If you think being able to take all variables you can into account and have your model spit out "better" or "worse" is crude, than you can't be asked anything c

If you think being able to take all variables you can into account and have your model spit out "better" or "worse" is crude, than you can't be asked anything cause any answer to anything is crude. The question is simple, given any century throughout history, would a person prefer to be born in 2000 or any century before then, not knowing anything else about their life, where they will be born, who their parents are etc. I'm pretty sure a rational person will always choose 2000 as of today if they are choosing actually thinking of the consequences and not just "I wanna cosplay as a cowboy". If you don't think you can answer that question you don't have any knowledge. You fell into the trap of "I learned how much I didn't know and now think nothing can be answered because everything is complex" which is a trap some people fall into. At some point laws need to be written and you need answers. What is simplistic to me is saying "aw chucks it's too complex, nobody knows if it's better because for one person over there it's worse". Even complex systems have answers at the end, said another way, whatever the distribution or long tails or whatever, I can still calculate a median. You should "roll up" your knowledge into being able to still answer "yes" or "no" to something. And the answer is yes, the world is better to live in today, regardless of how much hand waving you do about specific subsets of people or caring about 2008 till now vs before as if that realistically mattered on a large scale of centuries of human existence. It's also funny how its crude when I say it's better for everyone but it's not crude when you say it's worse for Greek people. Also still trying to understand if you think the financial crisis has anything on medieval medical practices and lack of food and societal support systems. I was poor in portugal during that period so pretty much went through the same as the Greeks and let me tell you I'd rather be poor in the 2000s than rich anywhere on earth in the 1400s.