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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Yeah, the world sucks and it's a fight to keep progress happening instead of it being an automatic thing but it's mostly getting better over time, not worse. Eh. Some of these are subject to definitional quibbling, at the very least. Like the slavery one; I suppose I'll accept that forced labor as punishment for a crime (aside from political offenses) doesn't count, but does the treatment of foreign workers in Qatar qualify as slavery? Does ISIS qualify as a country? Reasonable definitions could yield a number higher than 3 there, I think. New HIV infections are down, but that doesn't tell us the numbers of deaths attributable to AIDS or the number of people living with HIV. And of course as the graph itself shows, HIV/AIDS is a new problem that arose just a few decades ago, whereas many of the other charts use much larger timescales. The number of nuclear warheads doesn't mean much; what really matters is the number of countries that have them, which has increased. Women have the theoretical right to vote almost everywhere, but many of the 194 countries don't have elections in any meaningful sense. Which brings us to the most definitionally tricky one: democracy. I think most people here will agree that democracy, or at least liberal democracy, has been on the decline pretty much everywhere except Tunisia over the past few years. This is obscured by the binary measurement of democracy/non-democracy and by ending the graph in 2015. And of course, scholarly articles published is a poor measure of scientific progress. I'm not going to be all doom-and-gloom here; most of the non-HIV public health metrics show genuine progress, and the world is still probably more democratic now than it was in 1988 or so. But there's plenty of reasons for pessimism as well as optimism.
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Jul 6, 2018 18:22
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I think the graphs are very intentionally a range from very frivolous (number of movies/cell phones) to very serious (child death, war death). To show a range from "big issues like war and disaster and starvation are getting better" but also to address the followup of "what about ME?" My point is that it's questionable whether some of these even measure actual progress, in part because a lot of them are using one straightforward statistic to measure something more complex. The issue with number of movies isn't even that it's frivolous, but that it's a imperfect metric of things people actually care about, like the quality of movies.
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Jul 6, 2018 18:38
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NoNotTheMindProbe posted:Stretch the line back 10k years and these are all tiny blips in the data. It would be reasonable to assume that everything will return to the long term mean. This is a silly line of argument. Everyone isn't going to suddenly forget how to read. (You may have noticed that I've been arguing both sides here. That's because different parts of my mind are on each side of the optimism/pessimism line.) Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 01:05 on Jul 7, 2018 |
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Jul 7, 2018 01:03
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Japex posted:Some things that may appear to be good are actually harmful. I believe the lifestyle popularized in the West is not sustainable long-term especially not with an ever growing population. You also need to take into account moral relativism. Your idea of good is somebody else's idea of bad. Whoa, a galaxy-brain Thanos/JRPG villain take.
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Jul 7, 2018 01:52
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