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A book like this will sell very well to the contingent that always thinks everything's going downhill. People have been saying the same at every single point al

by simonh 5y ago

A book like this will sell very well to the contingent that always thinks everything's going downhill. People have been saying the same at every single point all the way through the remarkable advances over the last few centuries. Running out of steam, as in a slowdown in the growth curve on various metrics is not the same as a decline. It's simply unrealistic to expect technology and engineering to advance as fast as they did in the mid-20th Century indefinitely. We've exhausted a lot of the low hanging fruit on the science and technology trees, but there are still plenty of fruit to pick, we just need to put more work into reaching them. On the political side, again political division and policy confusion are nothing new. The scientific and technical response to the Pandemic are a resounding validation of our capabilities and the strength of our institutions, even given the many frankly inevitable policy missteps. The big one is climate change. That's a huge problem that's a real test of our capabilities and resolve, but the main obstacles are actually political. We do have the technical capability to bend the curve on climate change and soften the blow quite a bit. Hand wringing isn't going to help, in fact it emboldens those who for various reasons don't want to do anything about it.

LocalH 5y ago
Things can still be "going downhill" while some things are better than they've ever been in human history. Frame of reference is a big thing that is almost never discussed - one's perception of how "bad" things are can only be informed by what one has already experienced, and otherwise influenced by the media that is plopped in front of us (in a kind of feedback loop). Your "bad" is not the same as my "bad" and that is true for everyone. A certain amount of "bad" experience is necessary in this world, in order to truly appreciate the "good", when you look at it. In that sense, a pure utopia would actually be a bad thing in the whole of human existence.
- simonh 5y ago
  I simply don't believe that a preponderance of the things we value in our society are actually declining. From the article: "In his new book, On Decline: Stagnation, Nostalgia and Why Every Year is the Worst One Ever, Potter argues that the West's two centuries of progress and prosperity — underpinned by liberal democracy, plentiful energy and natural resources, and economic growth — has ground to a halt and is now even going backwards." None of those things - technological progress, prosperity, access to democracy, economic growth - are actually declining. Take out the last 2 years of the pandemic, and global metrics on all these fronts have been making robust advances. Global poverty in particular has undergone dramatic falls as hundreds of millions of people in China and across South East Asia left behind grinding poverty and joined the global middle class. Even Africa, which always has problems in many areas, has actually been doing pretty well by historical standards. "The West" is doing fine as well, a few slow patches and setbacks sure but nothing fundamental. All the things weighing on people's minds in the last few years - Brexit, Trump, immigration, even Islamic terrorism - are just annoyances. Relative to actual tangible improvements in most people's lives they're just unfortunate speed bumps. They don't actually move the needle at a civilizational level.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - mdp2021 5y ago
    Then do not consider trends and consider the state of affairs: is it satisfactory for you? Those «improvements in most people's lives» to you make bestialities disappear? You have a different set of values than others. If some of the things implicit in your list do not «move the needle at a civilizational level» (actually, they do), it is because they reveal a situation which already positions the needle some of us judge at an unfortunate level. Though they may not be declining (they are), they remain in a dire state (to other's evaluation).
    - simonh 5y ago
      Of _course_ the state of affairs today is not satisfactory. There are many ways we could improve the world, or Western Civilization. That's a completely different question. We face several serious challenges to our civilization in the coming decades, no question. I don't even know if we will overcome them, but if we don't then out civilization will be in decline, if we do overcome them then it won't.
  - bllguo 5y ago
    it's clearly talking about the decline of Western civilization, so it's quite bold to take credit for the successes of the alternatives the West is hellbent on destroying
  - tuatoru 5y ago
    Access to democracy is declining in practical terms. This is one of the main reasons that it costs so much to build public infrastructure like high-speed rail or a new tunnel under the Hudson, and why the government is not doing enough on climate change despite the results of surveys, for instance. A minority can veto actions that would benefit everyone else.
- mdp2021 5y ago
  > A certain amount of "bad" experience Sorry, but certainly not: just the implicit awareness of having avoided bad experiences is sufficient. Intelligence is the ability to entail consequences out of events not experienced (Prof. Patrick Winston) - you just need intelligence. One certainly does not need to catch fire while being run over by a steamroller, to appreciate carrying on one's own business. If another does, their issue - but it's an issue.
  - LocalH 5y ago
