8 ms·

Pessimists Archive

63 points by Jugurtha 5y ago

dash2 5y ago
Yeah, up to a point, right? It's interesting they have TV in there but TV addiction is (probably) a real thing (http://sites.oxy.edu/clint/physio/article/televisionaddiction.pdf http://sites.oxy.edu/clint/physio/article/televisionaddictio...).
- Jugurtha 5y ago
  Wouldn't TV addiction be an addiction problem? There also are knife accidents, car accidents, swimming pool related drownings, email addiction, work addiction. These exist, but what are the externalities in general?
  - dash2 5y ago
    Heroin addiction is an addiction problem too... but TV addiction, like heroin addiction, seems quite widespread. (Average screen use is now something like 8 hours per day, IIRC.) There might also be externalities. Suppose you want to play outside, but all your friends are watching TV.
- 0xdeadb00f 5y ago
  TV addiction is almost definitely a real thing. So is social media addiction.
jl6 5y ago
We desperately need longitudinal news media. Current news works like this: 1. Something looks bad 2. Generate outrage 3. Forget all about it 4. Go to 1, on another topic. Can you imagine a form of journalism that picks its topics for the year, then relentlessly follows up on them every day, not getting distracted by passing outrage, but actually digging deeply? Sites like this could be a start, to help us stop forgetting.
- qsort 5y ago
  Digging deeply into anything requires time and focus most people won't put in if they have any choice at all. We have far greater means to temporally cross-reference media now than at any other point in history, and yet most news outlets outright abitually lie about publicly available information. We vastly overestimate how much people care whether things are true or false.
- crtasm 5y ago
  https://private-eye.co.uk/ https://private-eye.co.uk/ do some excellent investigations and special reports, I think mostly only available in the print copy though.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 5y ago
  In many ways, the news that we get is the news that consumers of news generally care about—so if an issue gets buried under much more current ones, it’s just a consequence of people caring about the current ones. We’re pretty much asking for human nature to change here. You also can’t reasonably expect journalism to report on something where there is nothing new or significant to report, which happens a lot in long legal cases.
- mjklin 5y ago
  That’s one reason I appreciate podcasts like “You’re Wrong About” that revisit past news stories and tell them properly.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
shaolinspirit 5y ago
this is hilarious. I'm wondering if blockchain will be there :D
tolstoywasright 5y ago
Not surprised seeing Pinker is a fan. These are the same type of people that parrot the "technology is neutral, it's how you use it" line. "Only by looking back at fears of old things when they were new, can we have rational constructive debates about emerging technologies today that avoids the pitfalls of moral panic and incumbent protectionism." Sure ok, start with this: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/228250.Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimination_of_Television https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/228250.Four_Arguments_fo...
- kspacewalk2 5y ago
  > "technology is neutral, it's how you use it" line. Seems like such an obviously true statement to me, that the only thing to add is that you cannot un-invent, abolish or wish it away. Folks who believe in the "complete nuclear disarmament" fairy tale have a hard time with this.
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    You might not be able to wish away nuclear weapons, but if all countries in the world wanted there to be no nuclear weapons, they could (after solving climate change) introduce a global ban on nuclear energy and the possession of fissionable elements. This would have to be accompanied by a powerful inspections regime, with big rewards for whistleblowers. Also, if a country did announce it had secretly produced nuclear weapons, or was discovered to have them, that would probably have to be treated as a casus belli, and all other countries would have a legal duty to launch a massive (conventional) bombardment of that country.
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      The entire world was able to come together to ban CFCs, so there’s at least one precedence of a harmful substance getting universal prohibition. And there are all sorts of human rights conventions on what may or may not be used in war.
  - janto 5y ago
    Is Twitter neutral?
mrzool 5y ago
> When the car began replacing the horse, pessimists didn’t treat it like a great new tool. They called it “the devil wagon,” and said its mission was to destroy the world. They were absolutely right.
- i_cannot_hack 5y ago
  The authors of the website really undermine their own point by including a lot of "hysterical" comments that are still reasonable warnings or complaints, were completely reasonable at the time (things change!) or are just sensible questions. The sections on computers includes an article matter-of-factly informing about a virus being found on 3000 computers. Calling the virus a time bomb is not hysteria - it was literally designed to be one. And surely computer viruses are an even bigger problem today? The clipping titled "Perils of the lazy age", which predicts that people sitting down in front of the television instead of chopping firewood will make people "unable to stand on their own feet" sure is obnoxiously written, but the sentiment is not wrong: Obesity and cardiovascular disease is basically an epidemic today. If these are some of the best examples of past hysteria, I guess we should listen more to those we consider hysterical today?
  - Flankk 5y ago
    I'd blame obesity on diet before I'd blame it on television. Six of one, half dozen of the other though. The entire food chain is GMO and soaked in poison.
    - tyre 5y ago
      What’s the issue with GMO? How is it different from cross-breeding and husbandry which we’ve been doing for millennia? (I’m asking honestly.)
      - forgotmypw17 5y ago
        First, it's a bit of a red herring, the biggest issue IMHO is the synthetic pesticide use which correlates it. Many plants are primarily GMO to make them pesticide-resistant. The issues with pesticides you may be aware of. Another issue is that often GMO correlates with patentry, terminator seeds, IP lawsuits, and so on. But that's also a tangential issue. The main issue is that, just like anything new, it puts us in the "beta testing in production" area, where the product being tested is "things which none of our ancestors have ever encountered, evolutionarily" and production environment is "our bodies".
janto 5y ago
This is representing only one quadrant of the predictions × outcomes matrix. Where are the pessimistic predictions that turned out to be accurate? Where are the optimistic predictions on disruptive tech that did turn out net negative? Where are the nuances?
- gameswithgo 5y ago
  How many bad outcomes did the pessimism prevent!
ForHackernews 5y ago
Ok, but television really did make the world worse. Arguably also the personal automobile.
- kspacewalk2 5y ago
  It's certainly the case that neither television not automobile were inventions completely free of negative effects. But to say that they made the world worse is a very myopic view, focused on first world moral panics rather than attempting to evaluate what these inventions meant for a Turkish or an Indian village, for example.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
spedru 5y ago
The website decided to randomly turn into a blank white page after clicking through a number of items on the timeline. Said timeline also obscures the bottom of the tweet embed on a small viewport. Between that and the cutesy center-justified monospace, perhaps the pessimists were at least right about Web Technologies™.
nbzso 5y ago
This is bias in propagandist form. Give me pessimistic archive with right vs wrong facts. Why in the era of digital information we don't have public tools to fact-check political and corporate propaganda vs scientific evidence. This will be a good nonprofit"startup" :)
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 5y ago
  What is a “wrong fact”?
po1nt 5y ago
I really hope AI will be added in future.
wayeq 5y ago
The 2015 bitcoin entry will just be a link to news.ycombinator.com

