It’s true that they sell products which are using technology, but I’m not sure it makes a different in the conclusions.
How much things are worth to me, relative to how much I have to pay for them
It’s immensely in our favor that prices aren’t personalized, because when we’d pay less than others, we can ignore that product, and when we’d pay more, we can pocket the difference. Think about how cruel the market could be to you with personal prices. Dying of thirst? Water is 500$ a glass now.
Perhaps the lack of personalization pushes the consumer surplus higher than 5%, but generally you need competition between sellers, otherwise they really push the prices as high as they can. I’m not sure exactly why insulin costs 10 times more in the US than elsewhere, but people who are dying don’t really have a choice, it’s clearly worth it to buy. A trade being worth it is not sufficient to describe the context it happens in as being objectively good.
Seems like a category error
I should have brought up competition instead. But some technologies are so easy to replicate that competitors can enter the market, or that people can DIY the product. “Mass-produce” was a bad choice of words fom my side, “accessible” would have been more fitting. Phones are mass produced, but it would be extremely difficult for a new competitor to enter that market, so it’s a clear counter-example to my statement.
I agree with the housing example. I also think the job market (thought it depends on the field and location) is bad in the same way that scalping is bad.
I find it hard to disagree with anything you wrote, and yet, technological advancements does not really seem to improve life for people. We’ve getting quite efficient at making food, but it doesn’t seem to be getting cheaper over time. I don’t think car prices or phone bills are decreasing meaningfully either. Bus and train fares have been steadily increasing over time. The internet makes it possible to communicate with people far away which I value a lot, but it does not seem to have improved socialization in general. The pattern of “benefits erase themselves” seems to apply so broadly that it feel like a mathematical law more than a result of greed. Despite exponential improvements in hardware, I’d say that the loading times of programs has remained somewhat constant.
And, of course, every technology which can be used for evil tend to be used for evil. One could argue that the consequences of this evil also remains constant over time, but I’d need to think about it for longer to say if I believe that.
I find it hard to disagree with anything you wrote, and yet, technological advancements does not really seem to improve life for people. We’ve getting quite efficient at making food, but it doesn’t seem to be getting cheaper over time. I don’t think car prices or phone bills are decreasing meaningfully either. Bus and train fares have been steadily increasing over time. The internet makes it possible to communicate with people far away which I value a lot, but it does not seem to have improved socialization in general. The pattern of “benefits erase themselves” seems to apply so broadly that it feel like a mathematical law more than a result of greed.
These seem to be at the core of what you’re trying to express, so I’ll share some thoughts focused on them.
Point 1: I think it depends on your baseline/what you’re comparing to for the purpose of determining whether an improvement has occurred. For me, I was born in the early 1980′s and live in Canada, so my baseline is kind of like “what things were like in the early 1990′s in Canada”. And against that baseline, many technological improvements have occurred and the benefits are widely diffused. And if I compare the life I have now with the life my parents had when they were kids (they were born in the mid 50′s, and the power grid mostly expanded throughout North America in the 1960′s, so “we lived 3 people to a bedroom, had to relieve ourselves in an outhouse, and remember when the lights first turned on” is a common experience for many people born in the 50′s) But for someone who was born 20 years later than me and their main comparison year is say 2010-2015, it can seem like things have gone downhill recently. I might argue that they’re wrong (stories of the form “things have gotten worse” are much more transmissible than “things have gotten better”, and statistics have all kinds of issues, so you have to carefully check you facts and can’t reliably just go on vibes) but the differences are less stark, and on some metrics things have unambiguously gotten worse in some places that are at the technological frontier or where local governance has had a setback/been bombed into a problematic situation (although for the world as a whole/humanity in aggregate, the story is still firmly “things are getting better”, and I think I could make that case). If your baseline is “America immediately pre-pandemic” or more recent than that, yeah, it’s a lot muddier.
