8 ms·

Are Progressives in Denial About Progress? Yes, but So Is Almost Everyone Else

36 points by mpweiher 4y ago

kgwxd 4y ago
Progressives have to spend all their time trying to conserve the progress regressives endlessly try to take away.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  I think this is a fair explanation of the bias towards highlighting the negative, perhaps stated a bit divisively. But in essence, if people aren't kept focused on what isn't right yet, it's easy for them to see the positive and assume the future is here and uniformly distributed, when only one of those things is the case.
  - krapp 4y ago
    This is the main reason "color blindness" and other aspects of progressivism are seen as unintentionally reinforcing the status quo of white supremacy. Ignoring (or pretending to ignore) race in a society in which systemic racism still exists actively works against efforts to recognize and fight those issues, often to the point of those efforts being considered "racist" in merely acknowledging the problem (although that accusation more often comes in bad faith from the right.) Color blindness may be an ideal goal for the future, but we're not there yet.
    - kgwxd 4y ago
      It only unintentionally reinforcing white supremacy in that calling out white supremacy causes white supremacists to double-down on their efforts which, when unchecked, causes a feedback loop. If anyone could get anything done to actually punish white supremacists, the world might be able to evolve past seeing color. BLM exists because white supremacists exist, not the other way around. Getting rid of one would get rid of the other, but not vice versa. As childish as it sounds, someone started it, that's who deserves the punishment.
- throwawayfranco 4y ago
  [dead]
- throwawayfranco 4y ago
  [dead]
jackosdev 4y ago
It’s funny when someone is parroting the doom and gloom they hear from mainstream media, and you point out something like how world hunger and poverty is at an all time low, the standard of living has never been higher etc. most of the time they’ll just continue justifying their position, its only engineers that I’ve heard say “oh yeah..”
- d_e_solomon 4y ago
  > its only engineers that I’ve heard say “oh yeah..” Yes - only engineers are capable of independent and rational thought. The orange site continues to sniff its own farts.
  - ThrowawayR2 4y ago
    Not that I really disagree with you but you could have said that more civilly.
    - d_e_solomon 4y ago
      Yes, I should be more civil in my comment and thank you for pointing it out. I find the tone of "engineers, developers smart, everyone else dumb" to be really tiresome; and when it becomes self congratulatory, it becomes really irksome. It's also the casual dismissal of knowledge in other fields and lived experiences of others that just happen again and again here. I should probably find a different place to hang.
- tinyspacewizard 4y ago
  It's a bit more nuanced than that. The standard of living for the bottom half globally has substantially improved over the past 100 years. The standard of living for the bottom half of the developed world has arguably declined in the past few decades. In the last 5 years or so, due to inflation and Covid, more people have fallen into extreme poverty.
  - BirAdam 4y ago
BirAdam 4y ago
I think the conclusions stated in the abstract are empirically visible. If I walk outside and actually interact with people, there seems to be little division and hate. If I spend time consuming media, things look quite different. Humans are tribal so hate of the other tends to sell. Yet, even in the early parts of the 2000s, an Muslim cab driver in New York would willingly sell a ride to a Jewish passenger, and a Jewish landlord would willingly rent a space to a Muslim renter. The same is true across most of the USA. When people shoot off their mouths about something, they’re not necessarily talking about what they’d actually do, but often merely what they feel in that passing moment. Most people do still behave in a sane and moral way day to day, because physical proximity moderates their behavior. Similarly, we see disaster everywhere in media, and there is disaster, but in real life… hunger is almost gone, living standards are high, soul and body crushing work is continually being made easier to handle, and we have more awareness of things like mindfulness, mental health, and loving kindness (all of which were no no words when I was younger). The world is a good place, mostly.
- dmix 4y ago
  I’ve often wondered how George Carlin would react against the modern progressive movement towards gatekeeping speech. Especially with his soft language and dirty words bits. https://youtu.be/o25I2fzFGoY https://youtu.be/o25I2fzFGoY Sometimes it’s easy to get so wrapped up in your well intentioned culture where you end up being ridiculous and detach yourself from reality.
  - matthewdgreen 4y ago
    George Carlin's shtick was to use racist words mostly to make a point about how stupid racism was. He also spent a lot of time attacking anti-intellectual movements. I have no doubt that he'd poke fun of current progressive speech codes, but I don't think you'd find him carrying water for the other side. This is an important distinction that some folks don't seem to understand.
    - dmix 4y ago
      Carlin was always a big lefty. Every critique doesn't mean you're 'carrying water for the other side.' Although I know it's trendy to ignore nuance in language these days.
susanasj 4y ago
I mean, the conclusion that things are better than people think is based entirely on measurements that the authors of the study decide represent "progress". It's true that some gender and racial inequalities have lessened slightly, but many people including myself would say they should be eliminated entirely. The authors are right that some health indicators like teen pregnancy for Americans have improved, but overall life expectancy for Americans has fallen for several years in a row now. The authors are right that incarceration rates have fallen slightly, but America still has by far the largest prison system in the world. I do think in many ways things are getting worse. The American economic system becomes more openly exploitative by the day, and oligarchs openly flaunt their power while we are largely powerless to stop them. There is very little accountability for powerful companies that break the law (see something like Hertz Rental Cars getting people arrested with false reports of stolen cars), and income inequality in America is growing from it's already staggering heights. The comparison for "are things getting better" shouldn't be a baseline of "things used to be even more terrible and now they are slightly less so", it should be "are we making things better at the rate that we should be", and I think the answer to the latter is clearly no. That said I'm an optimist because my left wing politics demand it of me. A better world is certainly possible. EDIT: this article doesn't mention climate change at all does it lol. The big looming thing that could ruin the next generation's lives entirely.
