6 ms·

For basically everyone of an age to being reading HN, we've essentially never known anything other than technology (and life in general) improving over time, of

For basically everyone of an age to being reading HN, we've essentially never known anything other than technology (and life in general) improving over time, often exponentially. If you've never seen this talk by Jonathan Blow, he's makes a rather compelling argument that we don't necessarily have any reason to believe this will continue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

fallous 6y ago
I'm not sure I'd use the term "improving" but would instead say "changing." The perception of those changes has certainly been weighted towards "improvement" but some of that perception is a hangover from the popular mid-century views that most people held regarding science and technology (others held such views prior to that time but I wouldn't say they were the majority).
- hntrader 6y ago
  Read Steven Pinker's works. Things have been improving according to any meaningful definition of that word.
  - hollandheese 6y ago
    And then read his critics who blow his whiggish history out of the water.
    - hntrader 6y ago
      Which one should I read first? I read Taleb's critique, who comes off as a raving lunatic in this context, and Gladwell who must have some axe to grind since he doesn't actually address the concrete metrics that Pinker brings up. Lower childhood mortality, less poverty, longer life expectancy, less violent crime, less disease, more equality, less war. Things are getting better, along almost every metric we can think of. It's not just "different". It's also not just Pinker's work confirming that, OurWorldInData is good on this topic too. The only sensible argument I've heard to the contrary is that our systemic tail risks have gotten bigger. Which is accurate but doesn't change the fact that things are much better for almost everyone presuming that such risks can be mitigated.
      - neolog 6y ago
        I'm sure you can think of other dimensions in which things are worse than they used to be. (Not being snarky, I just think things are usually more complicated.)
      - hollandheese 6y ago
        Honestly just google "Steven Pinker critique" and you'll find lots of good ones. Jason Hinkel's are especially good: https://twitter.com/jasonhickel/status/1334072469091708929?lang=en https://twitter.com/jasonhickel/status/1334072469091708929?l...
        hntrader 6y ago
        Jason Hinkel's article raises some good points but is hardly a valid rebuttal. It's extremely weak. I'm still firmly on the side of Pinker's narrative, which clearly fits the data far better. (1) Hinkel falsely concludes that "The poverty rate has worsened dramatically since 1981", using a graph of the number of people in poverty (which increases by ~31% between 1981 to 2013) as justification. The rate did not increase. The rate decreased according to his own graph! The population increased by 59% over that same time period, so the correct conclusion from his own data is that the poverty rate actually reduced over that same time period. (2) Not only is poverty better, but almost every other meaningful metric (disease/mortality/war deaths/crime deaths) is also better, which he hand-waves away in a single paragraph after falsely asserting that the poverty rate has gone up! It is borderline dishonest, or perhaps at best he is innumerate. If this is the best rebuttal then I am even more confident in the conclusion that things are getting better - MUCH better - aside from a number of existential tail risks that we need to mitigate.
        neolog 6y ago