A second thought: I have a simple model that predicts that if you’re comparing what we’ve achieved through technology to what could (one would think) be achieved by using our technological capabilities optimally, it’s always going to seem like we’re far from where we could be, and the distance is increasing over time. My model is: Technological progress is a one-way ratchet giving us new capabilities (mostly—we do sometimes forget or lose technological capabilities, but with a growing population and economy, this is rare). Regulatory burden is another one-way ratchet (usually, in practice—it’s a lot less likely for regulators to decide to remove a regulation that exists than to create a new one), which puts certain things we could do off-limits. Whether a particular regulation is good or bad on net is a matter for debate, but the net effect is that over time absent a civilizational reset, there’s going to be an increasing gap between what’s technologically possible and what we actually do. If we get too carried away, we could even foreclose so many options that what we actually do gets worse, but I’d expect mostly our trajectory of improvement is less steep than it could be. So if your baseline is “look how much less we’re doing than we could be!”, I mean, yes, that seems correct—although I’d also note how far we are from the worst we could be doing, to balance that out.
Re: benefits erase themselves. Not exactly. We just, use the slack offered by technological improvements in unexpected ways. For computers, in the 1980′s it took about 5 minutes for my home computer to load, in 2005 I remember it taking 15 for my work computer to load some days because there were a bunch of GPOs being applied on each login very inefficiently, in 2016 my HDD-based laptop loaded in 3 minutes 30 seconds, and now my work laptop (SSD based, but slow processor and tiny hard drive with a lot of swapping I think) takes a minute or two, and my home laptop boots in under 30 seconds (I’m making the distinction between home and work computers because work computers tend to be slower, for various reasons). So, there’s been some decrease, but it hasn’t been commensurate with the increase from “33mhz processor, single core” in 1985 to “2ghz, 20 cores”. Lots of the processing power and other improvements have gone to things other than making the boot process faster—like, for example, doing millions of background checks per minute to make sure the computer doesn’t do something that crashes it. Or things being written in memory-safe and auto-garbage-collected languages. It’s expensive to move from “the computer does exactly what the assembly language programmer says it should do, even if that results in problems” to “a high-level language program is written and then automatically compiled into inefficient but working assembly language and many, many automated checks are done to prevent problems that used to be common”. Also there are all kinds of malicious code checks running in the background, and hundreds of other processes running doing various things that are mostly helpful. And also, doing high definition video at megapixels of resolution at 60 frames a second with 16 million colour options per pixel is just several orders of magnitude harder than doing VGA graphics at 640x480 with a 256 colour palette. Also, software installs have gotten easier and more likely to just work rather than causing problems that require deep experience with computers to diagnose and fix, and this is partially downstream of “there is more hard drive space, so each program now gets its own sandboxed set of files and directories, rather than having to share bits of code”. Would I trade faster loading for “but there are fewer software programs and the computer crashes so often I have a ‘save your work every 30 seconds’ reflex because software programming that doesn’t crash the computer takes a lot more skill and programming in a lower-level language just takes longer, and also I have to carefully manage drivers and occasionally open my computer up and do something to one of the dip switches so that the sound will work in my new program”? Nah. I think a computer that boots up in under 30 seconds is good enough, and at a certain point it’s OK to focus hardware improvements on other things.
One could even argue that absent technological improvement, we couldn’t afford the level of regulation we have—and if you think that many of the regulations we have exist for reasons like “improves human safety and health, at a cost” or “makes a complicated society easier for less-capable people to exist in without catastrophe, because certain exploits are forbidden and failure-cases are handled”, you could think of this as an improvement downstream of a technology improvement. The benefits may exist, but just may not be highly visible. Like “computers crash less because there are a bunch of background processes running that enforce things like “non-admins can’t do a bunch of things” and “software applications can only do very specific things with the hardware” and “memory leaks are handled automatically” and “even though there are 300 processes running at once and that would be totally impossible for a human to code up such that they didn’t interfere with each other, automated checks make sure they don’t interfere with each other very much”. There are parallels in other areas of society—cars would probably be cheaper if we didn’t have a bunch of safety testing and failure analysis going on, and the burden of the safety measures that are required has gone up over time (when I was a kid, airbags and crumple zones weren’t a thing, and cars used to occasionally explode if you bumped them the wrong way (a slight exaggeration)) - but more people would die in the absence of those regulations. Is that a net benefit relative to a less regulated world? Hard to say, the answer is complex.