- CapricornNoble 4y ago
  >>>It's true that some gender and racial inequalities have lessened slightly, but many people including myself would say they should be eliminated entirely. Is it realistic to expect that society can eliminate fuzzy, grey-area problems like discrimination when we can't even eliminate tangible, clear-cut physical-reality problems like murder? I agree with your general point that it's easy to cherry-pick metrics though.
  - 082349872349872 4y ago
    Some societies have largely eliminated classes of murder such as mass shootings or police shootings. The future's here, it's just not so evenly distributed.
rayiner 4y ago
Talking about progress on racial equality while lumping all minorities together is deeply misleading. There are two completely different groups of minorities in the US: black and indigenous people, and everyone else. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353 https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353 For black and indigenous people, gaps relative to whites are not closing at all. Moreover, for black people, the gap results entirely from gaps between black men and white men. Black women actually have similar income mobility to white women raised in similar economic circumstances. Hispanics and Asians by contrast have similar or higher income mobility compared to whites. That means that income gaps for these groups are closing over time (and quite rapidly). The gaps that do exist are attributable to recency of immigration, similar to what could be said for Italians or Polish people in the 1920s. Are progressives in denial about progress? When it comes to black and indigenous people, the answer is “no.” Their error is instead that they lump non-white immigrants into the conceptual “black/indigenous” category when in reality they should be categorized with other immigrant groups: Germans, Italians, Irish, etc.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  >for black and indigenous gaps are not closing at all This is blatantly incorrect in regards to black Americans. They match all other non-indigenous race groups in term of income distribution and have seen huge leaps in total wealth over the last decade. Obviously wealth building takes time, but we’re getting there https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disparities-in-wealth-by-race-and-ethnicity-in-the-2019-survey-of-consumer-finances-20200928.html https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disp...
  - epivosism 4y ago
    I think you're getting downvoted since the lead paragraphs of your link don't support your claims. Was there a part you were referring to specifically? "New data from the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) show that long-standing and substantial wealth disparities between families in different racial and ethnic groups were little changed since the last survey in 2016; the typical White family has eight times the wealth of the typical Black family and five times the wealth of the typical Hispanic family."
VictorPath 4y ago
This article goes on about progress for blacks in the US...a half century ago the New York City magnet school Stuyvesant had hundreds of black students (over 300). In recent years the number accepted each year has been 7 or 8 each year, with a student body of over 3000. Efforts to bring students in from different neighborhoods have resulted in massive political efforts against that. This is just one data point, but would shape local people's perceptions toward progress, and opposition seems even more vociferous in other parts of the country. I put my trust in how the average person thinks things are going, not from people on high telling us everything is great and why don't we recognize this. In the past year our industry has seen stocks tank, and layoffs increasing along with the fed funds rate. Someone having to push a story of how great everything is will get a cool response. People can assess how things are going, despite efforts from on high that people are mistaken in how great things are going.
yboris 4y ago
Brilliant quote from the abstract: "Most laypeople do not organize information in ways that provide reliable monitoring of social change over time, which makes their views on progress susceptible to memory distortions and high-profile current events and political rhetoric." I remember an older person warning me to not go to NYC because she thought it was still riddled with crime (as it presumably was decades ago). I am confident that watching the news actively distorts one's perception of the state of the world (unless one explicitly discounts what they see in favor of many other pieces of information).
mensetmanusman 4y ago
It’s interesting that he notes science should strive towards a large amount of criticism to keep the debate fresh and sharp. In social sciences today a monoculture has formed and any criticism is frowned upon due to all the new sensitivities.
gremlinsinc 4y ago
> Most laypeople do not organize information in ways that provide reliable monitoring of social change over time, which makes their views on progress susceptible to memory distortions and high-profile current events and political rhetoric. My baseline for whether progress is being made is this : Is home-ownership as accessible to a single bread-winning family with 2.5 kids as it was in 1970, furthermore that's just to return to a normal time where the American dream was at least in reach, for this to be 'progressive' it'll have to encompass minorities who were most likely cut out of the ability to reach those things back in the 70s for whatever reasons. Empirically things trend towards getting worse for people when CEO's and elites are having runaway profits such as they are now. Case in point the 1920's before the great depression. CEO pay was < 100x average salaries in 1980, by 85 it was 200-300, today for some companies its as high as 5000x. Furthermore, healthcare costs have hardly made any progress in fact more and more people are having to choose to pay rent or buy diabetes medicine. When just 'living' is by default stressful and miserable for > 60% of people it can't begin to be progressive in nature.
boxed 4y ago
Hans Rosling would agreed. ... and why is this flagged?

