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Ytlaya posted:
Like, in all of human history has any human ever had a decent quality of life? If you take out things like having access to food and water and access to education and stuff as low hanging fruit? Is there any metric you can compare people's lives for to figure out what was decent? Like it's very cool for people to have lots of stuff, I live in the first world and have lots of stuff and it's very cool. But a definition of a decent life that makes me the first human to ever live that had a worthwhile life is very lol. And saying you are pessimistic because soon things like literacy or access to food might hit near 100% and not increase anymore because everyone has access and it turned out actually very easy to end world hunger is a very silly definition of pessimistic.
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Sep 8, 2018 01:17
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So far, am I the only person to notice one problem with the original post, even with the post title? What does 10,000 years of human history mean? If you take "history" to mean "written history", then its too much, because I think the general consensus on that is somewhere around 6,000 years, maybe a bit longer for proto-writing. If you are looking at urbanization or agriculture, then probably 10-15,000 years is a good estimate. But people are much older than that: modern humans are 100-250,000 years old. We don't have a lot of evidence for what human's were like before the beginning of writing and a consistent archaeological record, but the date of when different technological advances were first recorded keeps on getting pushed back. There is no particular reason to doubt that people of a quarter million years ago, or 100,000 years ago, had the same sort of complicated cultures and ideas about the world as we do. I mean, yes, obviously without written language and permanent structures, and the populations of urbanization, people were different, but they were still people. And the fact that we are all here is evidence of this: the way that hunter-gatherers emmigrated out of Africa means they weren't just wandering around looking for the next berry bushes. Take the emmigration to Australia, for example: as far back as 60,000 years ago, people had enough social cohesion, and enough technology (in the form of boats able to cross the ocean) to settle Australia. There might be some discussions about the archaeological record, but humans have been doing things proactively and adjusting to change easily 10 times as long as the time between now and the building of the first pyramid. There has been climate change and population bottlenecks before. If anything, knowing how long people have been around, and how much we have already adjusted, makes me feel a lot more optimistic.
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Sep 8, 2018 04:52
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glowing-fish posted:So far, am I the only person to notice one problem with the original post, even with the post title? Given how brutish, short, dim and miserable such an existence was, the prospect of humanity having to make a permanent return to that way of life I personally consider horrifying rather than uplifting.
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Sep 8, 2018 05:24
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Kerning Chameleon posted:Given how brutish, short, dim and miserable such an existence was, the prospect of humanity having to make a permanent return to that way of life I personally consider horrifying rather than uplifting. Citation needed. I mean, I am not a primitivist, and I know that there were large chunks of history when people probably did live at very low standards of living, but how much do you really know about what life was like in Sundaland 50,000 years ago? Or, consider a time that is much more recent, (although still ancient): the Harappan civilization (also known as the Indus Valley Civilization), which around 4000 years ago, showed evidence of a relatively egalitarian, non-militaristic society where flush toilets were installed in almost every urban dwelling.
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Sep 8, 2018 05:38
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Kerning Chameleon posted:Given how brutish, short, dim and miserable such an existence was, the prospect of humanity having to make a permanent return to that way of life I personally consider horrifying rather than uplifting. Happiness was invented in New Jersey in 1978
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Sep 8, 2018 05:40
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God, I really would really like modern media to stop romanticizing pre-industrial and post-apocalyptic societies. We need more Threads these days, and less Fallouts. If we really want people to make the effort to right society away from its current self-destructive path, then maybe we should stop giving them reasons to think life after electricity and penicillin might not be so bad for them.
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Sep 8, 2018 05:44
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Happiness was invented in New Jersey in 1978 I actually wrote an essay elsewhere about this, blaming my endless games in the Civilization series for distorting my perception of human history. I don't think its a conscious thought, but I do think people tend to think of human consciousness as kind of springing up at the time our historical records begin: I think that on a level, people do tend to think of people who lived before Egypt and Mesopotamia as being somehow "not quite human", that they would have just been passively reacting to their environment, and being static in their beliefs and thoughts. (Needless to say, this also has some really problematic connotations with regards to contact with hunter-gatherer peoples around the world).