        Excluding China, the graph in [1] shows ~3pp decrease in poverty over 30 years, and a good portion of that time was above the starting point so it might just be random fluctuation. Also, > only 5% of new income from global growth goes to the poorest 60% of humanity – people living on less than $7.40/day. https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-poverty https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-...
  - fallous 6y ago
    By "things" it seems you ignore the key bit of the parent I was replying to... namely "technology," especially within the confines of the main article which focused on UX. Specifically I used the word "changing" rather than "improving" because within the tech world (and to a degree the larger world of product) there is a long history of new and novel equating to better, hence the tired ad slogan "new and improved!" That emphasis on newness as desirable is a result of the many measurable improvements that did result from the rapid pace of innovation that occurred in the 19th and 20th century, improvements that were obviously perceptible in that they resulted in large leaps forward vs incrementally over long time periods. Also, to claim that there has been improvements for large-scale populations via some new thing is nowhere close to being sufficient to explain how that new thing is an improvement for the individual customer.
dave_sid 6y ago
How about this. Tonight, when I want to watch a program on BBC Iplayer, I need to switch on the kindle fire stick, wait for it to load, find the iplayer app and wait for 30 seconds until it loads, search for a channel, with each character I type taking 0.5 seconds to show up on the screen (no kidding), select the channel and wait 10 seconds for it to buffer. When I was a kid, I just used to press one button on the front of the tv and it was on in less than a second. Not sure what my point is really but there’s something not quite right with this situation. Technology has improved choice but made the experience awful.
- anderspitman 6y ago
  The cool thing is that while it's not easy, there's probably never been an easier time to make good stuff. There's a lot of opportunity out there to make better experiences.
- kenjackson 6y ago
  You can't just turn on the TV? It seems like all of those other steps allow you more flexibility to do a bunch of stuff you probably couldn't do as a kid, such as watch BBC from any country in the world, or watch something from the BBC that came on earlier, or to pause the BBC so you can get some chips from the pantry. Every once in a while, Netflix will take like 15s to load. But before I cuss out my XBox One, I do try to remember that as a kid I was happy downloading one picture off a 300BPS modem in like 10 minutes from a BBS (which sometimes took 30 minutes to finally get into) back when I was kid.
- dmix 6y ago
  My android box running pirated streaming and torrent services (or even IPTV occasionally when I want to watch “TV”) seems to work 100x better than your proprietary tech. Plus it runs Prime and Netflix just fine... My $50 Chromecast is still the best thing around for watching movies or streams off my computer. Kodi works but it takes set up times which I don’t like investing. Sounds like you either just have low end tech or bad gov run software services. And I’m not running anything fancy just your typical Android SoC with a decent remote with a keyboard on the back, which I bought for <$100 max off Amazon.
prox 6y ago
In decade 1 as the author describes it, there was still patience of investors that there ROI would come, and AI/data wasn’t feasible enough, so good UX was the name of the game. Think of carts that needed to be 1 click affairs. When I did my training in advertising, the first line uttered by my teacher was “We are learning you to lie here” , and indeed the rest of the course was about how to deceive the customer by pushing the right buttons. That’s the state of affairs of most of the commercial web. And I think you are right it won’t change.