36 points by mpweiher 4y ago

kgwxd 4y ago

Progressives have to spend all their time trying to conserve the progress regressives endlessly try to take away.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
shadowgovt 4y ago
I think this is a fair explanation of the bias towards highlighting the negative, perhaps stated a bit divisively. But in essence, if people aren't kept focused on what isn't right yet, it's easy for them to see the positive and assume the future is here and uniformly distributed, when only one of those things is the case.
- krapp 4y ago
  This is the main reason "color blindness" and other aspects of progressivism are seen as unintentionally reinforcing the status quo of white supremacy. Ignoring (or pretending to ignore) race in a society in which systemic racism still exists actively works against efforts to recognize and fight those issues, often to the point of those efforts being considered "racist" in merely acknowledging the problem (although that accusation more often comes in bad faith from the right.) Color blindness may be an ideal goal for the future, but we're not there yet.
  - kgwxd 4y ago
    It only unintentionally reinforcing white supremacy in that calling out white supremacy causes white supremacists to double-down on their efforts which, when unchecked, causes a feedback loop. If anyone could get anything done to actually punish white supremacists, the world might be able to evolve past seeing color. BLM exists because white supremacists exist, not the other way around. Getting rid of one would get rid of the other, but not vice versa. As childish as it sounds, someone started it, that's who deserves the punishment.
throwawayfranco 4y ago
[dead]
throwawayfranco 4y ago
[dead]

jackosdev 4y ago

It’s funny when someone is parroting the doom and gloom they hear from mainstream media, and you point out something like how world hunger and poverty is at an all time low, the standard of living has never been higher etc. most of the time they’ll just continue justifying their position, its only engineers that I’ve heard say “oh yeah..”