63 points by Jugurtha 5y ago

Yeah, up to a point, right? It's interesting they have TV in there but TV addiction is (probably) a real thing (http://sites.oxy.edu/clint/physio/article/televisionaddiction.pdf http://sites.oxy.edu/clint/physio/article/televisionaddictio...).

Jugurtha 5y ago
Wouldn't TV addiction be an addiction problem? There also are knife accidents, car accidents, swimming pool related drownings, email addiction, work addiction. These exist, but what are the externalities in general?
- dash2 5y ago
  Heroin addiction is an addiction problem too... but TV addiction, like heroin addiction, seems quite widespread. (Average screen use is now something like 8 hours per day, IIRC.) There might also be externalities. Suppose you want to play outside, but all your friends are watching TV.
0xdeadb00f 5y ago
TV addiction is almost definitely a real thing. So is social media addiction.

jl6 5y ago

We desperately need longitudinal news media. Current news works like this: 1. Something looks bad 2. Generate outrage 3. Forget all about it 4. Go to 1, on another topic. Can you imagine a form of journalism that picks its topics for the year, then relentlessly follows up on them every day, not getting distracted by passing outrage, but actually digging deeply? Sites like this could be a start, to help us stop forgetting.

qsort 5y ago
Digging deeply into anything requires time and focus most people won't put in if they have any choice at all. We have far greater means to temporally cross-reference media now than at any other point in history, and yet most news outlets outright abitually lie about publicly available information. We vastly overestimate how much people care whether things are true or false.
crtasm 5y ago
https://private-eye.co.uk/ https://private-eye.co.uk/ do some excellent investigations and special reports, I think mostly only available in the print copy though.
rTX5CMRXIfFG 5y ago
In many ways, the news that we get is the news that consumers of news generally care about—so if an issue gets buried under much more current ones, it’s just a consequence of people caring about the current ones. We’re pretty much asking for human nature to change here. You also can’t reasonably expect journalism to report on something where there is nothing new or significant to report, which happens a lot in long legal cases.
mjklin 5y ago
That’s one reason I appreciate podcasts like “You’re Wrong About” that revisit past news stories and tell them properly.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

shaolinspirit 5y ago

this is hilarious. I'm wondering if blockchain will be there :D

tolstoywasright 5y ago

Not surprised seeing Pinker is a fan. These are the same type of people that parrot the "technology is neutral, it's how you use it" line. "Only by looking back at fears of old things when they were new, can we have rational constructive debates about emerging technologies today that avoids the pitfalls of moral panic and incumbent protectionism." Sure ok, start with this: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/228250.Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimination_of_Television https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/228250.Four_Arguments_fo...