fallous 6y ago

I'm not sure I'd use the term "improving" but would instead say "changing." The perception of those changes has certainly been weighted towards "improvement" but some of that perception is a hangover from the popular mid-century views that most people held regarding science and technology (others held such views prior to that time but I wouldn't say they were the majority).

hntrader 6y ago
Read Steven Pinker's works. Things have been improving according to any meaningful definition of that word.
- hollandheese 6y ago
  And then read his critics who blow his whiggish history out of the water.
  - hntrader 6y ago
    Which one should I read first? I read Taleb's critique, who comes off as a raving lunatic in this context, and Gladwell who must have some axe to grind since he doesn't actually address the concrete metrics that Pinker brings up. Lower childhood mortality, less poverty, longer life expectancy, less violent crime, less disease, more equality, less war. Things are getting better, along almost every metric we can think of. It's not just "different". It's also not just Pinker's work confirming that, OurWorldInData is good on this topic too. The only sensible argument I've heard to the contrary is that our systemic tail risks have gotten bigger. Which is accurate but doesn't change the fact that things are much better for almost everyone presuming that such risks can be mitigated.
    - neolog 6y ago
      I'm sure you can think of other dimensions in which things are worse than they used to be. (Not being snarky, I just think things are usually more complicated.)
    - hollandheese 6y ago
      Honestly just google "Steven Pinker critique" and you'll find lots of good ones. Jason Hinkel's are especially good: https://twitter.com/jasonhickel/status/1334072469091708929?lang=en https://twitter.com/jasonhickel/status/1334072469091708929?l...
      - hntrader 6y ago
        Jason Hinkel's article raises some good points but is hardly a valid rebuttal. It's extremely weak. I'm still firmly on the side of Pinker's narrative, which clearly fits the data far better. (1) Hinkel falsely concludes that "The poverty rate has worsened dramatically since 1981", using a graph of the number of people in poverty (which increases by ~31% between 1981 to 2013) as justification. The rate did not increase. The rate decreased according to his own graph! The population increased by 59% over that same time period, so the correct conclusion from his own data is that the poverty rate actually reduced over that same time period. (2) Not only is poverty better, but almost every other meaningful metric (disease/mortality/war deaths/crime deaths) is also better, which he hand-waves away in a single paragraph after falsely asserting that the poverty rate has gone up! It is borderline dishonest, or perhaps at best he is innumerate. If this is the best rebuttal then I am even more confident in the conclusion that things are getting better - MUCH better - aside from a number of existential tail risks that we need to mitigate.
        neolog 6y ago
        Excluding China, the graph in [1] shows ~3pp decrease in poverty over 30 years, and a good portion of that time was above the starting point so it might just be random fluctuation. Also, > only 5% of new income from global growth goes to the poorest 60% of humanity – people living on less than $7.40/day. https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-poverty https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-...
- fallous 6y ago
  By "things" it seems you ignore the key bit of the parent I was replying to... namely "technology," especially within the confines of the main article which focused on UX. Specifically I used the word "changing" rather than "improving" because within the tech world (and to a degree the larger world of product) there is a long history of new and novel equating to better, hence the tired ad slogan "new and improved!" That emphasis on newness as desirable is a result of the many measurable improvements that did result from the rapid pace of innovation that occurred in the 19th and 20th century, improvements that were obviously perceptible in that they resulted in large leaps forward vs incrementally over long time periods. Also, to claim that there has been improvements for large-scale populations via some new thing is nowhere close to being sufficient to explain how that new thing is an improvement for the individual customer.

dave_sid 6y ago

How about this. Tonight, when I want to watch a program on BBC Iplayer, I need to switch on the kindle fire stick, wait for it to load, find the iplayer app and wait for 30 seconds until it loads, search for a channel, with each character I type taking 0.5 seconds to show up on the screen (no kidding), select the channel and wait 10 seconds for it to buffer. When I was a kid, I just used to press one button on the front of the tv and it was on in less than a second. Not sure what my point is really but there’s something not quite right with this situation. Technology has improved choice but made the experience awful.

anderspitman 6y ago
The cool thing is that while it's not easy, there's probably never been an easier time to make good stuff. There's a lot of opportunity out there to make better experiences.
kenjackson 6y ago
You can't just turn on the TV? It seems like all of those other steps allow you more flexibility to do a bunch of stuff you probably couldn't do as a kid, such as watch BBC from any country in the world, or watch something from the BBC that came on earlier, or to pause the BBC so you can get some chips from the pantry. Every once in a while, Netflix will take like 15s to load. But before I cuss out my XBox One, I do try to remember that as a kid I was happy downloading one picture off a 300BPS modem in like 10 minutes from a BBS (which sometimes took 30 minutes to finally get into) back when I was kid.
dmix 6y ago
My android box running pirated streaming and torrent services (or even IPTV occasionally when I want to watch “TV”) seems to work 100x better than your proprietary tech. Plus it runs Prime and Netflix just fine... My $50 Chromecast is still the best thing around for watching movies or streams off my computer. Kodi works but it takes set up times which I don’t like investing. Sounds like you either just have low end tech or bad gov run software services. And I’m not running anything fancy just your typical Android SoC with a decent remote with a keyboard on the back, which I bought for <$100 max off Amazon.

prox 6y ago

In decade 1 as the author describes it, there was still patience of investors that there ROI would come, and AI/data wasn’t feasible enough, so good UX was the name of the game. Think of carts that needed to be 1 click affairs. When I did my training in advertising, the first line uttered by my teacher was “We are learning you to lie here” , and indeed the rest of the course was about how to deceive the customer by pushing the right buttons. That’s the state of affairs of most of the commercial web. And I think you are right it won’t change.