d_e_solomon 4y ago
> its only engineers that I’ve heard say “oh yeah..” Yes - only engineers are capable of independent and rational thought. The orange site continues to sniff its own farts.
- ThrowawayR2 4y ago
  Not that I really disagree with you but you could have said that more civilly.
  - d_e_solomon 4y ago
    Yes, I should be more civil in my comment and thank you for pointing it out. I find the tone of "engineers, developers smart, everyone else dumb" to be really tiresome; and when it becomes self congratulatory, it becomes really irksome. It's also the casual dismissal of knowledge in other fields and lived experiences of others that just happen again and again here. I should probably find a different place to hang.
tinyspacewizard 4y ago
It's a bit more nuanced than that. The standard of living for the bottom half globally has substantially improved over the past 100 years. The standard of living for the bottom half of the developed world has arguably declined in the past few decades. In the last 5 years or so, due to inflation and Covid, more people have fallen into extreme poverty.
- BirAdam 4y ago

BirAdam 4y ago

I think the conclusions stated in the abstract are empirically visible. If I walk outside and actually interact with people, there seems to be little division and hate. If I spend time consuming media, things look quite different. Humans are tribal so hate of the other tends to sell. Yet, even in the early parts of the 2000s, an Muslim cab driver in New York would willingly sell a ride to a Jewish passenger, and a Jewish landlord would willingly rent a space to a Muslim renter. The same is true across most of the USA. When people shoot off their mouths about something, they’re not necessarily talking about what they’d actually do, but often merely what they feel in that passing moment. Most people do still behave in a sane and moral way day to day, because physical proximity moderates their behavior. Similarly, we see disaster everywhere in media, and there is disaster, but in real life… hunger is almost gone, living standards are high, soul and body crushing work is continually being made easier to handle, and we have more awareness of things like mindfulness, mental health, and loving kindness (all of which were no no words when I was younger). The world is a good place, mostly.

dmix 4y ago
I’ve often wondered how George Carlin would react against the modern progressive movement towards gatekeeping speech. Especially with his soft language and dirty words bits. https://youtu.be/o25I2fzFGoY https://youtu.be/o25I2fzFGoY Sometimes it’s easy to get so wrapped up in your well intentioned culture where you end up being ridiculous and detach yourself from reality.
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  George Carlin's shtick was to use racist words mostly to make a point about how stupid racism was. He also spent a lot of time attacking anti-intellectual movements. I have no doubt that he'd poke fun of current progressive speech codes, but I don't think you'd find him carrying water for the other side. This is an important distinction that some folks don't seem to understand.
  - dmix 4y ago
    Carlin was always a big lefty. Every critique doesn't mean you're 'carrying water for the other side.' Although I know it's trendy to ignore nuance in language these days.

susanasj 4y ago

I mean, the conclusion that things are better than people think is based entirely on measurements that the authors of the study decide represent "progress". It's true that some gender and racial inequalities have lessened slightly, but many people including myself would say they should be eliminated entirely. The authors are right that some health indicators like teen pregnancy for Americans have improved, but overall life expectancy for Americans has fallen for several years in a row now. The authors are right that incarceration rates have fallen slightly, but America still has by far the largest prison system in the world. I do think in many ways things are getting worse. The American economic system becomes more openly exploitative by the day, and oligarchs openly flaunt their power while we are largely powerless to stop them. There is very little accountability for powerful companies that break the law (see something like Hertz Rental Cars getting people arrested with false reports of stolen cars), and income inequality in America is growing from it's already staggering heights. The comparison for "are things getting better" shouldn't be a baseline of "things used to be even more terrible and now they are slightly less so", it should be "are we making things better at the rate that we should be", and I think the answer to the latter is clearly no. That said I'm an optimist because my left wing politics demand it of me. A better world is certainly possible. EDIT: this article doesn't mention climate change at all does it lol. The big looming thing that could ruin the next generation's lives entirely.

