of competence and power going. We're on the edge of the abyss... and many people don't even realize it.

bamboozled 6y ago
Yeah, well I don’t think life has ever been very certain ?
dane-pgp 6y ago
> Yes, we have been since 1945, when the first persistent existential threat we created ourselves first arose... Nuclear Weapons. That makes me wonder at what point the world's nuclear arsenal became big enough to be an existential threat. For reference, there were apparently ~300 atomic bombs in the world in 1950: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_nuclear_weapons_stockpiles_and_nuclear_tests_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_nuclear_weapons_sto...

Lammy 6y ago

What am I supposed to think BBC wants for me (from me?) when this already-ominously-worded page popped into view with three additional scary headlines pre-loaded in my eye-line so I've read them before I can even choose not to. "You may also like: - Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? - The perils of short-termism: Civilisation’s greatest threat. - The greatest long-term threats facing humanity." I know even discount supermarkets put their highest-converting items at eye-level on the shelves across, so I'm sure the same considerations go into news media and the placement isn't an accident. I remember Facebook's research project inserting more-positive or more-negative stories to a person's personalized News Feed yo successfully influence their mood in that direction. The ability for Facebook or anyone to do such a study makes me pretty confident BBC could detect three "negative" wordings if they hadn't directly paid somebody to write them this way, and they could avoid say I'll "like" them so a momentary positive hits first to maximize my emotional whiplash.

mistermann 6y ago
I think what you are "supposed" to think is less important than what you (and everyone) do think, as well as what the downstream consequences are due to your consumption of this type of article, a type which we've likely all read several several instances of every day for years on end.

OrderlyTiamat 6y ago

Regardless of what you think about the concept of hinginess, I'm thoroughly unconvinced by the arguments presented against it in this article. The first one for example, seems like an adapted doomsday argument: given that we continue to exist for x years at a certain societal level, and given the certainty of a hinge, our prior for the hinge being this century would be very low. But this is begging the question. The entire point of a hinge is that we don't know if we're going to continue to exist at a certain level of development, thus our assumptions required to develop the prior are dependent on our conclusion that this isn't the period of the hinge. The other arguments boil down to accusations of bias. These are a little more substantial in that we do actually know these biases exist, and we should account for them. But that doesn't mean necessary that we're not living in a hingey period. It's not necessarily an argument against moreso than a stern warning that more research is needed and the conclusion isn't warranted yet. I'd think there should be stronger arguments against the premise, and some comments in this post have given far better arguments already.

kokey 6y ago
That's also what stood out to me. It's almost like the article was painting the hypothesis as something a lot of people who 'feel' the same way (as the author) is trying to prove it to be true without going into why do they feel that way and how much bias is in that. Sure, technology is developing fast, but its been quite fast since just before the start of the industrial revolution or when humans started walking or farming etc. I would speculate during those times of rapid development of some of the historical civilisations there was probably just as much of a feeling of it being at a hinge as now. It's just that right now we like to attract people's attention and creating suspense and that sense of hingeyness is good at attracting attention and there's now a lot of money to be made from attracting attention. Not just money, but you can drive political action if you give people this kind of sense of do or die urgency. This could turn the hypothesis into a self fulfilling prophecy. That's why we need better arguments against it.

jl6 6y ago

For those who didn't read the article, the conclusion is: "probably not". This is an example of how an idea is granted false legitimacy by having a catchy alliterative name.

personlurking 6y ago
as well as this law: Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
mistermann 6y ago
> This is an example of how an idea is granted false legitimacy by having a catchy alliterative name. Technically, the legitimacy of this idea is unknown, necessarily. This is an example of how heuristic predictions about reality (and the future of it) can easily be mistaken for facts.

chippy 6y ago

For those who would like to delve a bit deeper into the Hinge of History, this is the link from the article and is well worth the read. It was submitted here 2 days ago and got zero points! https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XXLf6FmWujkxna3E6/are-we-living-at-the-most-influential-time-in-history-1 https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XXLf6FmWujkxna3E6/... Its often a human mistake to think that right now is the most important time ever because it is literally the moment we are in. With the perspective of history and with the imagination for the future you can start to see how what we think is the most urgent things maybe not so, and you can see how small changes elsewhere might be the best thing for the future. It can inoculate you against being manipulated by urgency-based calls for action.

watwut 6y ago
> It can inoculate you against being manipulated by urgency-based calls for action. Perspective of history however does not show that being passive is universally what is needed more that if we wait, it gonna be alright. Now that current need is not urgent. I mean, not being the most important historical moment does not imply it is not important for us and those right after us. Generally we should seek to avoid those super important moments by working on issues before they get so bad.
- chippy 6y ago
  Agreed! It's one thing to be aware of rhetorical tricks of urgency and its another not to do anything. I think it's very telling that the post that started this whole thing off was on an Effective Altruism forum.
m-i-l 6y ago
> Its often a human mistake to think that right now is the most important time ever because it is literally the moment we are in. Whenever I ask my youngest child what their favourite toy is, more often than not it is the one they have just played with, or what their favourite book is, and it is the one they have most recently read. I suspect that our view of history is similar. Now is always the most important moment in time, whichever time now is.

