> lead people to believe that humans are getting nastier over time, even when they’re not
Most people aren't nasty or getting nastier but nasty people are likely over represented in those with power and there seems to be a current swing to having more such people getting into positions of power.
Added to that is that modern technology and weapons make it easier for a few "bad apples" in power to cause more grief to more people than before.
Its the media (or more generally group dynamics) too. One side exaggerates how nasty the other side is, which gets people outraged and engaged, then they act nasty to them because its 'justified.' It also creates a feedback loop where regardless of what the other side did originally they are now much more likely to be nasty to your side simply because you were nasty to them. Maximizing engagement like this necessarily destabilizes discourse. There is a huge monetary incentive to maximizing engagement, while there is only a mild philosophical one to stabilizing discourse, so guess which one loses.
I finally caved to one of those "balanced news" sites because someone had a 50%-off sale. They have a feature where you can see news stories that are being ignored by either liberal or conservative outlets.
It's damned fascinating, tempered by the fact that it's also damned terrifying that the populace as a whole is being controlled by it... and also that the future President of the US is trying to control it.
But maybe that's just me falling into the trap TFA talks about. :)
Social network algorithms tend to promote nasty people and their polarizing comments, so for a person which lives online, their belief that humans are getting nastier is colored by their everyday interactions.
It is good that gentle people still exist and may, in fact, be very numerous, but is it still as good if their ability to contribute to societal norms is diminished?
Their lawyers have recrafted the laws/regulations/courts that used to keep them in check. And now it's a combination of the callously indifferent and the belligerently selfish.
Their willingness to ignore their conscience gives them serious business advantages, and their enormous profits have given them too much power. It's all "ends justify the means" fools.
I highly doubt this. It feels like just another symptom of what they're describing here about memory versus present experience. Ask me if I think Trump seems nastier than Reagan and yeah, he does. But that's because I have a living impression of both of them and I was a child when Reagan was president. I can't say Putin is nastier than Stalin, or Trump is nastier than Andrew Jackson. Macron isn't worse than Napoleon. Merkel isn't worse than Hitler. History has some really shitty, nasty leaders in it, and I can't look at today and say this is worse than notable really bad times.
The Matrix is a shared simulation in 1999, the ideal circumstances allegedly.
In some aspects I would argue so as well - partially on the basis of our societies having a lower complexity amount back then.
The last two decades we enabled high throughput information flows via real-time video streams, social media, news feeds, etc.. At what cost? Did we actually gain anything over the 1999s in exchange for all that complexity?
The article talks about “good cup bad cup” and how negative news is much more impactful - again, at what cost did we enable all these information flows with potentially negative information?
Will personalized AI agents allow us to reduce the complexity coming from these information flows?
From the linked article in footnote [2] where that question is asked, the question above says that 2% of Christians answered "I don't believe in Jesus". Makes me wonder what they think a Christian is!
But that specific question was restated wrongly. Again in footnote [2] and in the link itself, it says it was 14% of Christians who answered "definitely" or "probably" with another 37% saying "not sure".
There are ways to justify that answer. One can believe in the moral tenets of Christianity, while also believing that its supposed leader was a fiction, or a conflation of real people. You can see the story as a myth, which is not the same as fiction. I don't know any such people, but it is a realistic version of Christian theology.
But I suspect it's mostly just cranks lying to pollsters.
I would laugh if I didn’t interpret this as a disturbing dearth of evidence-based critical thinking. Homo Sapiens has immense power over the world and other species and very little rationality to temper and guide that power.
I was Christian in 2000 and we thought Jesus would come again definitely, probably then too. There have been soo many disappointed millenarians in the past 2000 years.
This is why its a wonderful thing, an act of rebellion and of bravery, to create something, to love someone, to laugh and smile at another human being. Yeah, the world feels terrible. Smile anyway!
Just a note that you can buy that "Visions of Daniel and John" apocalyptic timeline chart online from a bunch of places and, of course you should. What better way to greet guests?
> If you have a vague feeling that your Bad Cup didn’t used to be so full, and then you conclude we’re slip-sliding toward catastrophe, you haven’t discovered anything. You’ve just taken your biases for a walk.
Or maybe we are seeing unprecedented levels of CO2, cleared land, and population? I guess that's just bias too, then, right?
An alternative explanation is that every time someone thought society was getting worse, it WAS, and here we are, at the worst point.
Just because we have a cognitive bias, it doesn’t mean that bias is leading us in the wrong direction on every topic. A stopped clock is right twice a day and all that. It just means we have to be more careful when assessing evidence.
I am actually panicking as much as you are about it, but, thinking about it, maybe it is just bias?
Like, people in the 20th century were living in constant fear of mutually assured destruction for dozens of years. Is that better or worse than the guaranteed collapse of the ecosystem? I couldn’t tell.
But these days, no one really cares about a nuclear war, it seems, even if one of the nuclear power is currently fighting a war; and it’s appearing to lose it.
It's not doing great, but it's not really losing, either.
