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Somebody else echoed my opinion exactly. Don't load your expectations onto other people as a given. I don't use social media. I read (and less often, post on)

by sjw987 1y ago

Somebody else echoed my opinion exactly. Don't load your expectations onto other people as a given. I don't use social media. I read (and less often, post on) Hacker News at work sometimes, and that is quite literally all the user submitting content I produce. I've never used social networks (truly, personal choice), nor browsed them anonymously. I also don't read the news on a daily basis. I use one day per week to catch up on news from a relatively neutral, brief and unbiased source (The Economist Weekly summaries). You don't need to use social media or read the news frequently to see that the world is in a bad state. You see it every day around you, and you can see it getting worse. Personally, I try my best to block out the things I can't change. I stay offline as much as I can outside of work time, exercise and read a lot. I spend about as little time as you can engaging with world affairs and politics, yet I still notice it. I'm not unhappy in general in life, but I acknowledge that things aren't as good as they were a few years ago, can work out the direction things are headed, and can project that 20, 30, 40 years down the line, things aren't going to be better or probably even stay at this level. We're all well aware people have had it worse historically. That doesn't detract from the fact that when we have more education than the typical person born before the 1900s, and when women have the means to control their reproductive cycle, many people aren't going to go ahead and have kids when they foresee the future being worse for their kids. We have lived through a golden age the last 50+ years. Things are going to get worse. The perfect storm which led to our (in the West) prosperity isnt't going to whip up again as it did before, even if we did have a WW3 and "won" it. The spoils simply wouldn't be the same. The dodo went extinct in 1662, it also was an unbroken evolutionary thread of more than 4.5 billion years. The opening line is a meaningless tidbit. Your response to the other poster comes across a tad condescending. Just because somebody doesn't see things positively doesn't make them have a "doomerism" mindset (sounds like the exact sort of forced trend word vomit that comes from social media).

sebmellen 1y ago
I agree with your point on the word “doomerism” and I should have quoted it. Later in my comment I said “prophecy of economic or climactic doom,” which is more reflective of how I see it. Go back through history and you will see time and time again that the world was due to end, but did not. Bayesian probability says we’re probably not headed for a world-ending outcome. But I suppose I also take issue with your claim that “things aren't as good as they were a few years ago.” On what metric are you measuring this? Finally — your point about the dodo just reinforces what I’m saying all the more! What I’m saying is: let’s not go extinct!
- sjw987 1y ago
  We needn't jump to the end of the world or human extinction, hence why I didn't understand the need for finalistic terms like doom. What many people believe is that life simply isn't going to be as good for the next generation(s). You can already see the downward trend from our parents generation to ours, the downward trend (economically, politically and socially) within our own lifetimes and project that to the next generation. Keep in mind, our parents received an unlikely to be repeated boost in their fortunes (which was paved with the largest war we've ever had and good luck for us to be on the receiving end of most of the spoils of that war, rightly or wrongly). There's a huge list of issues making life worse for people right now, and many more being kicked down the road for the next generation. I live in the UK, so I speak mostly with the context of my own country. That's the life I live and what I know. I read quite a bit about affairs in other countries, as I said, once a week, and the picture doesn't seem to be too unique country-to-country. I don't want to list everything that would fall under the metric of measurement, because while I know it looks like a cop-out, it's honestly a huge list filled with points that we all know about (war, inequality, political shifts, cost of living crisis, climate change, changing cultural landscape). I could pick one and discuss it at length, but I don't know what that would do besides allow for venting. The advance of science, medicine, and technology can be used as a reliable metric for improvement, but these alone can't balance out the negative socio-economic and political changes, especially when they're all so intertwined. It's great that science can provide GLP drugs for people to lose weight, but the counter-balance is that socially people are less inclined to do without. New technology is always getting better, but if it's just being used to revolutionise serving ads and selling subscriptions, that's counterintuitive. Antibiotics are becoming redundant faster than we can create new types.
  - sebmellen 1y ago
    Fair points, I wasn’t trying to be condescending. You’re right about the UK. That is a different context than the US and the trends you mention are perhaps more economically “real” there than here. But I still think the core question matters: what do we do about it? History shows decline isn’t always permanent. Rome fell and the Black Death killed a third of Europe. But we still ended up with the fruits of the Renaissance and Enlightenment because people kept making people and working for the betterment of the world. You mention antibiotics becoming redundant. This is true. But we’re also developing phage therapy, CRISPR antimicrobials, and new drug classes. We’re figuring out protein folding at scale for the first time. Every one of these problems eventually leads to some kind of solution so long as there are smart people paying attention to what needs to be done. The dodo couldn’t adapt but, as humans, we can. I’m not saying ignore the problems. I’m saying don’t let them paralyze you. To solve problems, we need more smart people — someone has to keep making them!