Indeed. Writing just the conclusions doesn’t tend to work out, so I waste words being pre-emptive.
It’s not that nothing has gotten better, but that the things which improve and deteriorate seem to cancel each other out. This felt effect is less strong for people who conform, and for those who don’t have strong principles which are threatened by change.
I think “things have gotten worse since 2010” is a much easier argument to make, perhaps it’s too easy, so I will defend the idea that there’s little improvement doing all of human history. I don’t care what stats people have collected as reality takes precedence over derivativations. I yield when I have a theory about something and a source contradicts it, but I do not yield to the consensus when it conflicts with something I’ve personally experienced.
I don’t think the memetics of ideas matter unless they are related to cognitive biases strongly enough to alter ones perception of their past, and I generally expect opinions about the past being worse to come from personal experience rather than hearsay. Of course, the effect of nostalgia is strong, so for some subjective topics, people will say that the experiences of their teens or so were “the best” quite consistently.
The worst parts of the world may be getting better quite consistently, but I think the best parts of the world are getting worse. It wouldn’t be strange if globalism drove things closer to an average.
I agree that technology is likely one-way (Unless Kaczynski’s plan is feasible) and that regulations are mostly one-way (making human freedom tend towards zero, by the way, which is one of my dislikes of modernity). I’d also argue that technology is neutral, and that while ideal uses of it are possible, bad uses drag down the overall utility of the technology. And every time you make laws to prevent bad uses, you make good uses more difficult, and increase the total overhead of the technology itself.
I’d also argue that exploitation is becoming more common, because it’s almost synonymous with optimization. Thinking in objective metrics is also harmful to the overall experience of life (notice how buildings are getting uglier over time!). In other words, we sacrifice good taste (and everything which is hard to quantify) for efficiency. The past was more human, and therefore less Molochian, because we valued the subjective more. The two values inherently conflict
Re: benefits erase themselves
A lot of modern “benefits” seem to benefit the lowest common denominator, and to make things worse for power users. Perhaps this is another levelling process. It would also be a net benefit on paper (‘lowest common denominator’ is a bigger group than ‘power users’). I won’t deny your personal experiences, but I think there’s also examples of things getting slower and worse over time.
We couldn’t afford the level of regulation
I want to pause future regulation too (if regulation worked, we’d not always need more of it), and I think it feels “necessary” partly because of technological improvements. But it’s admittedly another process, which runs somewhat parallel to technology, and which is influenced by other factors like the fear of being sued. Also by modern morality, which only focus on the bad side of things, and therefore doesn’t notice that reducing the negative aspects of things must necessarily reduce the positive aspects as well. For a trivial example, kids are safer at home than they are playing in the woods, but the life of a zoo animal is not strictly better than that of a wild animal (and I dislike the sort of people who don’t intuitively understand this position). We only track the safety metric, and overlook the tradeoffs, so everything is getting better on paper, but we rightly feel like something is lost as a result, because it is.