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Sep 8, 2018 05:54
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Kerning Chameleon posted:God, I really would really like modern media to stop romanticizing pre-industrial and post-apocalyptic societies. We need more Threads these days, and less Fallouts. If we really want people to make the effort to right society away from its current self-destructive path, then maybe we should stop giving them reasons to think life after electricity and penicillin might not be so bad for them. I mean, I'd rather have electricity and medicine than no electricity and no medicine but don't you think at some future point in history there might be some advanced guy sitting at an advanced computer looking back at our time period and talking about how we had not even invented squeedlysqonk yet and thus were miserable. People in 12AD didn't know they didn't have electricity, they had the normal amount of electricity everyone they knew had, it would be a weird conversation to try to convince them they were miserable for not having it if their life was otherwise going as well as anyone else. You don't really know what you don't have that would improve your life. But it'd be weird to declare everyone ever to live to be suffering until the last invention was made and we could objectively list who can be actually happy.
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Sep 8, 2018 06:17
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I mean, everyone is obviously still miserable, but significantly, measurably less so than centuries past. That just means there's always going to be room for improvement, not that our spear-poking ancestors had some secret to happiness and well-being that's been lost with our Enlightened understanding of the world. Hell is having tasted the fruit of Paradise, and knowing you'll never get to taste it again, after all. We have one chance to make this Industrial-Digital Enlightened Human Civilization experiment a lasting thing, and we're squandering it. The notion that our past is condemned to be our future, and the realization that there's realistically nothing that any of us can do to stop it at this point was my final push into full-on  nihilism, on a societal level at least.
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Sep 8, 2018 06:38
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I mean, I'd rather have electricity and medicine than no electricity and no medicine but don't you think at some future point in history there might be some advanced guy sitting at an advanced computer looking back at our time period and talking about how we had not even invented squeedlysqonk yet and thus were miserable. People in 12AD didn't know they didn't have electricity, they had the normal amount of electricity everyone they knew had, it would be a weird conversation to try to convince them they were miserable for not having it if their life was otherwise going as well as anyone else. You don't really know what you don't have that would improve your life. But it'd be weird to declare everyone ever to live to be suffering until the last invention was made and we could objectively list who can be actually happy. It's quite possible that people suffer all the time without entirely realizing it. There's no reason why that shouldn't be the case.
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Sep 8, 2018 06:46
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OwlFancier posted:It's quite possible that people suffer all the time without entirely realizing it. There's no reason why that shouldn't be the case. The idea no one in history has been happy or okay yet is edgy teen nonsense.
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Sep 8, 2018 06:50
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:The idea no one in history has been happy or okay yet is edgy teen nonsense. I mean it doesn't really have much to do with history. Have you considered that the primary effect, or manifestation, of optimism is to minimize past suffering, thereby impairing the ability to form accurate assessments of one's life experience? This is, of course, very useful and motivating for a person, it gets them out of bed every morning and gets them to work. But does that persistent hope produce happiness? How long can a committed optimist persist without payoff? I'd be inclined to suggest their entire lives in many cases.
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Sep 8, 2018 07:00
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I bet when the first humans landed on some remote tropical islands there were brief moments of a perfect society where there were no natural predators and there were lots of coconuts and tasty little animals like lobsters. Of course in due time the humans kept reproducing until the paradise could not support all the humans, at which point the society turned into a hellscape of war and cannibalism. So basically at this point an optimist should look forward to when humans invent interstellar travel so you can steal a FTL spaceship and travel to some unknown paradise planet with the girl of your dreams by your side.
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Sep 8, 2018 08:16
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Kerning Chameleon posted:I mean, everyone is obviously still miserable, In the real world, no, "everyone" isn't just loving miserable all the time.
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Sep 8, 2018 09:05
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Yeah, we're doomed, and I'll give you five simple reasons why. 1. ~60% of fossil fuel emissions stay in the atmosphere, and CO2 levels have spiked from 280 ppm in the 1950's to 400 ppm today. We are on track to reach 1500 ppm in the next hundred years. 2. When CO2 dissolves in water it combines with water molecules to form carbonic acid, and the oceans have already become 30% more acidic in the past century. 3. Photosynthetic algae and plankton absorb CO2 through photosynthesis, then drag it to the ocean floor when they die, but as the oceans become hotter and more acidic their populations are shrinking, and they simply dissolve the CO2 back into the water when they die. 4. Optimal photosynthesis needs temperatures around 20 c, and the chemical reaction slows down and stops above 40 c. 5. Agricultural civilization is still completely dependent on fossil fuels. It doesn't matter how efficient a solar panel is when you still need hundreds of millions of barrels of oil to grow, harvest, process and distribute food.
