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In general as people get older they become able to see things that are getting worse, since they have a wider frame of reference, and have a hard time seeing th
by gfodor 3y ago
In general as people get older they become able to see things that are getting worse, since they have a wider frame of reference, and have a hard time seeing things that are getting better, because they imagine the past was better than it was. The result, in many cases, is an articulation of a very nuanced explanation for why the present sucks, but often to me I read it as just a self-rationalization. The truth is, a lot of stuff is amazing now that was far worse in the past.
A lot of the things people are making now are being driven by young people. Young people have an ignorance about the past, so miss some of the lessons, but they also lack the cynicism which prevents revisiting things that people have determined "don't work" in the past.
I generally see tech as a large ecosystem which is in fact progressively improving, with minor setbacks that often do echo the same setbacks in the past. The error is to pattern match too strongly on these setback patterns as though they contain some kind of timeless wisdom. If there's any industry where past performance isn't indicative of future results, it's technology. (Which is and of itself, is a process of knowledge discovery at its core.) My general approach to thinking about this is I grow older is to guard against the kind of cynicism I see in so many of my peers. Yes, it means I will be wrong on things where the cynic turns out to be right. But given the pull of cynicism, I suspect more likely I will remain cynical in many places I shouldn't be anyway, so I'd rather focus on being right in the places where the cynic is wrong by forcing myself to remain optimistic and give the young the benefit of the doubt.
This also has the added benefit of making the process of working on things more fun in general - not just because it leads to actually making stuff (cynicism demotivates this) and it also leads to being surrounded by peers who are optimistic and interested in continuing to make stuff (being surrounded by cynics is generally miserable, and breeds cynicism.) A few years ago, I found myself in a broad peer group of technologists who were deep into the abyss of cynicism, and made a conscious decision to just sever myself from these networks because this kind of negativity was becoming my dominant mode of thinking about technology. I've done some of my best work since then and much of it has probably come about due to the fact that I dove into it due to the counterfactual level of optimism I had due to this one decision.
- TheCapeGreek 3y agoI was thinking about this the other day, from the frame of reference of a middle-upper class person 30-40 years ago. At their time, tech was at its peak. Life was the greatest it could possibly be! And yet with so many problems, conflicts, economic difficulties, and ordinary life stressors. We feel the same today as they felt then. We just have better toys and different problems. Some problems might be more existential (e.g. climate change), but day-to-day is it so different? In material terms yes, in personal terms not so much. The human condition is far slower to change than the world it inhabits.
- gfodor 3y agoI think we spend a lot more time now, on average, struggling through higher levels of Maslow's hierarchy. I think this will accelerate: much of the struggles of my children will be primarily about self-actualization and finding meaning in life. Parents today are worrying abou 'the last war' in many ways, like how are they going to afford college or pay the mortgage, when the real challenge for children in a world of AGI will be purpose and meaning - something parents have largely not had to think too hard about comparatively, since much meaning in life can come from the succeeding over the struggle to simply get by.
- brabel 3y ago> Some problems might be more existential (e.g. climate change) 30-40 years ago it was worse given the real possibility of nuclear war.
- reaperducer 3y agobecause they imagine the past was better than it was Old people romanticize the past. Young people romanticize the future.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago> Young people romanticize the future. Does not seem to be the zeitgeist of online discourse (presumably, in places that a sufficiently representative portion of young people express thoughts).
- jancsika 3y agoYes, with the caveats that young people also romanticize the past, and old people also romanticize the future.
- flohofwoe 3y ago> Young people romanticize the future. I have the impression that young people currently are much more pessimistic about the future than the 'old-fart-me' ever was (except for that time in the 80's when an all out nuclear war just seemed right around the corner for a while).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jtr1 3y agoA lot of it is what you pay attention to. It's easy to get pinned to trends that looked optimistic when you were young. Those trends may falter and fail, but they're blades of grass in a field.
- Gormo 3y ago> A lot of the things people are making now are being driven by young people. Young people have an ignorance about the past, so miss some of the lessons, but they also lack the cynicism which prevents revisiting things that people have determined "don't work" in the past. Indeed, much of the progress in technology today is coming from revisiting stuff that didn't work out in the past but has since become viable (much of modern ML, for example). Conversely, it seems like the actually novel stuff coming out today "doesn't work" out-of-the-box at a much higher rate than when new stuff was introduced in past decades. I'm seeing pervasive problems with new technology for use cases that "just worked" consistently with the incumbent tech right from the outset in the '90s or earlier. There has been some progress in consumerizing interfaces, but this has been accompanied by drastic regression in functional consistency and long-term reliability under the hood. And while UIs that only expose designers' preconceived use cases might be a bit more straightforward for end-users, accessibility to the underlying functionality of technology as technology has vastly regressed. It feels like Sturgeon's law has gone from 90% to 99% over the past 10-15 years or so.