More people would die in the absence of those regulations
Indeed, but that does not make such regulations objectively good to me. And try asking older people who did things which are now considered bad or unsafe if they regret their actions or if they’re happy that one cannot have their experiences and memories anymore. The overwhelming majority of people I’ve spoken with prefer the past (random example—many have fond memories of playing multiplayer games back when harsh insults were a core part of the experience, and find themselves repulsed by modern over-regulation)
Indeed, but that does not make such regulations objectively good to me. And try asking older people who did things which are now considered bad or unsafe if they regret their actions or if they’re happy that one cannot have their experiences and memories anymore. The overwhelming majority of people I’ve spoken with prefer the past (random example—many have fond memories of playing multiplayer games back when harsh insults were a core part of the experience, and find themselves repulsed by modern over-regulation)
I think you’d get different answers from older people depending on which bad/dangerous thing you were talking about. Smoking and not wearing seatbelts are two things that immediately came to mind as things that are now regulated away in lots of places and this is an improvement which even former smokers and people who at first protested against seatbelts would generally acknowledge as good. Likewise leaded gasoline and paint, and strong social and criminal penalties for drunk driving. The fact that kids can’t go play together in the local area without adult supervision, in many places, is obviously bad, even though there is risk involved. The fact that your example relates to multiplayer games, suggests you might think of me as an old person—my childhood was before they existed. I mean, there were board games, of course, and like, 2-4 player video games. But the experience of freedom to say socially inappropriate things (I’m pretty sure even the people saying them understood they shouldn’t say them in front of their mother, that’s why being able to say them elsewhere might have been thrilling) during online gaming is one from the generation you’d call older, but I’d call younger. My generation’s internet was dialup, and the thrilling thing (for some people) was to say trollish things on online forums (this was pre-social-media, Facebook got popular after I graduated university). And if I’m correct that you’d count me among the old, I for one would not want to go back. Half of the girls I knew well at all in high school got sexually assaulted by a classmate, but didn’t feel comfortable to tell anyone about it except close friends, who they would swear to secrecy, and worried it was their fault or that they’d somehow brought it on by dressing wrong or smiling when they shouldn’t have smiled. I’d trade a lot of “people have to be more careful what they say” for a little bit of “but the sexual assault rate goes down, and when something like that does happen people can talk about it with less shame”.
”People think of the past as better than the present” is a true fact about human psychology in general, but it does not imply that the past actually was better than the present—nostalgia is a label that exists for a reason. Ask those same people which year they’d like to time travel back to, if they could time travel. Many will say something like a year of their childhood, but then remind them of some good things that have changed since then, and see if they still want to go. And anyone who reads enough history to know what life might have been like before they were born, would not say something like “I want to go back to the 1800′s when tradition and the family were stronger, and people had more freedom”. Because after a bit of reflection, they’d be like “oh yeah, no antibiotics or washing machines, and if I’m put into the body of a random person, I’m 90%+ likely to be toiling on a farm and die in my 40′s, and my main (unlikely) hope will be that none of my kids die before adulthood and my wife survives all the childbirths, and that’s if I’m lucky enough to be embodied as a man ”.
EDIT to add: I’ll also flag that “what it is socially permissible to say while gaming” is a change in social norms, rather than a change in technology/technical capabilities. We’ve drifted rather far from the original point, which was around technology improving or not improving life much for most people, to a more general discussion of whether the past was better or worse than the present, for whatever reason.
Those examples are because of a change in knowledge more than a change in values. The risks of injury from playing are immediate and visible, unlike leaded gasoline and smoking which takes decades to really cause harm, so that’s a change in values. I think we’ve become thin-skinned cowards, and that we pretend cowardize is virtue. Worse still, the popular form of signaling is now being offended or hurt on other peoples behalf. The degree to which people feel sympathy for my life experiences does not line up with how much pain these experiences caused me. Neither does socities stance of problems mirror the degree to which said problems affect me.
Many experiences are both good and bad, with the good outweighting the bad. But the modern world only focuses only on the negative aspects, which is disasterous (for the same reason that being perfectionist will be disasterous to ones schooling). Such philosophy is provably unworkable, it assues inaction is better than action (as less mistakes are made), and that people dying is good (less people alive means less suffering, and dead people don’t cause others pain). I dislike modern metrics.
If you talk with people in Thailand, most will still reject the idea that seatbelts are necessary, despite knowing how we feel about them and why. Most people project their current values through all human history, judge them retroactively, and fail to differentiate value judgements from rational judgements. If your experiences in high school were distressing at the time, and not just looking back , then I consider them valid.
The reason we feel less shame is because we removed weight from sexual relationships. This makes relationships more superficial, and sex less intimate. You can always make this trade-off. Reducing suffering is trivial, just care less. Take lithium and SSRIs and you will remove both the valleys and the peaks of life. The sum of positive and negative emotions won’t change, but to those who only count the negatives, this is experienced as improvement.
> Nostalgia Applies specifically to ones own childhood. The position I’m arguing is quite a lot harder since it extends further back.
> We’ve drifted Right, but the future will be made worse by technology because our values have become degenerate, and I think tech also causes our values to worse, so the two problems are hard to separate. Advances in tech will be used against us more than for us.
Ok, now you’ve gone on to “modern culture is worse than earlier culture”. I don’t feel like I have a good handle on the culture to which you refer, so I can’t really comment, in the sense of going “you think modern culture is like X, but I think modern culture is like Y, let’s discuss”. You seem quite sure of your opinions, but I don’t know what your evidence is.
I will disagree with this, though:
The reason we feel less shame is because we removed weight from sexual relationships.
When I spoke about people feeling less shame around having experienced sexual assault now than in the past, it was definitively not because they came to place less weight on sexual relationships. Maybe different generations have different opinions on sex, but I’m skeptical that the people I grew up with have radically different views on sex now than they did when we were younger. The reason for reduced shame around having been sexually assaulted was common knowledge that it was happening to many people, and the women who had experienced it feeling less alone. I base this statement on conversations with women I know, before and after 2016 (the MeToo thing was when common knowledge of a societal problem was established). It is possible that young people today place less weight on their sexual relationships, I don’t know, but that sounds like a talking point a Catholic might have made about what would happen when birth control was new technology in the 1960′s and early 1970′s—I don’t see a technological reason why it should be the case now. And statistically, surveys appear to show that young people are having less sex than prior generations, which isn’t what I would expect if they were like “meh, sex isn’t a weighty matter”.
I have seen opinions like “modern people are weak degenerate hedonistic cowards who revel in copious casual sex” expressed online, but I’m aware that attention-based filters are being applied to what I see, and also 90+% of all comments are made by a small number of constantly online people with an axe to grind. So I don’t consider what I see online as strong evidence of what the culture I live in is actually like. I weight more heavily the conversations I have with people around me, or people I know well who have moved away but we keep in touch, or statistical research with some attempt at rigor. And the people I have spoken to, are generally not weak degnerate cowards who treat sex lightly. I know people both young (in their 20′s) and old (in their 80′s), and the young people seem basically good, and the old people seem proud of their grandchildren’s many virtues, and generally impressed with the younger generation, relative even to their own kids in some cases.
Separately from what you see online from people unknown to you, what are the people you talk to offline, or know well, like? If you were to base your statements about what people are like only on what you know about people you know fairly well, what conclusions would you draw about what people are like in society today? The same as above? (It is of course possible that the people I know aren’t representative of society as a whole, and neither are the small number of people you will know personally, but I’m curious what your experience has been).
It does seem like I’m drifting, but I don’t think I am. The problem is incentives, and incentives tend to be materialistic and degenerate. I shouldn’t call it modern culture, for I think that culture is actually disappearing. (culture, like religion, is like a defense against incentives, since it creates subjective values which defend against objective metrics of value). There is no longer any meaningful difference between most countries thanks to globalism, which is why I’m not specifying which culture. There’s no point in saying “That one where people are having less children, and where less and less people believe in religion” as that’s everywhere. I could even say something specific like “The country where the biggest bills you can have of their currency is getting smaller over time compared to inflation, in order to make currency more digital as a measure against crime, also beef is getting expensive” and that’s still basically everywhere.
I looked it up, and while younger generations have more permissive attitudes toward relationships, it seems that both rates of cheating and socities attitude towards it are stable. Acceptability of premartial sex about doubled since 1970. But according to the data I just found, neither the average nor the mean number of sexual partners is increasing over time. Rate of virginity seems to fall from 60% at 18 years old to 2% at 25 years old(!). Virginity at 18 is increasing over time, but virginity at 25 is decreasing, so I was almost mislead by the increasing age of consent (another global pattern of change). I’m still pleasantly surprised by this data, which is the same as me admitting that I was somewhat wrong about it.