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Sep 8, 2018 10:20
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Climate change is for sure the most reasonable counterpoint to "we should be optimistic about the future". Unlike reducing poverty, increasing lifespans, decreasing infant mortality, literacy, and pretty much everything else, the condition of the climate is one of the few things that's consistently getting worse over time, with maybe the occasional glimmer of hope but by no means any hard solutions or improvements. But I think people overstate the impact of climate change. Most researchers place pretty low odds on the idea that climate change is going to wipe out humanity. It's probably "only" going to cause widespread famines and massive displacement of people, which is for sure bad, but I think that always assuming that climate change = apocalyptic hellhole furthers the idea that climate change is some future thing that's going to happen instead of something that's already affecting us and causing issues right now.
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Sep 8, 2018 12:36
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Except those effects of climate change also ratchet up tensions and make the possibility of nuclear war more and more likely with each new conflict, especially since the situation with North Korea over the past few years have all but put a stake in the heart of non-proliferation as a realistic aspiration for nation states and currently nuke-less powers start the arms race again to have their own seat at the big boys' table like NK has achieved. Not to mention the direction of the much lauded tech industry products is so far geared to entrench the interests of the rich and powerful, and mass microtarget individuals to strangle actual threatening movements to the elite in their crib. When it's not used to simply inflame divisions anyway, of course. It's not just this or that particular situation in a vacuum that will doom our civilization, it's the comorbidity of several seemingly unrelated crises that I don't think we can truly correct in time for that will be our collective downfall. Kerning Chameleon fucked around with this message at 14:22 on Sep 8, 2018 |
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Sep 8, 2018 14:16
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Kerning Chameleon posted:Except those effects of climate change also ratchet up tensions and make the possibility of nuclear war more and more likely with each new conflict, especially since the situation with North Korea over the past few years have all but put a stake in the heart of non-proliferation as a realistic aspiration for nation states and currently nuke-less powers start the arms race again to have their own seat at the big boys' table like NK has achieved. On the other hand people have been claiming the end is near for thousands of years and have been consistently wrong every single time.
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Sep 8, 2018 15:43
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Well, no the end absolutely did happen for a shitload of people, arguably almost everyone, throughout history.
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Sep 8, 2018 16:03
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization I mean, sure. Violent deaths have declined by 90-95%, but is that really an improvement when yesterday I saw two people aggressively tweet at each other?
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Sep 8, 2018 16:04
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OwlFancier posted:Well, no the end absolutely did happen for a shitload of people, arguably almost everyone, throughout history. Yes, everyone dies and every empire falls eventually which is is probably why everyone through all of history has over inflated their own place and gone to assume their end roughly matched up with the end of all things. Everyone wants to think life on earth was at it's peak the age they were at their peak and will decline along with them and just wrap up around the time they die. It's more comforting to just pretend everyone dies when you are 80 than it is to imagine some bad things will happen (including very bad things) and some good things (including very good things) will happen and 130 years after you are dead stuff will still be continuing on.
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Sep 8, 2018 16:11
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Unlike the belief that everything's going to get better over time rather than the possibility that the future might just be a steadily increasing engine of human misery, perpetuated not out of preference towards a happy life but out of fear of the alternative. Definitely not something believed because it's a nice idea.
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Sep 8, 2018 16:14
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glowing-fish posted:Citation needed. i, for one, like having antibiotics and emergency medicine and central heating also internet porn and not starving due to bad harvests in a year
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Sep 8, 2018 16:36
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:On the other hand people have been claiming the end is near for thousands of years and have been consistently wrong every single time. OwlFancier posted:Well, no the end absolutely did happen for a shitload of people, arguably almost everyone, throughout history. Yes, the European Invasion was definitely not the end for Native Americans. I mean sure, 90%+ of their population was wiped out, their culture annihilated, their former homes ransacked and paved over for resource starved colonists, and the "lucky" survivors got to become ethnic miniorities in their own drat homes... but lighten up guys, at least it wasn't the end for the entire human race, right? Or the Black Plague. Sure, it brought the continent closer to actual extinction than even the world wars, and stunted any hope of social or educated progress for a whole century... but hey, they bounced back right as rain once they found a couple of continents' worth of near totally untapped resources, right? Or the original loss of the Golden Age, the Bronze Age Collapse. Sure, a dynamic and cosmopolitan pan-Mediterranean civilization, full of sophisticated trade and vibrant culture, was so thoroughly snuffed out we don't even have enough surviving records to say what the gently caress even actually happened beyond wild educated guesses. And sure, the Mediterranean basically went through their equivalent of the dark ages for several centuries before civilization could really arise again. And yeah, that's because nobody could make bronze anymore and it took that long for people to be able to find and utilize iron instead. But hey, it's not like that much science, culture, and philosophy could have been lost, right? We have never before the last century had the power to depopulate the entire globe, either all at once or gradually, and there is no iron equivalent of oil and coal we could hop over to when those run out in a setback society.
