I think your point here is a great note on the topic, but sort of misses the very large, loud group of people out there who honestly think the world's improveme

I think your point here is a great note on the topic, but sort of misses the very large, loud group of people out there who honestly think the world's improvement has inflected and is now going to hell in a hand basket. As such, I prefer being reminded about how remarkably not-awful things are versus the next pointlessly negative everything's falling apart rhetoric. Mind, that may have to do with where I live, maybe, and I prefer balanced rhetoric. But it's useful to remind people that the general goodness of the world is monotonically increasing (perhaps with a 10-point moving average and a little spot of outlier filtering). And yeah, this sort of conversation is almost necessarily a long-now topic. To talk about it over the course of a few months or just a year is a bit silly - there's a lot of noise. But over many decades and especially centuries, things certainly look better now. Things may be crap now in many ways, but it's only knee-deep crap. In the bad old days people waded through crap up to their eyeballs uphill both ways.