Robert Sapolsky found the the most obvious predictor of stress in primate societies (measured via cortisol levels) was inequality. Speaking as a member of a highly inequal primate society, it makes sense to me.
I think evolution hardwired our primate brains against inequality. We go out of our way to punish those who don't play nice and share with the broader group. Otherwise complex societies would have never emerged, because assholes exploiting and taking advantage of peers would ruin and doom any group larger than a few individuals.
It make sense to me too. Financial strain, limited opportunities, social exclusion and perceived unfairness can all contribute to heightened stress levels and anger towards life...
It might be unfair to focus on this, but that "perceived unfairness" just jumped out at be.
My first reaction was to think "it's not just perceived"... but after a little introspecting, I couldn't help but notice how grim that statement actually is. It means that any mistreatment is fine - as long as the person can be distracted from it.
And thinking about that reminded me how every new tech since the internet/90th has been increasingly distracting. There is a reason we've started calling it the attention economy after all...
This varies by country. The GINI Index for the United States which measures income inequality rose sharply from 1980 to 1993 and then has been fairly flat since.
“Real stuff” retail logistics is 100% a game of physical statistics; keep enough necessities on shelves people don’t riot.
Everything else about society is conservative political ideology
Just angling for vanity rewards based upon peddling the best story, the best trauma, or best political network connections given contemporary zeitgeist; no Im the best aligned with set of virtues!. Whose family sold the most cars during the auto boom, and why we should still care…
It’s partly the late stage effect of the ad supported everything business model. Rage is very effective to generate engagement, tribalism and passion. When major politicians are ready to exploit the us vs them dynamic to their benefit it creates a perfect storm.
Also the Guardian and other news outlets have been driving this where every headline is about how one group or another is outraged it’s getting a bit ridiculous.
This is probably one of the biggest reasons right here. Its the whole reason behind inflammatory clickbait headlines.
It's also one of the reasons I avoid most social media, I don't need that kind of negativity affecting my mental health. If its something important, I will probably hear it from a friend or it might appear here on HN.
But even on HN I have been seeing a lot of inflammatory news on the front page. Makes me wonder if someone has built an AI webapp which shows you only the tech related news on HN.
It's something that demagogues have known for centuries.
Get people angry, and you can lead them around.
When we are angry or afraid (and, it's my belief that anger is really just a reaction to fear), our thinking becomes "binary." No time to sweat the details. [Fight|Flight] Pick one. We don't become stupid, but our decisions tend to be rash, and ill-considered.
People make bad decisions when they are stressed, especially when angry.
Works a charm, when you are the hate dealer, and you are the one that benefits from the bad decisions of your customers.
These aren’t conscious decisions people are making. It’s baked into our chemical systems (read thinking fast and slow for some more context).
Millions of years of survival instincts don’t go away overnight. We are wired to pay more attention to negative things so we don’t get eaten. That wiring is exploited at scale in ways we never dreamed of.
Even in the days before the internet, nightly news crews knew: if it bleeds, it leads.
Evolution takes generations. Society might adapt, if given enough time, and assuming that society can survive that long while trillion-dollar companies are incentivized to exploit human emotion in such a destructive way.
I'd say anger IS a prime engagement mechanism, its purpose is almost to 'engage' ("I must take action to fix this now/it is on ME to engage with this now). The problem is that it can be co-opted and misused to drive up numbers for people sitting in San Francisco, outside of its original purpose in a huntergatherer society.
Sample size of one…it feels true to me. Maybe it’s my age or I am somehow blissfully unaware it’s always been like this. It feels very true for me in America that the moment you like or dislike something or even have an opinion that is a shade of gray instead of black or white, that you immediately get dumped into a binary category. In America this seems to be extremely true regardless of ideology.