kspacewalk2 5y ago
> "technology is neutral, it's how you use it" line. Seems like such an obviously true statement to me, that the only thing to add is that you cannot un-invent, abolish or wish it away. Folks who believe in the "complete nuclear disarmament" fairy tale have a hard time with this.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  You might not be able to wish away nuclear weapons, but if all countries in the world wanted there to be no nuclear weapons, they could (after solving climate change) introduce a global ban on nuclear energy and the possession of fissionable elements. This would have to be accompanied by a powerful inspections regime, with big rewards for whistleblowers. Also, if a country did announce it had secretly produced nuclear weapons, or was discovered to have them, that would probably have to be treated as a casus belli, and all other countries would have a legal duty to launch a massive (conventional) bombardment of that country.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    The entire world was able to come together to ban CFCs, so there’s at least one precedence of a harmful substance getting universal prohibition. And there are all sorts of human rights conventions on what may or may not be used in war.
- janto 5y ago
  Is Twitter neutral?

mrzool 5y ago

> When the car began replacing the horse, pessimists didn’t treat it like a great new tool. They called it “the devil wagon,” and said its mission was to destroy the world. They were absolutely right.

i_cannot_hack 5y ago
The authors of the website really undermine their own point by including a lot of "hysterical" comments that are still reasonable warnings or complaints, were completely reasonable at the time (things change!) or are just sensible questions. The sections on computers includes an article matter-of-factly informing about a virus being found on 3000 computers. Calling the virus a time bomb is not hysteria - it was literally designed to be one. And surely computer viruses are an even bigger problem today? The clipping titled "Perils of the lazy age", which predicts that people sitting down in front of the television instead of chopping firewood will make people "unable to stand on their own feet" sure is obnoxiously written, but the sentiment is not wrong: Obesity and cardiovascular disease is basically an epidemic today. If these are some of the best examples of past hysteria, I guess we should listen more to those we consider hysterical today?
- Flankk 5y ago
  I'd blame obesity on diet before I'd blame it on television. Six of one, half dozen of the other though. The entire food chain is GMO and soaked in poison.
  - tyre 5y ago
    What’s the issue with GMO? How is it different from cross-breeding and husbandry which we’ve been doing for millennia? (I’m asking honestly.)
    - forgotmypw17 5y ago
      First, it's a bit of a red herring, the biggest issue IMHO is the synthetic pesticide use which correlates it. Many plants are primarily GMO to make them pesticide-resistant. The issues with pesticides you may be aware of. Another issue is that often GMO correlates with patentry, terminator seeds, IP lawsuits, and so on. But that's also a tangential issue. The main issue is that, just like anything new, it puts us in the "beta testing in production" area, where the product being tested is "things which none of our ancestors have ever encountered, evolutionarily" and production environment is "our bodies".

janto 5y ago

This is representing only one quadrant of the predictions × outcomes matrix. Where are the pessimistic predictions that turned out to be accurate? Where are the optimistic predictions on disruptive tech that did turn out net negative? Where are the nuances?

gameswithgo 5y ago
How many bad outcomes did the pessimism prevent!

ForHackernews 5y ago

Ok, but television really did make the world worse. Arguably also the personal automobile.

kspacewalk2 5y ago
It's certainly the case that neither television not automobile were inventions completely free of negative effects. But to say that they made the world worse is a very myopic view, focused on first world moral panics rather than attempting to evaluate what these inventions meant for a Turkish or an Indian village, for example.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

spedru 5y ago

The website decided to randomly turn into a blank white page after clicking through a number of items on the timeline. Said timeline also obscures the bottom of the tweet embed on a small viewport. Between that and the cutesy center-justified monospace, perhaps the pessimists were at least right about Web Technologies™.

nbzso 5y ago

This is bias in propagandist form. Give me pessimistic archive with right vs wrong facts. Why in the era of digital information we don't have public tools to fact-check political and corporate propaganda vs scientific evidence. This will be a good nonprofit"startup" :)

rTX5CMRXIfFG 5y ago
What is a “wrong fact”?

po1nt 5y ago

I really hope AI will be added in future.

wayeq 5y ago

The 2015 bitcoin entry will just be a link to news.ycombinator.com