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Sep 8, 2018 16:45
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Kerning Chameleon posted:Yes, the European Invasion was definitely not the end for Native Americans. I mean sure, 90%+ of their population was wiped out, their culture annihilated, their former homes ransacked and paved over for resource starved colonists, and the "lucky" survivors got to become ethnic miniorities in their own drat homes... but lighten up guys, at least it wasn't the end for the entire human race, right? Yeah, sure seems like history was a tapestry of rising and falling fortunes and very good and very bad things happening for various groups stretching back thousands of years. Not sure how I should take that and change it to "so therefore it's different this time and this will all wrap up soon'.
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Sep 8, 2018 17:08
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Perhaps a more accurate reading would be that history is a succession of ends-of-the-world with the primary change being the size of the world in question, and that currently the world is quite possibly the entire planet.
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Sep 8, 2018 17:26
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OwlFancier posted:Perhaps a more accurate reading would be that history is a succession of ends-of-the-world with the primary change being the size of the world in question, and that currently the world is quite possibly the entire planet. I, for one, look forward to our post-resource wars Somali warlord brigade-turned-world government overlords
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Sep 8, 2018 17:27
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Xae posted:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization I think it's very interesting that this long term trend towards decreasing homicide remains very strong even when we just look at comparatively brief intervals. For the United States for example:  homicides are per 100,000 people The trend is just as clear in European data too:  I tend to lean towards economic explanations for these kinds of social changes, but there's been several historical studies on this phenomena that suggest it may be driven in large part by culture change. That is to say homicide has become less socially acceptable over time. I can't remember the title of the work I read parts of but it was on the decline in homicide in Dutch/Flemish cities from the Renaissance to the early modern, and focused on the decline in the culture of knife duels.
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Sep 8, 2018 17:36
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Squalid posted:I tend to lean towards economic explanations for these kinds of social changes, but there's been several historical studies on this phenomena that suggest it may be driven in large part by culture change. That is to say homicide has become less socially acceptable over time. I can't remember the title of the work I read parts of but it was on the decline in homicide in Dutch/Flemish cities from the Renaissance to the early modern, and focused on the decline in the culture of knife duels. Probably a combo of homicide becoming less acceptable, the state's capability to investigate homicides and enforce penalties for them increase, medical advances lead to assaults that would've been fatal becoming survivable, all of which combine to make homicides less common. Once it's less common, it becomes further less acceptable, the state's ability to investigate homicides increases, yadda yadda. There's several positive feedback loops in the equation.
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Sep 8, 2018 17:42
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OwlFancier posted:Perhaps a more accurate reading would be that history is a succession of ends-of-the-world with the primary change being the size of the world in question, and that currently the world is quite possibly the entire planet. Yes, history is a succession of ends of the world if you define end of the world as some totally other thing. Like I get the poetic and philosophical idea that any time a field mouse dies it snuffs out a whole universe but the idea of viewing horrible deaths as the end of the world is honestly super lovely. Like the holocaust was a horrible event and killed more than half the jews on earth but talking about that as "welp, that was the end of jews, we are post jews now, their history ended" is not "I sympathize with their plight" as much as it is "I deny their plight". Talking about natives like their story was done and gone in 1476 or whatever is just a way to deny they still exist and still continue to have a story and their bad situation could be changed if someone wanted to. Even groups that literally cease to exist generally continue to have descendants and cultural influence even if the group as a group vanishes. Treating very bad events as "the end" is more lovely than helpful as a way to view bad events, stuff tends to continue and saying "all done now, sorry" is more a way to sweep stuff away into the past to not worry about what they are doing now in the present. Like there is more native americans now than when columbus landed, many of them living in not great conditions. Treating this at the end of the story, book closed for them denies the idea they could maybe live in better conditions or more stuff could happen to them. (good or bad, it's also a way to ignore modern injustices, to pretend they are all done and nothing important happens to them anymore)
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Sep 8, 2018 18:03
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Like, in all of human history has any human ever had a decent quality of life? If you take out things like having access to food and water and access to education and stuff as low hanging fruit? Is there any metric you can compare people's lives for to figure out what was decent? The point is mostly that we live in a world where it's totally possible to live in a world where people can easily afford (or otherwise receive) their basic needs (plus some recreational spending) and not be financially stressed, but we instead live in a world where the vast majority of resources go to a tiny percent of the world population. Most people live lives with some level of constant background stress. Cicero posted:I think maybe you've been spending too much time in D&D. I can assure you that most people are not particularly happy. This is reflected by what polls we have on the subject. I also don't think you're in a position to really make this sort of comment; it's like a white person commenting that they think racism isn't really so bad.