CapricornNoble 4y ago
>>>It's true that some gender and racial inequalities have lessened slightly, but many people including myself would say they should be eliminated entirely. Is it realistic to expect that society can eliminate fuzzy, grey-area problems like discrimination when we can't even eliminate tangible, clear-cut physical-reality problems like murder? I agree with your general point that it's easy to cherry-pick metrics though.
- 082349872349872 4y ago
  Some societies have largely eliminated classes of murder such as mass shootings or police shootings. The future's here, it's just not so evenly distributed.

rayiner 4y ago

Talking about progress on racial equality while lumping all minorities together is deeply misleading. There are two completely different groups of minorities in the US: black and indigenous people, and everyone else. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353 https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353 For black and indigenous people, gaps relative to whites are not closing at all. Moreover, for black people, the gap results entirely from gaps between black men and white men. Black women actually have similar income mobility to white women raised in similar economic circumstances. Hispanics and Asians by contrast have similar or higher income mobility compared to whites. That means that income gaps for these groups are closing over time (and quite rapidly). The gaps that do exist are attributable to recency of immigration, similar to what could be said for Italians or Polish people in the 1920s. Are progressives in denial about progress? When it comes to black and indigenous people, the answer is “no.” Their error is instead that they lump non-white immigrants into the conceptual “black/indigenous” category when in reality they should be categorized with other immigrant groups: Germans, Italians, Irish, etc.

edgyquant 4y ago
>for black and indigenous gaps are not closing at all This is blatantly incorrect in regards to black Americans. They match all other non-indigenous race groups in term of income distribution and have seen huge leaps in total wealth over the last decade. Obviously wealth building takes time, but we’re getting there https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disparities-in-wealth-by-race-and-ethnicity-in-the-2019-survey-of-consumer-finances-20200928.html https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disp...
- epivosism 4y ago
  I think you're getting downvoted since the lead paragraphs of your link don't support your claims. Was there a part you were referring to specifically? "New data from the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) show that long-standing and substantial wealth disparities between families in different racial and ethnic groups were little changed since the last survey in 2016; the typical White family has eight times the wealth of the typical Black family and five times the wealth of the typical Hispanic family."

VictorPath 4y ago

This article goes on about progress for blacks in the US...a half century ago the New York City magnet school Stuyvesant had hundreds of black students (over 300). In recent years the number accepted each year has been 7 or 8 each year, with a student body of over 3000. Efforts to bring students in from different neighborhoods have resulted in massive political efforts against that. This is just one data point, but would shape local people's perceptions toward progress, and opposition seems even more vociferous in other parts of the country. I put my trust in how the average person thinks things are going, not from people on high telling us everything is great and why don't we recognize this. In the past year our industry has seen stocks tank, and layoffs increasing along with the fed funds rate. Someone having to push a story of how great everything is will get a cool response. People can assess how things are going, despite efforts from on high that people are mistaken in how great things are going.

yboris 4y ago

Brilliant quote from the abstract: "Most laypeople do not organize information in ways that provide reliable monitoring of social change over time, which makes their views on progress susceptible to memory distortions and high-profile current events and political rhetoric." I remember an older person warning me to not go to NYC because she thought it was still riddled with crime (as it presumably was decades ago). I am confident that watching the news actively distorts one's perception of the state of the world (unless one explicitly discounts what they see in favor of many other pieces of information).

mensetmanusman 4y ago

It’s interesting that he notes science should strive towards a large amount of criticism to keep the debate fresh and sharp. In social sciences today a monoculture has formed and any criticism is frowned upon due to all the new sensitivities.

gremlinsinc 4y ago

> Most laypeople do not organize information in ways that provide reliable monitoring of social change over time, which makes their views on progress susceptible to memory distortions and high-profile current events and political rhetoric. My baseline for whether progress is being made is this : Is home-ownership as accessible to a single bread-winning family with 2.5 kids as it was in 1970, furthermore that's just to return to a normal time where the American dream was at least in reach, for this to be 'progressive' it'll have to encompass minorities who were most likely cut out of the ability to reach those things back in the 70s for whatever reasons. Empirically things trend towards getting worse for people when CEO's and elites are having runaway profits such as they are now. Case in point the 1920's before the great depression. CEO pay was < 100x average salaries in 1980, by 85 it was 200-300, today for some companies its as high as 5000x. Furthermore, healthcare costs have hardly made any progress in fact more and more people are having to choose to pay rent or buy diabetes medicine. When just 'living' is by default stressful and miserable for > 60% of people it can't begin to be progressive in nature.

boxed 4y ago

Hans Rosling would agreed. ... and why is this flagged?