This is in alignment with my past experiences too. After moving to America, I met a friend who told me she would never share a table with someone who voted Republican. I found this super surprising, but the rest of the group agreed. That was a hard rule for them. From what I've been able to gather, most privileged progressive white-collar circles in American cities tend to run almost exclusively Democrat. Has it always been this way? Have Americans always allowed voting habits to dictate their choice of friends?
Back in Canada, of my three closest friends, one voted LPC, another Green, and another CPC. This next election I imagine it will be different. The amount of tribalism Americans associate with their two parties has always been so fascinating to me.
> Has it always been this way? Have Americans always allowed voting habits to dictate their choice of friends?
Not to the degree we see today. I think it's something that's really taken off in the last 8 to 10 years, and I remember seeing the first signs of it starting in maybe 2008. The Tea Party and Occupy Wallstreet movements seemed to be the leading indicators of a much more deepening divide.
It's not really surprising to me though. I think when you frame it as "allowing voting habits to dictate your choice of friends" it sounds superficial, but there are deep ethical and ideological divides. You're framing like people are saying "You voted for X and so we can't be friends", but I think a more accurate framing would be "X is an abhorrent belief and cannot in good conscience have a relationship with anyone who would support X or any politician who is in favor of X".
Believe it or not, this is _very different_ than it was maybe 20 years ago. I used to have good friends who were in the "other" party, and while we had pretty strong disagreements about policy, I never doubted that in the end we all wanted what was best for people, and our views of what the best outcomes would be were pretty aligned even if our ideas of how to get there were very different.
Today, that's not the case. There's almost no common ground to find.
Intolerance of the other's point of view seems to be increasing. And I do think that social media is fueling that intolerance. Its easy to be rude to someone online than it is in person. In short, its easier to be intolerant online than in person.
Also, seeing the world in Black and White requires less effort than viewing it in shades of grey. And the rational mind seeks certainty and clarity, which makes Black and White an attractive option compared to uncertainty of ambiguous shades of grey.
> From what I've been able to gather, most privileged progressive white-collar circles in American cities tend to run almost exclusively Democrat. Has it always been this way?
No and it's not always true. They just have different shibboleths and areas you'd see them. Rust Belt and Farm belt come to mind here.
> Have Americans always allowed voting habits to dictate their choice of friends?
At least in my lifetime, things started to polarize around the GWB vs Kerry election. Opinions on the war/etc caused some people at my college to change some friendships based on political affiliations... most people would just avoid talking politics though (touching on your previous question, someone in collage from a fairly well off family kinda got the wrong message from American dad, yet he just made sure to stop talking about how pretty Ann Coulter was in front of left wing people.)
The elections after that amplified the split however. Obama's second election was, in my head, less 'contentious' than the first... but by 2016 I think everything was in full swing.
As I remember it, it wasn't like this in the period before 2000-2003. The 2000 US Presidential election was very acrimonious; I think that died down because 9/11 was a unifying threat; then controversies about the war in Iraq and WMDs etc. reignited it. And this is also when the Internet became relevant to the public discourse and I think Internet social dynamics fanned a lot of the flames.
Even about the stupidest and minor things too, I’ve noticed. A few weeks ago I discussed how I’m not a big fan of dark theme UIs, and the comments here on HN were shockingly nasty and out of place.
People seem to have a huge need to defend their preferences and world views, as if something could be taken away from them, should they fail to defended it any turn. If you instead comment that you prefer one thing, but can see the usefulness of another, moderate your own opinion and leave room for the alternatives, then your comment/post/video/tweet the your engagement drops to almost zero. That's no good in an engagement driven economy.
During my several decades I would say polarization and tribalism has been a mainstay of American discourse. Think of “communist” as an all-purpose slur in the 50s, the Vietnam and establishment vs. counterculture situation in the 60s/70s, some weak anti-Yuppie stuff in the 80s, etc. But I can’t think of any time this bad.
I personally blame not only the algorithms, but the focus of political parties on activating their more extreme constituents rather than on achieving reasonable compromise and effectively governing. It used to be you could have an actual substantive debate, but now at least one side will be either unable or unwilling to participate.
The Republicans in particular got so good at energizing the extreme “base” as an electoral strategy that it seems the whole party leadership was inadvertently replaced by the “base”, which makes it very hard to make progress.
Agency. All power has been effervescing up up up, into stratospherically high off C suites.
We no longer see a local world that we have a place in around us; the decisions are all made in far off places & built by production line labor thousands of miles yet further still.
Few about figure out an orientation & poise in the modern "thrownness" of being. Many do adapt & find a way, but
Without agency, we have no core of self to believe in, to fall back in. Every offense grates further. Anger is for the reactive, for the unempowered, those without; those with a sense of self can have affronts big & small roll off, because they have a connection to meaning. They believe in something and their role in that something. Agency & self co-develop, and are the antidote to being easily swayed.
(This is not a total answer. But I believe these conditions form a sizable chunk of the bedrock of our social conditions & experiences, set up what zeitgeists come and go.)
(This belief in human agency is Ppart of the reason I believe so strongly in http://malleable.systems. Technology ought offer us a path to agency, a way to check the Black Iron Prison of consumerdom/control. This is a religious/spiritual calling, of letting people back in to systems, to me.)
My anecdote after working with college students: It’s obvious to me that they’re doing better than my generation in many metrics: Easy access to information that can improve their lives, massively more acceptance of everything from LGTBQ+ to simply being a nerd (which was relatively stigmatized even a few decades ago), significantly more job opportunities, remote work, international travel is common, they drive nice cars, get paid well (CS students in my case) and on and on.
Yet their expectations have advanced faster than their quality of life. Some of the things they tell me are so pie in the sky that it’s hard to even begin to imagine how to return their expectations to reality. For example, many of them have picked up ideas that we should all be working 8-10 hours per week due to societal progress, or that the government could easily institute UBI at levels that had everyone living comfortable middle class lifestyles and made work optional. There is no critical thinking about where the money would come from or how anything would get done if nobody had to work, but they’ve seen it repeated so many times on Reddit that it’s accepted as incontrovertible truth. Every year I hear one student repeat the same argument that Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, or some other figure could cure global warming, world hunger, or other concerns and still have millions left over. Some people truly believe this.
The other strange angle I’m hearing frequently is the idea that life was so much easier in the past. College students are convinced that I grew up in an era where work was easier and everything was cheap. They don’t believe me when I explain how hard my parents had to work, or the fact that my dad grew up in a house smaller than their college dorm (new construction college dorms are incredibly large and lavish, for some reason). The internet has told them that every prior generation had it easy and they their generation was the first to encounter any financial challenges, so that’s what they believe.
Against impossible expectations like these, no amount of reality could ever be satisfying. I feel like I’m becoming an old man by watching these college students live comfortable lives, secure good job offers (this is what we help with), do work they enjoy, live in nice places, and still be convinced that everything is terrible because it can never reach the level of their expectations about the world.
Note that many of these students are the kinds to turn their nose up at TikTok, have deleted their Instagram years ago, and scoff at people for consuming viral YouTube shorts, like mentioned in the article. Weirdly, the content they consume on their platforms of choice (usually Reddit) is actually worse in many ways. I think we underestimate just how bad and inflammatory the content on Reddit can be.
We have more than enough wealth here in the US (and most first world societies) to eliminate most child poverty in our nations, and we even demonstrated this ability during the pandemic era. But for some reason we choose not to do this. Yes you can sit back and cherrypick the most innumerate beliefs that 23-year-olds hold, but we’re adults and we need to accept responsibility for the flaws in the society we’re handing them. If we can’t do that, our criticism is hollow and embarrassing.
Let's not pretend the reason is some big mystery. We choose not to do this because corporations and the very wealthy would have to proportionally pay their share for it, and by and large they control politicians and the political processes.
> Some of the things they tell me are so pie in the sky that it’s hard to even begin to imagine how to return their expectations to reality. For example, many of them have picked up ideas that we should all be working 8-10 hours per week due to societal progress, or that the government could easily institute UBI at levels that had everyone living comfortable middle class lifestyles and made work optional.
IMO they should be applauded for being able to even imagine such a world--and encouraged to go make it happen before all the "status quo advocates" beat it out of them. The world has so much surplus to offer, yet that surplus is captured by so few. Good for these kids who, at least for the moment, haven't yet resigned themselves to the "fact" that this can't be changed.
Are these expectations impossible, or simply accrued to the most privileged in society? It's not the materiality those kids are complaining about, it's the distribution. Big Corp and Big Government really think they can gas light Americans even when we have access to all the data. That's the rage
> Every year I hear one student repeat the same argument that Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, or some other figure could cure global warming, world hunger, or other concerns and still have millions left over. Some people truly believe this.
The annual cost to eliminate world hunger is estimated to be $6 billion - $23 billion. A US treasury level return on the combined fortunes of Bezos and Gates would be around the higher number. The rough math checks out on the two of them combined ending world hunger forever. Even if they keep millions.
Those cost estimates are nonsense, way too low by orders of magnitude. Since the invention of the Haber-Bosch process (nitrogen fertilizer), major world famines haven't been caused by a lack of food or even money for food. The actual causes have always been political: incompetence, corruption, and violence.
For example, during the 1983–1985 famine in Ethiopia which killed 1.2M people there was a drought, but the primary cause was war. The combatants used hunger as a weapon, and stole food from civilians and foreign aid supplies.
How much would it cost to intervene in every conflict zone and impose peace? Look what happened in Afghanistan recently. The cost would be in the trillions if it's even possible at all.
It seems to me that we are not as good at recognizing tradeoffs as we used to be. We used to have discussions where we would point out that more X is good but it would have the downside of less Y, but now we just yell "More X!" at one another.
I don't think this is mutually exclusive, and it depends on the nature of concerns. Should these students be complaining? No. Could it be and has it been much worse? Yes. Should we still hope for a society where advances in technology and productivity filter into leisure time for the masses? I think so. Is global warming , and reduction in biodiversity an existential threat, and the sort of thing we should be deeply ashamed about as a society, and doing everything we can to slow? Yes.
There is rage, genuine rage; and there is rage as spectacle. Sometimes these overlap, but not necessarily. The spectacular rage is both incendiary and therapeutic. I can not help but remember this Black Mirror episode and see the parallel to it in many media : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
> My thesis has been that America is characterized by low levels of violence but also low social trust.
Low levels of violence? Compared to whom? US ranks high in number of incarcerated citizens per 100k[^1]. There is no other "western" country in that list, for example.
Outside those cities, violent crime is very low and comparable to other "western" countries. It's something that people see on the news but don't personally experience. In my relatively affluent city, the homicide rate most years is zero.
Readit News
I think evolution hardwired our primate brains against inequality. We go out of our way to punish those who don't play nice and share with the broader group. Otherwise complex societies would have never emerged, because assholes exploiting and taking advantage of peers would ruin and doom any group larger than a few individuals.
My first reaction was to think "it's not just perceived"... but after a little introspecting, I couldn't help but notice how grim that statement actually is. It means that any mistreatment is fine - as long as the person can be distracted from it.
And thinking about that reminded me how every new tech since the internet/90th has been increasingly distracting. There is a reason we've started calling it the attention economy after all...
My problem is that when a corporation does something super shitty to me, I have zero ability to punish them for it.
Give people the ability to punish corporate bad actors, and they would get a lot happier.
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/trust/archive/fall-2022/how-the....
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...
However I’m not totally convinced this is the main factor.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA
Deleted Comment
Everything else about society is conservative political ideology
Just angling for vanity rewards based upon peddling the best story, the best trauma, or best political network connections given contemporary zeitgeist; no Im the best aligned with set of virtues!. Whose family sold the most cars during the auto boom, and why we should still care…
It’s hilariously bad
Also the Guardian and other news outlets have been driving this where every headline is about how one group or another is outraged it’s getting a bit ridiculous.