cblconfederate 6y ago

I wonder what percentage of people want to see huge historical changes at this point. I certainly feel that the past decades were too stable, then stagnant, and it feels like covid is accelerating the moves considerably. If anything, i want more of it

0xBA5ED 6y ago
Be careful what you wish for. Rapid large-scale change is exciting perhaps, but not controllable. It is a recipe for sub-populations to slip through the cracks, increasing human suffering.
umvi 6y ago
So in other words, you are tired of "move slow and preserve things" and want more "move fast and break things"
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  moving fast and breaking things are orthogonal
  - rytill 6y ago
    Moving fast and breaking things are not the same thing, but they're correlated. Certainly they are not orthogonal.

jpz 6y ago

The front of any exponential curve will always feel like the time of most significance. More generally, everything else is grist for the mill - now is all that counts. We are always at the "hinge of history", surely.

29athrowaway 6y ago

The historian Yuval Noah Harari says that we are transitioning from an era dominated by human emotion, into an era dominated by data-driven manipulation of those emotions. By gathering data from each individual, it is possible to build a profile that can be used to predict how that person would react to different stimuli. And at scale, it can be used to trigger people's emotions like playing a piano, manipulating them at will. Today we can already see that by emphasizing divisive topics like: "abortion", "gun control", "immigration"... it is possible to make people upset towards each other with a high success rate. What if the reason these topics are emphasized is not morality but really about how people will emotionally react to them?

ggm 6y ago

I wonder how ordinary people felt in 1848, or 1871, or 1789 or ....

TLightful 6y ago

No, it's technically and scientifically known as the h'arse of history.

chiefalchemist 6y ago

Twenty years ago or so it was "the end of history." Now it's a hinge? It sounds like historians keep finding solutions that are in need of problem. Or perhaps, a book or two needs to be sold? Meanwhile, we're struggling to get past history properly re-paradigmed.

known 6y ago

Humans are 'infinitely' diverse (physically/emotionally/morally/genetically) They'll adapt/prevail to adverse conditions/environment;

dfilppi 6y ago

No, we aren't.

username90 6y ago

Thought experiment: Lets say you live the life of a random human throughout all time, both past and future. That is one data point, but one data point can tell us quite a lot still. So lets say you start your life, and you notice that the human population had just expanded exponentially to 100 times what it usually was, what would you assume will happen in the future? If the future will hold millions of years with humanity prospering on earth with roughly current population number then picking a human born today is very small, it is like winning the lottery. If humanity expands quadratically to other solar systems then the chance of being born today is basically none. The most likely scenario would be that human population is currently at its peak and the population will within not that many generations dwindle down to almost nothing and probably go extinct.

fractaled 6y ago
I don't think this logic applies to the demographics of today. The total number of humans to have ever lived is calculated to be ~105 billion. So assuming you're applying that logic to today, you're one of the most recent ~7%, which doesn't seem that remarkable -- at least not to the point of assuming fatalistic scenarios.
- username90 6y ago
  If humanity continues like this with no new discoveries then in ten million years we would have 200 million per year * 10 million years = 2 quadrillion people. Getting a human who lived at the start of that peak is very improbable. But you are right, civilization lasting another few thousand years isn't that improbable. Just that it is strange that it would last a thousand years but not a million, seems like humanity should have figured out how to stabilize things if civlization lasts that long. Edit: Or maybe our ultimate downfall will just be lack of evolutionary pressure so at some point nobody can sustain civlization. That wouldn't happen in a thousand years but a million years is definitely enough. Edit2: Or we solve our lifespan issue very soon and people no longer die, so people also no longer can procreate or they would exhaust available resources.

anovikov 6y ago

We're not, time between start of WWII and till the Arab Oil embargo when the technical revolution ended, was quite a bit more influential. And yes sure people had an even better way to destroy biosphere then too, as well as lots of ways to make things better, and it's fair to say our grandfathers used this resource in general, in a very constructive way. We neither got that much potential to either break or fix things, nor we make a wiser use of what we have. Yes we got Elon Musk sure, but apart from him, all that the humankind is doing is finding progressively sneakier ways to make people click on ads, which is hardly a great achievement. Everything else from art to politics is just a tool to this end.

throwaway0956 6y ago

I find it amusing that as soon as the West experiences mildly uncomfortable living conditions in comparison to the rest of the world we start getting all kinds of dystopian articles from the press. No, we aren't living at the "hinge of history." We're living through a phase during which people realize that after generations of wealth and prosperity they have no idea how to live through discomfort.

Oricle 6y ago

BBC, don't believe anything this pedophile institute says!

miketlewis 6y ago

The author's argument that we are not at a hinge point because "there are potentially a vast number of people ahead of us, yet to born" is challenged by the doomsday argument which suggests that it is statically most likely that the future population is equivalent to the historic population, and thus, given that the current population is exceptionally high, catastrophic collapse is imminent. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument