5 ms·

This reads like the usual "appeal to nature" fallacy. If you're going to focus on things like the soil being fertile and being directly involved with your neig

This reads like the usual "appeal to nature" fallacy. If you're going to focus on things like the soil being fertile and being directly involved with your neighbors, you kinda also have to consider the complete inability to cope with storms and disease and all the social ills that were reinforced because of that tight knit community. We like to think of past life as having been the benefits of all our modern moral leanings and all our "invisible" technologies combined with idealized visions of farming fertile lands and hunting among herds of animals, but any history book makes it obvious why our ancestors struggled so hard for us to live differently. Ignoring that many of the anecdotes presented in the linked article are mostly the author projecting despair onto others, those fundamental issues of disease, old age and death, were even worse when we lived "naturally" and had stronger ties to the people we lived around.

digging 3y ago
Largely agreed. A total regression view is inaccurate and foolish. Plenty of people had shit lives before industrialization and plenty of good lives were cut short. We can't just assume "the past is better." That's wrong in many ways. However, when we look at our lives today, we can see things that are not good, and we can find ways that those things could be good. Many solutions can come from the past. Connection to our communities and investment in our environment seem to have real benefits for us an individuals, besides the systemic benefits.
- nradov 3y ago
  How can solutions come from the past when we don't even have reliable information about what the past was like? Archaeological data on the lives of pre-Columbian indigenous New World peoples is extremely limited. Even much of what we think we know is probably mistaken, or at least badly distorted by modern biases.
  - digging 3y ago
    Simple: we don't replicate the lives of past peoples. We take ideas from [our ideas of] the past and find out if they work for us. And... it doesn't need to be from indigenous New World people.
    - nradov 3y ago
      Hardly simple. You are talking about running huge social experiments based on guesses about what might work better. It would be interesting to see the results of such experiments, but extremely difficult to convince people to participate.
      - digging 3y ago
        > You are talking about running huge social experiments based on guesses about what might work better No, I'm not. But it's a good idea. > extremely difficult to convince people to participate Yes - easier to just stop tricking people into known-unhealthy behaviors first. > Hardly simple. The answer is simple. The implementation may or may not be [more simple than trying to replicate the lives of people in the past].
fasterik 3y ago
Yep. Also known as the golden age fallacy. It's nostalgia for a past that never existed. Some people can't accept the fact that human life has always been terrible, and it's better today than it ever has been.
- tomjakubowski 3y ago
  the notion that quality of life could be boiled down to a number, to be put in some ranking for comparison across eras, is ludicrous
  - yamazakiwi 3y ago
    We don't need to rank eras and it doesn't hurt to make some comparisons or think about how life used to be. The main issue is people comparing while omitting large issues, not people claiming specific eras are better than others.
  - toolz 3y ago
    This is your opinion and I would suggest not a very popular opinion at that. I imagine the vast majority of the world can look at the number of violent crimes trending down over time and use that as a data point to rank eras. Similarly extreme poverty rate since the industrial revolution has drastically fallen. Another metric that I imagine the extreme vast majority of the world would find a useful metric in ranking eras. There are plenty of other metrics to rank eras that make plenty of sense if you look for them, and why shouldn't we? Is it even possible to make progress if we're not defining what progress looks like? Is progress such a ludicrous goal for the human race? If progress is a reasonable goal and you can't make progress without defining what progress looks like then it's necessary for progress to have metrics that can be used to rank eras.
  - fasterik 3y ago
    What I said doesn't depend on that assumption. I can make the claim that life is qualitatively better while being agnostic about whether we can attach a number to it.

digging 3y ago

Largely agreed. A total regression view is inaccurate and foolish. Plenty of people had shit lives before industrialization and plenty of good lives were cut short. We can't just assume "the past is better." That's wrong in many ways. However, when we look at our lives today, we can see things that are not good, and we can find ways that those things could be good. Many solutions can come from the past. Connection to our communities and investment in our environment seem to have real benefits for us an individuals, besides the systemic benefits.

nradov 3y ago
How can solutions come from the past when we don't even have reliable information about what the past was like? Archaeological data on the lives of pre-Columbian indigenous New World peoples is extremely limited. Even much of what we think we know is probably mistaken, or at least badly distorted by modern biases.
- digging 3y ago
  Simple: we don't replicate the lives of past peoples. We take ideas from [our ideas of] the past and find out if they work for us. And... it doesn't need to be from indigenous New World people.
  - nradov 3y ago
    Hardly simple. You are talking about running huge social experiments based on guesses about what might work better. It would be interesting to see the results of such experiments, but extremely difficult to convince people to participate.
    - digging 3y ago
      > You are talking about running huge social experiments based on guesses about what might work better No, I'm not. But it's a good idea. > extremely difficult to convince people to participate Yes - easier to just stop tricking people into known-unhealthy behaviors first. > Hardly simple. The answer is simple. The implementation may or may not be [more simple than trying to replicate the lives of people in the past].

fasterik 3y ago

Yep. Also known as the golden age fallacy. It's nostalgia for a past that never existed. Some people can't accept the fact that human life has always been terrible, and it's better today than it ever has been.

tomjakubowski 3y ago
the notion that quality of life could be boiled down to a number, to be put in some ranking for comparison across eras, is ludicrous
- yamazakiwi 3y ago
  We don't need to rank eras and it doesn't hurt to make some comparisons or think about how life used to be. The main issue is people comparing while omitting large issues, not people claiming specific eras are better than others.
- toolz 3y ago
  This is your opinion and I would suggest not a very popular opinion at that. I imagine the vast majority of the world can look at the number of violent crimes trending down over time and use that as a data point to rank eras. Similarly extreme poverty rate since the industrial revolution has drastically fallen. Another metric that I imagine the extreme vast majority of the world would find a useful metric in ranking eras. There are plenty of other metrics to rank eras that make plenty of sense if you look for them, and why shouldn't we? Is it even possible to make progress if we're not defining what progress looks like? Is progress such a ludicrous goal for the human race? If progress is a reasonable goal and you can't make progress without defining what progress looks like then it's necessary for progress to have metrics that can be used to rank eras.
- fasterik 3y ago
  What I said doesn't depend on that assumption. I can make the claim that life is qualitatively better while being agnostic about whether we can attach a number to it.