It's also one of the reasons I avoid most social media, I don't need that kind of negativity affecting my mental health. If its something important, I will probably hear it from a friend or it might appear here on HN.
But even on HN I have been seeing a lot of inflammatory news on the front page. Makes me wonder if someone has built an AI webapp which shows you only the tech related news on HN.
It's something that demagogues have known for centuries.
Get people angry, and you can lead them around.
When we are angry or afraid (and, it's my belief that anger is really just a reaction to fear), our thinking becomes "binary." No time to sweat the details. [Fight|Flight] Pick one. We don't become stupid, but our decisions tend to be rash, and ill-considered.
People make bad decisions when they are stressed, especially when angry.
Works a charm, when you are the hate dealer, and you are the one that benefits from the bad decisions of your customers.
Millions of years of survival instincts don’t go away overnight. We are wired to pay more attention to negative things so we don’t get eaten. That wiring is exploited at scale in ways we never dreamed of.
Even in the days before the internet, nightly news crews knew: if it bleeds, it leads.
Back in Canada, of my three closest friends, one voted LPC, another Green, and another CPC. This next election I imagine it will be different. The amount of tribalism Americans associate with their two parties has always been so fascinating to me.
Not to the degree we see today. I think it's something that's really taken off in the last 8 to 10 years, and I remember seeing the first signs of it starting in maybe 2008. The Tea Party and Occupy Wallstreet movements seemed to be the leading indicators of a much more deepening divide.
It's not really surprising to me though. I think when you frame it as "allowing voting habits to dictate your choice of friends" it sounds superficial, but there are deep ethical and ideological divides. You're framing like people are saying "You voted for X and so we can't be friends", but I think a more accurate framing would be "X is an abhorrent belief and cannot in good conscience have a relationship with anyone who would support X or any politician who is in favor of X".
Believe it or not, this is _very different_ than it was maybe 20 years ago. I used to have good friends who were in the "other" party, and while we had pretty strong disagreements about policy, I never doubted that in the end we all wanted what was best for people, and our views of what the best outcomes would be were pretty aligned even if our ideas of how to get there were very different.
Today, that's not the case. There's almost no common ground to find.
Also, seeing the world in Black and White requires less effort than viewing it in shades of grey. And the rational mind seeks certainty and clarity, which makes Black and White an attractive option compared to uncertainty of ambiguous shades of grey.
Single Vision, William Blake called it.
No and it's not always true. They just have different shibboleths and areas you'd see them. Rust Belt and Farm belt come to mind here.
> Have Americans always allowed voting habits to dictate their choice of friends?
At least in my lifetime, things started to polarize around the GWB vs Kerry election. Opinions on the war/etc caused some people at my college to change some friendships based on political affiliations... most people would just avoid talking politics though (touching on your previous question, someone in collage from a fairly well off family kinda got the wrong message from American dad, yet he just made sure to stop talking about how pretty Ann Coulter was in front of left wing people.)
The elections after that amplified the split however. Obama's second election was, in my head, less 'contentious' than the first... but by 2016 I think everything was in full swing.
I personally blame not only the algorithms, but the focus of political parties on activating their more extreme constituents rather than on achieving reasonable compromise and effectively governing. It used to be you could have an actual substantive debate, but now at least one side will be either unable or unwilling to participate.
The Republicans in particular got so good at energizing the extreme “base” as an electoral strategy that it seems the whole party leadership was inadvertently replaced by the “base”, which makes it very hard to make progress.
We no longer see a local world that we have a place in around us; the decisions are all made in far off places & built by production line labor thousands of miles yet further still.
