3 ms·

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 terr

• 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.