    There can be a very important subjective difference between close calls and actual bad experience. As well, it’s quite nuanced, even such a a close call can still be classed as a net “bad” experience, even if the really bad thing didn’t actually happen.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Yes, there's the difference between direct and second-hand knowledge. At the same time, one must acknowledge that there is a history, whether living, oral, written, archaeological, geological, or whatevs, of the past. There is no record of what will happen in the future. It is the one remaining terra incognita.
- philwelch 5y ago
  > Frame of reference is a big thing that is almost never discussed - one's perception of how "bad" things are can only be informed by what one has already experienced, and otherwise influenced by the media that is plopped in front of us (in a kind of feedback loop). Your "bad" is not the same as my "bad" and that is true for everyone. This can work both ways. As the past is increasingly forgotten, the conditions of the present are more and more normalized. For instance, how many people actually remember what airline flights were like before the TSA? There are fewer of them every year.
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
"We do have the technical capability to bend the curve on climate change and soften the blow quite a bit." The fundamental economics of the last century was cheap resource access and cheap technology development. The fundamental economics of the next century are resource shortage. The other primary fundamental economic change in the next century will be 5-6 billion people wanting the lifestyle and resource use of the first world, or even an approximation of it. And finally, global warming will displace several billion people, possibly more. Look at the Syria crisis, probably 1/1000th of the scale of the problem, to see how the world can handle that. When we discuss overpopulation, it is simplified and dumbed down. The real danger isn't some raw count of the number of people (7.9 billion and counting), but that number MULTIPLIED by the amount of resources their lifestyle needs. The pandemic is showing: - we cannot coordinate on a simple thing like "get jabbed once for free" - our economic supply chains are stretched thin, delicate, prone to disruption, and little in the way of redundancy or buffer - And most dangerously, the rich/elite don't care, they think they can fly off if the shit hits the fan.
- simonh 5y ago
  Firstly the US isn't the whole world, or even "The West". Plenty of countries have handled the pandemic reasonably well and have efficient vaccination programmes with strong public support. Mine is one. Heck even in the US you'll get over it. The Spanish Flu was far worse. I'm a pro-vax mask wearing Covid believer, I think the lockdowns were prudent. Even so, at a civilizational level it's just another speed bump either way. At the civilizational level even WW2 and Soviet and Chinese communism were just speed bumps. That's how powerful the forces of technological and social advancement are. The idea that Brexit or Trump, bad as they are, pose threats to our civilization? It's utterly absurd. Secondly all of those are forward looking predictions. They may happen, they may be mitigated by near term action. Right now we are still on an up swing that has wobbled a bit. That's not to be complacent, we face some tough challenges, but saying we face the possibility of a downward turn and that we are now in a downturn are two completely different things. Claiming the first when it's palpably, visibly not true on any relevant metric doesn't help build credibility for the second prediction.
  - 5y ago
philwelch 5y ago
> Running out of steam, as in a slowdown in the growth curve on various metrics is not the same as a decline. In the long run, it absolutely is. It's possible for any given point on the curve to have a positive first derivative and a negative second derivative, but if the second derivative stays negative, the first derivative will also ultimately turn negative. Which also leads to questions of whether there's a long term trend at all, or if it's simply a cycle. The derivative of a sine wave is just another sine wave (technically a cosine wave but the same shape). So you don't get anywhere in The way you know you're at the peak of a sine wave is if the derivative reaches zero but you're still upwards of where you started from.teresting looking at second derivatives. > It's simply unrealistic to expect technology and engineering to advance as fast as they did in the mid-20th Century indefinitely. We've exhausted a lot of the low hanging fruit on the science and technology trees, but there are still plenty of fruit to pick, we just need to put more work into reaching them. Physical technology is also one of the worst indicators of civilizational decline. Completely losing technology almost never happens outside of an outright civilizational collapse--the obvious example of this being the fall of Rome and the early Middle Ages, though the notion of the "Dark Ages" is highly controversial and somewhat overstated at the very least. I'm not even sure if the Bronze Age Collapse corresponded to a decline in technology. (Though the complexity of the technology itself is also a factor--while we understand how to do it in principle, for instance, we have lost the technology to land people on the moon.) (Social technology can be lost a lot more easily.) Here are a handful of clearer signs of civilizational decline: * The free-range territory of children has been declining continuously since the 20th century * Infrastructure megaprojects. In 1886, all of the railroads in the southern United States were all converted to the standard gauge used in the North over a 36-hour period, with no expenditure of federal funds that I'm aware of. Between 1956 and 1992, the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System was constructed with a total cost, in 2021 dollars, of approximately $500 billion. The current infrastructure bill in Congress costs $3500 billion and does not, in fact, construct seven brand new interstate highway systems. * Rising rates of obesity * Declining levels of testosterone
- dmux 5y ago
  And microplastics in _everything_.
- 5y ago

