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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.    yes, some of these are dumb, but a bunch aren't, now is the best time in history to be alive
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Jul 6, 2018 15:16
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Ytlaya posted:. But there's no clear path to them actually not being poor, at least as things stand now.  seems like there is and has been for a bunch of countries and a majority of the world.
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Jul 6, 2018 17:21
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Silver2195 posted: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. 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?" like if they only had the big issue ones people would say "yeah, so their lives are getting closer to mine, so what!" and if they just had the first world problem ones people would say "so I got a cell phone, people in africa are still starving, so what?" and by showing both it's "less people are starving and you got a cell phone" to show improvement across a range of life situations. If everything was already perfect in your life 20 years ago then even you have a lot more movies to watch.
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Jul 6, 2018 18:30
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Silver2195 posted:My point is that it's questionable whether some of these even measure actual progress Then ignore them, it seems like the measures of "real" problems like war and famine and death and disease and crime are getting better and it's just the fluff that you are arguing with. Like it'd be silly to be like "well yes, the number of babies that die is dropping but I don't like this new ghostbusters movie as much as the old one so it's a wash"
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Jul 6, 2018 19:19
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OwlFancier posted:War is a bit of a weird one given that until fairly recently we fought some of the most destructive wars ever and the world was under constant threat of total nuclear annihilation. How could it be otherwise? All problems forever will hit a peak before declining. Would you only count problems that never grew and then declined from there? I am sure there is also thousands of examples of diseases that mutated and killed one person then died out without spreading so their peak and resolution came simultaneously. Any other sort of problem had to grow before it shrank so it seems unfair to count things that peaked as not counting. Owlofcreamcheese fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Jul 6, 2018 |
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Jul 6, 2018 20:35
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OwlFancier posted:My point, is that looking at existing problems as if they just happened out of thin air, and then were solved, ignores the possibility towards a trend of increasing number and and scale of problems as a result of human activity. I mean, this seems like a worldview where there is not possibly a thing that could happen that would be interpretable as the world declining. If not just real but theoretical issues need to be counted.
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Jul 6, 2018 20:57
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If the world is in decline is it possible to determine what year was the best year?
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Jul 6, 2018 21:08
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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. There has never been that sort massive global regression at any time period in the last 10k years so it’s a weird thing to count on happening soon. Like, not that regression is never possible but claiming it’s inevitable seems based on whiney depression and wishing for gods vengeance instead of any sort of observed historical pattern.
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Jul 7, 2018 01:02
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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. Your 2edgy4me plan is that to avoid the sins of the western lifestyle killing people that we need to just kill everyone?
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Jul 7, 2018 01:57
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Ytlaya posted:This is using $1.25 a day as the threshold for "poor" Okay. Definite poverty a way you feel comfortable. Is the persentage of humans living like that increasing our decreasing. The number hungry/homeless/sick seem to be decreasing by every metric over the last 200 years.
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Jul 15, 2018 14:48
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Ytlaya posted:Yeah, but a lot (if not virtually all) of this can just be attributed to advancements in technology/medicine As opposed to what?
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Sep 7, 2018 05:08
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The Dipshit posted:Ok, I'll bite, what resources are you referring to that would prevent modern industrial civilization from reforming out of the ashes of this one. People have an extreme boner for fossil fuels, years of propaganda rotted their brain and can not imagine civilization existing without them. Like fax machines pre-date the use of fossil fuels but people are absolutely convinced a civilization without coal is a civilization of primitive huts and all human achievement requires oil.
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Sep 7, 2018 05:20
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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OwlFancier posted:As I said, thinking there is little hope doesn't have to be an obstacle to trying. Can you look back historically and name people that were instrumental in helping people or progressing people's rights or standards of living that had a "this is stupid and won't work" attitude about it? Like you can look back and name people like martin luther king that had optimistic attitudes that things can be fixed but who can you look back on that did the eyor thing and fought against the idea progress could be made?
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Sep 8, 2018 22:05
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OwlFancier posted:I don't know that I would call Martin Luther King an optimist, I think he was very realistic, it's what makes a lot of what he wrote as compelling as it is. He was realistic because we can retroactively see he succeeded, at the time he was outlandishly hopeful for what he could succeed and obviously taking positions that an attitude like yours would have called childish and naive.
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Sep 8, 2018 22:12
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OwlFancier posted:When I read things he wrote I get the impression of someone who doesn't allow their hopes to obfuscate their actual concrete observation of reality. When he describes the conditions he sees he does so with great clarity and frankness, as he does when he describes his obstacles as well. Not behaviour I've come to expect from optimists. Again, it's really obvious you can praise his "clarity" only because it's years later and you know what succeeded. Do you really think if he was posting on 1960s somethingawful that you wouldn't be the guy calling him some stupid hopeful dreamer that doesn't understand the real world like you do and that you support his goals in theory but think he's being a silly billy thinking he might change anything.
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Sep 8, 2018 22:30
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Kerning Chameleon posted:My apologies for, after years of trying to live the delusion, I can finally clearly see and, more importantly, accept the world as actually it is, not as the desperate try to lie to me and themselves about how they wish it was. Is the world as it actually is the most peaceful and prosperous age in all of human history where the largest percentage of people live free from hunger and disease that has ever existed?
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Sep 8, 2018 22:58
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OwlFancier posted:If you confine "the world as it is" to "within the last century except for the really big blips" and make a studious point of ignoring the looming massive problems on the horizon. There has literally always been problems dozens or hundreds of years from whatever year you are in. The thing that changed is we are now smart enough to 1) know about them in advance, 2) think of solutions. Even if you jerk off about the degenerate state of mankind and how you know for sure no one will lift a finger to solve anything we are still strictly better off by the fact we are able to anticipate these things now instead of running into them by surprise. Like maybe global warming will be exactly as bad as the toba event and humans will drop down to 3000 individuals for a second time, but the fact we know it 70 years in advance makes us strictly in a better position than ugg the caveman
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Sep 9, 2018 00:40
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OwlFancier posted:The death of the notion of automatic progress, that bad things generally won't happen, that it'll all come right in the end, that there's any justice but what people make for themselves. Yeah but the world actually has gotten significantly better by many important metrics. And no one but you seems to be stuck on some idea it happened "automatically" instead of being a thing people worked at. So you appear to be fighting an issue that doesn't actually exist using a tool that wouldn't help anyway.
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Sep 9, 2018 00:50
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Mulva posted:There's nothing useful for society in that viewpoint. I think his claim is he's got some double secret gambit where he thinks the future will be better if he says it will be worse because he will enlighten people and steer them to the correct path.
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Sep 9, 2018 00:58
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Kerning Chameleon posted:I'd rather be correct and die miserable and impotent, than to live on believing in and laboring under the lie of false hope. I consider knowing and accepting the truth more important than anything, even mutual survival or happiness, no matter how painful or despair-inducing it may be. To do otherwise would go against everything I believe in. What "truth"? You just made something up and decided you were right. That isn't any sort of deep truth.
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Sep 9, 2018 02:28
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