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> For almost every trouble in the present, you can cite people loudly anticipating it when whatever new political event/initiative, technological innovation, et
by xboxnolifes 3y ago
> For almost every trouble in the present, you can cite people loudly anticipating it when whatever new political event/initiative, technological innovation, etc first arrived on the scene. It doesn't mean critics should always be deferred to just because they're often right, but it does mean that you can do a lot of preparing for the future by reading what they warned was coming.
I feel the problem is that there is always somebody claiming <new thing> will fail, and there's also always someone else claiming <new thing> will succeed. You just end up looking back with hindsight to see those who were right.
There are always critics who are right. But there are also always critics who were wrong.
- swatcoder 3y agoIt's usually not about the binary guess of success or failure, though. Or at least that's not the interesting thing to look for. Initial criticism often helps see the future silhouette of a happening even in its success. You can see that American racial tension won't immediately end with emancipation or even with reconstruction, that Europe will remain tense and unstable after the Treaty of Versailles, that Bitcoin will struggle against genuine societal concerns around accountability or dispute resolution, etc and people almost always call these things out at the time. Keeping an eye on those original critiques, even when something proves generally desirable or successful or inevitable, helps make the challenges of today and tomorrow something to one might prepare for rather than be surprised by.