by simonh 5y ago

LocalH 5y ago

Things can still be "going downhill" while some things are better than they've ever been in human history. Frame of reference is a big thing that is almost never discussed - one's perception of how "bad" things are can only be informed by what one has already experienced, and otherwise influenced by the media that is plopped in front of us (in a kind of feedback loop). Your "bad" is not the same as my "bad" and that is true for everyone. A certain amount of "bad" experience is necessary in this world, in order to truly appreciate the "good", when you look at it. In that sense, a pure utopia would actually be a bad thing in the whole of human existence.

simonh 5y ago
I simply don't believe that a preponderance of the things we value in our society are actually declining. From the article: "In his new book, On Decline: Stagnation, Nostalgia and Why Every Year is the Worst One Ever, Potter argues that the West's two centuries of progress and prosperity — underpinned by liberal democracy, plentiful energy and natural resources, and economic growth — has ground to a halt and is now even going backwards." None of those things - technological progress, prosperity, access to democracy, economic growth - are actually declining. Take out the last 2 years of the pandemic, and global metrics on all these fronts have been making robust advances. Global poverty in particular has undergone dramatic falls as hundreds of millions of people in China and across South East Asia left behind grinding poverty and joined the global middle class. Even Africa, which always has problems in many areas, has actually been doing pretty well by historical standards. "The West" is doing fine as well, a few slow patches and setbacks sure but nothing fundamental. All the things weighing on people's minds in the last few years - Brexit, Trump, immigration, even Islamic terrorism - are just annoyances. Relative to actual tangible improvements in most people's lives they're just unfortunate speed bumps. They don't actually move the needle at a civilizational level.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mdp2021 5y ago
  Then do not consider trends and consider the state of affairs: is it satisfactory for you? Those «improvements in most people's lives» to you make bestialities disappear? You have a different set of values than others. If some of the things implicit in your list do not «move the needle at a civilizational level» (actually, they do), it is because they reveal a situation which already positions the needle some of us judge at an unfortunate level. Though they may not be declining (they are), they remain in a dire state (to other's evaluation).
  - simonh 5y ago
    Of _course_ the state of affairs today is not satisfactory. There are many ways we could improve the world, or Western Civilization. That's a completely different question. We face several serious challenges to our civilization in the coming decades, no question. I don't even know if we will overcome them, but if we don't then out civilization will be in decline, if we do overcome them then it won't.
- bllguo 5y ago
  it's clearly talking about the decline of Western civilization, so it's quite bold to take credit for the successes of the alternatives the West is hellbent on destroying
- tuatoru 5y ago
  Access to democracy is declining in practical terms. This is one of the main reasons that it costs so much to build public infrastructure like high-speed rail or a new tunnel under the Hudson, and why the government is not doing enough on climate change despite the results of surveys, for instance. A minority can veto actions that would benefit everyone else.
mdp2021 5y ago
> A certain amount of "bad" experience Sorry, but certainly not: just the implicit awareness of having avoided bad experiences is sufficient. Intelligence is the ability to entail consequences out of events not experienced (Prof. Patrick Winston) - you just need intelligence. One certainly does not need to catch fire while being run over by a steamroller, to appreciate carrying on one's own business. If another does, their issue - but it's an issue.
- LocalH 5y ago
  There can be a very important subjective difference between close calls and actual bad experience. As well, it’s quite nuanced, even such a a close call can still be classed as a net “bad” experience, even if the really bad thing didn’t actually happen.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Yes, there's the difference between direct and second-hand knowledge. At the same time, one must acknowledge that there is a history, whether living, oral, written, archaeological, geological, or whatevs, of the past. There is no record of what will happen in the future. It is the one remaining terra incognita.
philwelch 5y ago
> Frame of reference is a big thing that is almost never discussed - one's perception of how "bad" things are can only be informed by what one has already experienced, and otherwise influenced by the media that is plopped in front of us (in a kind of feedback loop). Your "bad" is not the same as my "bad" and that is true for everyone. This can work both ways. As the past is increasingly forgotten, the conditions of the present are more and more normalized. For instance, how many people actually remember what airline flights were like before the TSA? There are fewer of them every year.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