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Sep 8, 2018 18:26
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Yes suggesting that the colonization of the Americas might have been a cataclysmic event which irreparably destroyed many lives and much knowledge is demeaning. And it's certainly foolish to suggest that humanity has, for all of its history, destroyed itself to the extent of its capacity to do so without any regard for what it is destroying, and that perhaps its present capacity for destruction might represent an existential threat, in light of that. Me, the galaxy brain, "well the holocaust wasn't the end of Judaism because you see, Germany's imperial ambitions trod on the toes of the other imperial powers, and so they invaded them, and that coincidentally stopped it before it could finish, so actually the world is good!" OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Sep 8, 2018 |
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Sep 8, 2018 18:28
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Ytlaya posted:
Could you link us to these polls? Because a cursory search tells me that there are multiple methodologies for trying to find out if people are happy, and while they aren't uniformly positive, I can't find one that says that "most people are not particularly happy". But since you can assure us, a word that means that you are certain, and have evident, solid proof about the complicated matter of how happy people are, you aren't going to just leave it there, but are going to show us what you know. And not just a little bit: you are going to give a definitive explanation of why different methodologies to compute happiness (for example, the difference between measurements of objective well-being and subjective self-perception) both agree about who is happy and who isn't, and that both say, with the assurance that you promised us, that most people are not particularly happy. You will have no conflicting or ambiguous data in your replies. Once you have presented your data, everyone in this thread will admit that the issue is closed because of the polls that you have on the subject, assuredly.
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Sep 8, 2018 19:05
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protip to armchair pessimists: humanity is facing serious problems and humanity is better off now than throughout most of (pre-)history aren’t mutually exclusive
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Sep 8, 2018 19:10
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Hot Take: pessimism is popular precisely because if I believe that everything is hosed and meaningful change is impossible, I don't have to actually try to make things better. I'd rather be right and miserable than face the possibility of change, because change is loving terrifying.
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Sep 8, 2018 20:13
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I'd suggest that blind optimism is not necessarily more enlightened than apathetic pessimism. Especially given that it often manifests as end of history silliness whereby things just get better forever automatically.
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Sep 8, 2018 21:05
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“progress must be worked for” and “on balance, progress has been made” aren’t mutually exclusive either unless you’re a low energy (  ) centrist melt praying for tony blair and francis fukuyama’s love child to be crowned as sensible moderate business-friendly world emperor i guess
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Sep 8, 2018 21:15
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I would tend to take the position that the outlook is fairly bleak, on balance, but that doesn't preclude trying.
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Sep 8, 2018 21:20
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OwlFancier posted:Yes suggesting that the colonization of the Americas might have been a cataclysmic event which irreparably destroyed many lives and much knowledge is demeaning. It's demeaning to act like the native story ended at some point and the 5 million natives alive now are just some afterthought to their real history instead of an ongoing story that can and will continue to have pages. There is very few disasters so total that it literally closed the book on any story of any group of people and pretending that happens regularly is just a way to brush off the inconvenience that disasters and bad things have lasting consequences and the people they happen to continue to exist after and don't just disappear easily.
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Sep 8, 2018 21:31
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Ytlaya posted:The point is mostly that we live in a world where it's totally possible to live in a world where people can easily afford (or otherwise receive) their basic needs (plus some recreational spending) and not be financially stressed, but we instead live in a world where the vast majority of resources go to a tiny percent of the world population. Inequality seems bad on it's own terms but it seems like the actual data shows that over time inequality has risen but the amount of people with their needs met has also risen dramatically. It would be dumb to suggest they are linked inversely and somehow rising inequality caused more people to have food or water or whatever, but the fact they are so unlinked as to move in opposite directions seems that global inequality is not the primary cause of starvation or lack of water or education or whatever, since those things have risen quite positively as inequality grows. Like global inequality should be worked on as it's own problem though.
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Sep 8, 2018 21:47
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