4 ms·

I think especially online there's a lot of emphasis on "everything is wrong". A mission like this is hard to ignore and highlights the bias. On the whole, despi

by llbbdd 6mo ago

I think especially online there's a lot of emphasis on "everything is wrong". A mission like this is hard to ignore and highlights the bias. On the whole, despite setbacks, we continue.

bombcar 6mo ago
There's a lot of money/hay/political power/etc to be made from "everything is wrong" - it's hard for "good news" to really get into your bones. Not to say it's the best of times, nor to say it's the worst of times, mind you. Just that it's really hard to objectively compare.
- SV_BubbleTime 6mo ago
  Objectively never a better point in history, subjectively never more people miserable and misled. Wild stuff really. There is a book about it, using an Abe Lincoln quote he said hoping that the civil war wouldn’t happen, “better angels of our nature”.
simplyluke 6mo ago
If you want to dispel a bit more of the ever-pervasive online pessimism bias, read up on global rates of hunger the last time we flew to the moon (1972) vs now. The reality is, for all the problems we face today, there's no sane answer other than today to the question "when would you prefer to be born as a random person on earth"
- hkpack 6mo ago
  It is about trends and perceptions - 70s were very hopeful, now with global problems - wars, climate, AI, uncertainty, what is growing is desperation. I definitely don’t envy kids that are born nowadays.
  - SoftTalker 6mo ago
    The '70s were not hopeful. Economy was terrible, Vietnam ended but still hung over the culture, Watergate, Three Mile Island, Iranian hostage crisis, cold war threatening to turn hot at any moment, double-digit mortgage rates.... and Disco.
    - dakolli 6mo ago
      Have you checked the news recently?
    - __patchbit__ 6mo ago
      The Father of Disco was involved in the song "Electric Dreams" associated with a film about AI in a love triangle.
    - tedd4u 6mo ago
      Definitely not the 70's. I think the most recent age that might have counted as hopeful was really between the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) through the beginning of the GWOT (9/11/2001). So basically the 90's.
      - adrian_b 6mo ago
        The seventies were a more representative time for technological hopes, during a time when it was not yet clear which are the right technological choices. The nineties were a time of rapid technological progress, but most of it was perfectly predictable, without surprises. The only thing that was surprising during the nineties was how important the Internet became in practice, even if the evolution of its underlying technology was not surprising. The time correctly delimited by you was the time of the greatest false political hopes, when everybody around the World believed that we got rid of the communist blood-sucking parasites and now the World would become that which had been described for decades in the propaganda of the Voice of America, where the political elites are held accountable for their actions, so if they are bad they are replaced through democratic elections, and the bad commercial companies are eliminated by competition in the free market. Instead of this happening, already a couple of years before 9/11 a wave of destructuring many important historical companies happened, followed by a huge wave of mergers and acquisitions that has continued until today and which has eliminated competition from most markets, so that they are now dominated by quasi monopolies. Then the democratic elections have brought to power worse and worse human beings, all of whom have been much worse than some citizens that would have been randomly selected for those positions. Nowadays, the economies of USA and of the other "Western" countries, and also their political institutions, resemble much more those of the socialist countries that they mocked during the seventies, than those of USA and W. Europe of that time. So all the hopes of the nineties were naive and none of them was realized.
- birksherty 6mo ago
  Nope. Not from usa. I was born in 80s and would like to stay before 2000.
- andrepd 6mo ago
  A global view is probably not the right way to look at things, encouraging as it may be. Of course globally hunger rates fell and so did child mortality. If nothing else, by the inexorable progress of science and technology. But what about comparing the same country/region? After all that's a better sense of how things are progressing locally to you, and when people are asked "are things better or worse" they probably compare the way they live with the way their parents lived. Would you rather be born in 1980 or 2020 in China? In Poland? No question. Same question but in the USA? In the UK? The West in general? I'm really not so sure.
  - jasomill 6mo ago
    As an American with severe hemophilia, 2020, without a doubt. I was born in 1978, and in the early '80s, beat approximately 50/50 odds by not getting infected with HIV from the only available treatments at the time, and as a result of this and other risks including hepatitis, treatments were only used in response to active bleeding episodes throughout my childhood, resulting in arthritis in my ankles and elbows by the time I was around 8. And I still wound up with hepatitis C from near birth (at which point it was referred to as "non-A, non-B", as the virus would not be identified until the late '80s) until a cure was developed decades later, fortunately never symptomatic. So, while I beat the odds, my life expectancy from birth until much later would have been considerably longer had I been born in 2020, and my joints would work a lot better. Oh, and as someone who grew up with the Shuttle and attended both Space Camp and Space Academy in Huntsville, inevitable political nonsense notwithstanding, I'm elated about the successful mission. As for the odds, given the opportunity, I wouldn't even hesitate unless they were worse than 1 in 10.

by llbbdd 6mo ago

I think especially online there's a lot of emphasis on "everything is wrong". A mission like this is hard to ignore and highlights the bias. On the whole, despite setbacks, we continue.

bombcar 6mo ago

There's a lot of money/hay/political power/etc to be made from "everything is wrong" - it's hard for "good news" to really get into your bones. Not to say it's the best of times, nor to say it's the worst of times, mind you. Just that it's really hard to objectively compare.