"We do have the technical capability to bend the curve on climate change and soften the blow quite a bit." The fundamental economics of the last century was cheap resource access and cheap technology development. The fundamental economics of the next century are resource shortage. The other primary fundamental economic change in the next century will be 5-6 billion people wanting the lifestyle and resource use of the first world, or even an approximation of it. And finally, global warming will displace several billion people, possibly more. Look at the Syria crisis, probably 1/1000th of the scale of the problem, to see how the world can handle that. When we discuss overpopulation, it is simplified and dumbed down. The real danger isn't some raw count of the number of people (7.9 billion and counting), but that number MULTIPLIED by the amount of resources their lifestyle needs. The pandemic is showing: - we cannot coordinate on a simple thing like "get jabbed once for free" - our economic supply chains are stretched thin, delicate, prone to disruption, and little in the way of redundancy or buffer - And most dangerously, the rich/elite don't care, they think they can fly off if the shit hits the fan.

simonh 5y ago
Firstly the US isn't the whole world, or even "The West". Plenty of countries have handled the pandemic reasonably well and have efficient vaccination programmes with strong public support. Mine is one. Heck even in the US you'll get over it. The Spanish Flu was far worse. I'm a pro-vax mask wearing Covid believer, I think the lockdowns were prudent. Even so, at a civilizational level it's just another speed bump either way. At the civilizational level even WW2 and Soviet and Chinese communism were just speed bumps. That's how powerful the forces of technological and social advancement are. The idea that Brexit or Trump, bad as they are, pose threats to our civilization? It's utterly absurd. Secondly all of those are forward looking predictions. They may happen, they may be mitigated by near term action. Right now we are still on an up swing that has wobbled a bit. That's not to be complacent, we face some tough challenges, but saying we face the possibility of a downward turn and that we are now in a downturn are two completely different things. Claiming the first when it's palpably, visibly not true on any relevant metric doesn't help build credibility for the second prediction.
- 5y ago

philwelch 5y ago

> Running out of steam, as in a slowdown in the growth curve on various metrics is not the same as a decline. In the long run, it absolutely is. It's possible for any given point on the curve to have a positive first derivative and a negative second derivative, but if the second derivative stays negative, the first derivative will also ultimately turn negative. Which also leads to questions of whether there's a long term trend at all, or if it's simply a cycle. The derivative of a sine wave is just another sine wave (technically a cosine wave but the same shape). So you don't get anywhere in The way you know you're at the peak of a sine wave is if the derivative reaches zero but you're still upwards of where you started from.teresting looking at second derivatives. > It's simply unrealistic to expect technology and engineering to advance as fast as they did in the mid-20th Century indefinitely. We've exhausted a lot of the low hanging fruit on the science and technology trees, but there are still plenty of fruit to pick, we just need to put more work into reaching them. Physical technology is also one of the worst indicators of civilizational decline. Completely losing technology almost never happens outside of an outright civilizational collapse--the obvious example of this being the fall of Rome and the early Middle Ages, though the notion of the "Dark Ages" is highly controversial and somewhat overstated at the very least. I'm not even sure if the Bronze Age Collapse corresponded to a decline in technology. (Though the complexity of the technology itself is also a factor--while we understand how to do it in principle, for instance, we have lost the technology to land people on the moon.) (Social technology can be lost a lot more easily.) Here are a handful of clearer signs of civilizational decline: * The free-range territory of children has been declining continuously since the 20th century * Infrastructure megaprojects. In 1886, all of the railroads in the southern United States were all converted to the standard gauge used in the North over a 36-hour period, with no expenditure of federal funds that I'm aware of. Between 1956 and 1992, the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System was constructed with a total cost, in 2021 dollars, of approximately $500 billion. The current infrastructure bill in Congress costs $3500 billion and does not, in fact, construct seven brand new interstate highway systems. * Rising rates of obesity * Declining levels of testosterone

dmux 5y ago
And microplastics in _everything_.
5y ago