It is successfully using its nuclear arsenal to deter aid for the country it's invading. A lot of materiel is sent, but its uses are limited. A massive attack on the capital would be entirely justified, and is well within their capability, but is forbidden for fear of escalating to nuclear weapons.
Because of that, they are continuing to prosecute the war, and making minor gains. They cannot continue that forever, but in another month, their target is likely to be hamstrung even further. They may yet win, or negotiate a peace that they can pass off as a win (which would include Ukraine never joining NATO).
People may not have that immediate fear of nuclear war that characterized the 50s through the 80s. But the threat is in play, and it's being kept out of daily discourse only because the US refuses to challenge it.
MAD came extremely close to kicking off at least twice during the Cold War (Cuban Missile Crisis and that time a Soviet officer chose to ignore a malfunctioning early warning system). We can’t conclude from the fact that it didn’t kill us that it wasn’t a serious possibility.
Maybe in two or three decades we’ll discover that Russia was nearer to using nukes than we assume.
> Like, people in the 20th century were living in constant fear of mutually assured destruction for dozens of years. Is that better or worse than the guaranteed collapse of the ecosystem? I couldn’t tell.
The fallacy in your argument is that climate disaster is already happening. We have already rendered hundreds of species extinct. It is not a future risk.
I'm still in fear of nuclear holocaust. That problem hasn't gone away even if it's not top of zeitgeist now that other existential threats are so popular.
I also believe that, as a broad trend, life gets harder, scarier, and more painful as you age, especially once you pass some critical threshold. Your personal experience of life colors your view of those around you, so you begin to think "the world is worse" when what you probably should think is "my life is worse".
Lich fits better according to the stories. Zombies are mindless undead who eat the flesh of the living. Liches are kings sustained in unlife through magical means, and retain their minds.
Readit News
Most people aren't nasty or getting nastier but nasty people are likely over represented in those with power and there seems to be a current swing to having more such people getting into positions of power.
Added to that is that modern technology and weapons make it easier for a few "bad apples" in power to cause more grief to more people than before.
I finally caved to one of those "balanced news" sites because someone had a 50%-off sale. They have a feature where you can see news stories that are being ignored by either liberal or conservative outlets.
It's damned fascinating, tempered by the fact that it's also damned terrifying that the populace as a whole is being controlled by it... and also that the future President of the US is trying to control it.
But maybe that's just me falling into the trap TFA talks about. :)
It is good that gentle people still exist and may, in fact, be very numerous, but is it still as good if their ability to contribute to societal norms is diminished?
Their willingness to ignore their conscience gives them serious business advantages, and their enormous profits have given them too much power. It's all "ends justify the means" fools.
In some aspects I would argue so as well - partially on the basis of our societies having a lower complexity amount back then.
The last two decades we enabled high throughput information flows via real-time video streams, social media, news feeds, etc.. At what cost? Did we actually gain anything over the 1999s in exchange for all that complexity?
The article talks about “good cup bad cup” and how negative news is much more impactful - again, at what cost did we enable all these information flows with potentially negative information?
Will personalized AI agents allow us to reduce the complexity coming from these information flows?
lol, just lol.
But that specific question was restated wrongly. Again in footnote [2] and in the link itself, it says it was 14% of Christians who answered "definitely" or "probably" with another 37% saying "not sure".
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/12/08/about-fou...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Lizardman%27s_Constant
There are ways to justify that answer. One can believe in the moral tenets of Christianity, while also believing that its supposed leader was a fiction, or a conflation of real people. You can see the story as a myth, which is not the same as fiction. I don't know any such people, but it is a realistic version of Christian theology.
But I suspect it's mostly just cranks lying to pollsters.
Or maybe we are seeing unprecedented levels of CO2, cleared land, and population? I guess that's just bias too, then, right?
An alternative explanation is that every time someone thought society was getting worse, it WAS, and here we are, at the worst point.
Like, people in the 20th century were living in constant fear of mutually assured destruction for dozens of years. Is that better or worse than the guaranteed collapse of the ecosystem? I couldn’t tell.
But these days, no one really cares about a nuclear war, it seems, even if one of the nuclear power is currently fighting a war; and it’s appearing to lose it.
It is successfully using its nuclear arsenal to deter aid for the country it's invading. A lot of materiel is sent, but its uses are limited. A massive attack on the capital would be entirely justified, and is well within their capability, but is forbidden for fear of escalating to nuclear weapons.
Because of that, they are continuing to prosecute the war, and making minor gains. They cannot continue that forever, but in another month, their target is likely to be hamstrung even further. They may yet win, or negotiate a peace that they can pass off as a win (which would include Ukraine never joining NATO).
People may not have that immediate fear of nuclear war that characterized the 50s through the 80s. But the threat is in play, and it's being kept out of daily discourse only because the US refuses to challenge it.
Maybe in two or three decades we’ll discover that Russia was nearer to using nukes than we assume.
The fallacy in your argument is that climate disaster is already happening. We have already rendered hundreds of species extinct. It is not a future risk.
Deleted Comment
Yep. Compare to, say, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_late_Middle_Ages .
> here we are, at the worst point
Not even close. (But things are likely to change radically after Jan 20, so check back in a few months.)