Few about figure out an orientation & poise in the modern "thrownness" of being. Many do adapt & find a way, but
Without agency, we have no core of self to believe in, to fall back in. Every offense grates further. Anger is for the reactive, for the unempowered, those without; those with a sense of self can have affronts big & small roll off, because they have a connection to meaning. They believe in something and their role in that something. Agency & self co-develop, and are the antidote to being easily swayed.
(This is not a total answer. But I believe these conditions form a sizable chunk of the bedrock of our social conditions & experiences, set up what zeitgeists come and go.)
(This belief in human agency is Ppart of the reason I believe so strongly in http://malleable.systems. Technology ought offer us a path to agency, a way to check the Black Iron Prison of consumerdom/control. This is a religious/spiritual calling, of letting people back in to systems, to me.)
Yet their expectations have advanced faster than their quality of life. Some of the things they tell me are so pie in the sky that it’s hard to even begin to imagine how to return their expectations to reality. For example, many of them have picked up ideas that we should all be working 8-10 hours per week due to societal progress, or that the government could easily institute UBI at levels that had everyone living comfortable middle class lifestyles and made work optional. There is no critical thinking about where the money would come from or how anything would get done if nobody had to work, but they’ve seen it repeated so many times on Reddit that it’s accepted as incontrovertible truth. Every year I hear one student repeat the same argument that Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, or some other figure could cure global warming, world hunger, or other concerns and still have millions left over. Some people truly believe this.
The other strange angle I’m hearing frequently is the idea that life was so much easier in the past. College students are convinced that I grew up in an era where work was easier and everything was cheap. They don’t believe me when I explain how hard my parents had to work, or the fact that my dad grew up in a house smaller than their college dorm (new construction college dorms are incredibly large and lavish, for some reason). The internet has told them that every prior generation had it easy and they their generation was the first to encounter any financial challenges, so that’s what they believe.
Against impossible expectations like these, no amount of reality could ever be satisfying. I feel like I’m becoming an old man by watching these college students live comfortable lives, secure good job offers (this is what we help with), do work they enjoy, live in nice places, and still be convinced that everything is terrible because it can never reach the level of their expectations about the world.
Note that many of these students are the kinds to turn their nose up at TikTok, have deleted their Instagram years ago, and scoff at people for consuming viral YouTube shorts, like mentioned in the article. Weirdly, the content they consume on their platforms of choice (usually Reddit) is actually worse in many ways. I think we underestimate just how bad and inflammatory the content on Reddit can be.
Let's not pretend the reason is some big mystery. We choose not to do this because corporations and the very wealthy would have to proportionally pay their share for it, and by and large they control politicians and the political processes.
IMO they should be applauded for being able to even imagine such a world--and encouraged to go make it happen before all the "status quo advocates" beat it out of them. The world has so much surplus to offer, yet that surplus is captured by so few. Good for these kids who, at least for the moment, haven't yet resigned themselves to the "fact" that this can't be changed.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/09/college-graduates-are-overes...
There are significantly less job opportunities that offer acceptable levels of decency, compared to past decades.
The annual cost to eliminate world hunger is estimated to be $6 billion - $23 billion. A US treasury level return on the combined fortunes of Bezos and Gates would be around the higher number. The rough math checks out on the two of them combined ending world hunger forever. Even if they keep millions.
For example, during the 1983–1985 famine in Ethiopia which killed 1.2M people there was a drought, but the primary cause was war. The combatants used hunger as a weapon, and stole food from civilians and foreign aid supplies.
How much would it cost to intervene in every conflict zone and impose peace? Look what happened in Afghanistan recently. The cost would be in the trillions if it's even possible at all.
Low levels of violence? Compared to whom? US ranks high in number of incarcerated citizens per 100k[^1]. There is no other "western" country in that list, for example.
[^1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/262962/countries-with-th...
https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/murder-map-deadliest-u-s-ci...
Outside those cities, violent crime is very low and comparable to other "western" countries. It's something that people see on the news but don't personally experience. In my relatively affluent city, the homicide rate most years is zero.