SV_BubbleTime 6mo ago
Objectively never a better point in history, subjectively never more people miserable and misled. Wild stuff really. There is a book about it, using an Abe Lincoln quote he said hoping that the civil war wouldn’t happen, “better angels of our nature”.

simplyluke 6mo ago

If you want to dispel a bit more of the ever-pervasive online pessimism bias, read up on global rates of hunger the last time we flew to the moon (1972) vs now. The reality is, for all the problems we face today, there's no sane answer other than today to the question "when would you prefer to be born as a random person on earth"

hkpack 6mo ago
It is about trends and perceptions - 70s were very hopeful, now with global problems - wars, climate, AI, uncertainty, what is growing is desperation. I definitely don’t envy kids that are born nowadays.
- SoftTalker 6mo ago
  The '70s were not hopeful. Economy was terrible, Vietnam ended but still hung over the culture, Watergate, Three Mile Island, Iranian hostage crisis, cold war threatening to turn hot at any moment, double-digit mortgage rates.... and Disco.
  - dakolli 6mo ago
    Have you checked the news recently?
  - __patchbit__ 6mo ago
    The Father of Disco was involved in the song "Electric Dreams" associated with a film about AI in a love triangle.
  - tedd4u 6mo ago
    Definitely not the 70's. I think the most recent age that might have counted as hopeful was really between the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) through the beginning of the GWOT (9/11/2001). So basically the 90's.
    - adrian_b 6mo ago
      The seventies were a more representative time for technological hopes, during a time when it was not yet clear which are the right technological choices. The nineties were a time of rapid technological progress, but most of it was perfectly predictable, without surprises. The only thing that was surprising during the nineties was how important the Internet became in practice, even if the evolution of its underlying technology was not surprising. The time correctly delimited by you was the time of the greatest false political hopes, when everybody around the World believed that we got rid of the communist blood-sucking parasites and now the World would become that which had been described for decades in the propaganda of the Voice of America, where the political elites are held accountable for their actions, so if they are bad they are replaced through democratic elections, and the bad commercial companies are eliminated by competition in the free market. Instead of this happening, already a couple of years before 9/11 a wave of destructuring many important historical companies happened, followed by a huge wave of mergers and acquisitions that has continued until today and which has eliminated competition from most markets, so that they are now dominated by quasi monopolies. Then the democratic elections have brought to power worse and worse human beings, all of whom have been much worse than some citizens that would have been randomly selected for those positions. Nowadays, the economies of USA and of the other "Western" countries, and also their political institutions, resemble much more those of the socialist countries that they mocked during the seventies, than those of USA and W. Europe of that time. So all the hopes of the nineties were naive and none of them was realized.
birksherty 6mo ago
Nope. Not from usa. I was born in 80s and would like to stay before 2000.
andrepd 6mo ago
A global view is probably not the right way to look at things, encouraging as it may be. Of course globally hunger rates fell and so did child mortality. If nothing else, by the inexorable progress of science and technology. But what about comparing the same country/region? After all that's a better sense of how things are progressing locally to you, and when people are asked "are things better or worse" they probably compare the way they live with the way their parents lived. Would you rather be born in 1980 or 2020 in China? In Poland? No question. Same question but in the USA? In the UK? The West in general? I'm really not so sure.
- jasomill 6mo ago
  As an American with severe hemophilia, 2020, without a doubt. I was born in 1978, and in the early '80s, beat approximately 50/50 odds by not getting infected with HIV from the only available treatments at the time, and as a result of this and other risks including hepatitis, treatments were only used in response to active bleeding episodes throughout my childhood, resulting in arthritis in my ankles and elbows by the time I was around 8. And I still wound up with hepatitis C from near birth (at which point it was referred to as "non-A, non-B", as the virus would not be identified until the late '80s) until a cure was developed decades later, fortunately never symptomatic. So, while I beat the odds, my life expectancy from birth until much later would have been considerably longer had I been born in 2020, and my joints would work a lot better. Oh, and as someone who grew up with the Shuttle and attended both Space Camp and Space Academy in Huntsville, inevitable political nonsense notwithstanding, I'm elated about the successful mission. As for the odds, given the opportunity, I wouldn't even hesitate unless they were worse than 1 in 10.