by sjw987 1y ago

sebmellen 1y ago

I agree with your point on the word “doomerism” and I should have quoted it. Later in my comment I said “prophecy of economic or climactic doom,” which is more reflective of how I see it. Go back through history and you will see time and time again that the world was due to end, but did not. Bayesian probability says we’re probably not headed for a world-ending outcome. But I suppose I also take issue with your claim that “things aren't as good as they were a few years ago.” On what metric are you measuring this? Finally — your point about the dodo just reinforces what I’m saying all the more! What I’m saying is: let’s not go extinct!

sjw987 1y ago
We needn't jump to the end of the world or human extinction, hence why I didn't understand the need for finalistic terms like doom. What many people believe is that life simply isn't going to be as good for the next generation(s). You can already see the downward trend from our parents generation to ours, the downward trend (economically, politically and socially) within our own lifetimes and project that to the next generation. Keep in mind, our parents received an unlikely to be repeated boost in their fortunes (which was paved with the largest war we've ever had and good luck for us to be on the receiving end of most of the spoils of that war, rightly or wrongly). There's a huge list of issues making life worse for people right now, and many more being kicked down the road for the next generation. I live in the UK, so I speak mostly with the context of my own country. That's the life I live and what I know. I read quite a bit about affairs in other countries, as I said, once a week, and the picture doesn't seem to be too unique country-to-country. I don't want to list everything that would fall under the metric of measurement, because while I know it looks like a cop-out, it's honestly a huge list filled with points that we all know about (war, inequality, political shifts, cost of living crisis, climate change, changing cultural landscape). I could pick one and discuss it at length, but I don't know what that would do besides allow for venting. The advance of science, medicine, and technology can be used as a reliable metric for improvement, but these alone can't balance out the negative socio-economic and political changes, especially when they're all so intertwined. It's great that science can provide GLP drugs for people to lose weight, but the counter-balance is that socially people are less inclined to do without. New technology is always getting better, but if it's just being used to revolutionise serving ads and selling subscriptions, that's counterintuitive. Antibiotics are becoming redundant faster than we can create new types.
- sebmellen 1y ago
  Fair points, I wasn’t trying to be condescending. You’re right about the UK. That is a different context than the US and the trends you mention are perhaps more economically “real” there than here. But I still think the core question matters: what do we do about it? History shows decline isn’t always permanent. Rome fell and the Black Death killed a third of Europe. But we still ended up with the fruits of the Renaissance and Enlightenment because people kept making people and working for the betterment of the world. You mention antibiotics becoming redundant. This is true. But we’re also developing phage therapy, CRISPR antimicrobials, and new drug classes. We’re figuring out protein folding at scale for the first time. Every one of these problems eventually leads to some kind of solution so long as there are smart people paying attention to what needs to be done. The dodo couldn’t adapt but, as humans, we can. I’m not saying ignore the problems. I’m saying don’t let them paralyze you. To solve problems, we need more smart people — someone has to keep making them!