I may be biased in that I’m getting older, which means that the people around me generally care less over time. One becomes much more superficial and practical from age 15 to 30. I’ve gone from meeting multiple people who wrote the name of their partner in their arm with a kitchen knife, to hearing people say things like “Our relationship wasn’t practical so we broke up”, so it’s no wonder that people seem less deep over time.
>what conclusions would you draw
I grew up around many bad people, and stopped interacting with people from my own country as a result. But the online friends I know on a personal basis are quite sexually open, even though I feel like I’m filtering away hedonists and nihilists. By the way, when I started using the internet in my pre-teen years, it was dominated by intelligent libertarians, and today it’s mostly dumb conformity and brainrot, so it’s no wonder I feel as if that’s getting worse, too.
I’ve noticed a large increase in how much people care about politics. A large decrease in individuality and strength of character/personality. Increased socialization (homophily). Also a huge decrease in the desire for freedom to step outside of the Overton Window, and a large increase in wanting freedom within the Overton Window. The crabs in a bucket mentality also seems increasingly common, and one is expected not to behave in ways which can be misunderstood by those who look for the worst in others. If one doesn’t signal that they don’t hold value X, they’re now assumed to hold value X.
Do you remember how people made myths up around video games? “There’s a mew hidden behind the truck!”, etc. There’s no hidden information anymore, no exploration, and therefore no soil for culture to grow. Everyone just follows the current meta. In the same exact sense, our current society feels increasingly Plaza-like, whereas it used to feel Warren-like. This seems to have a bad influence on socialization.
It’s true that they sell products which are using technology, but I’m not sure it makes a different in the conclusions.
It’s immensely in our favor that prices aren’t personalized, because when we’d pay less than others, we can ignore that product, and when we’d pay more, we can pocket the difference. Think about how cruel the market could be to you with personal prices. Dying of thirst? Water is 500$ a glass now.
Perhaps the lack of personalization pushes the consumer surplus higher than 5%, but generally you need competition between sellers, otherwise they really push the prices as high as they can. I’m not sure exactly why insulin costs 10 times more in the US than elsewhere, but people who are dying don’t really have a choice, it’s clearly worth it to buy. A trade being worth it is not sufficient to describe the context it happens in as being objectively good.
I should have brought up competition instead. But some technologies are so easy to replicate that competitors can enter the market, or that people can DIY the product. “Mass-produce” was a bad choice of words fom my side, “accessible” would have been more fitting. Phones are mass produced, but it would be extremely difficult for a new competitor to enter that market, so it’s a clear counter-example to my statement.
I agree with the housing example. I also think the job market (thought it depends on the field and location) is bad in the same way that scalping is bad.
I find it hard to disagree with anything you wrote, and yet, technological advancements does not really seem to improve life for people. We’ve getting quite efficient at making food, but it doesn’t seem to be getting cheaper over time. I don’t think car prices or phone bills are decreasing meaningfully either. Bus and train fares have been steadily increasing over time.
The internet makes it possible to communicate with people far away which I value a lot, but it does not seem to have improved socialization in general.
The pattern of “benefits erase themselves” seems to apply so broadly that it feel like a mathematical law more than a result of greed. Despite exponential improvements in hardware, I’d say that the loading times of programs has remained somewhat constant.
And, of course, every technology which can be used for evil tend to be used for evil. One could argue that the consequences of this evil also remains constant over time, but I’d need to think about it for longer to say if I believe that.
These seem to be at the core of what you’re trying to express, so I’ll share some thoughts focused on them.
Point 1: I think it depends on your baseline/what you’re comparing to for the purpose of determining whether an improvement has occurred. For me, I was born in the early 1980′s and live in Canada, so my baseline is kind of like “what things were like in the early 1990′s in Canada”. And against that baseline, many technological improvements have occurred and the benefits are widely diffused. And if I compare the life I have now with the life my parents had when they were kids (they were born in the mid 50′s, and the power grid mostly expanded throughout North America in the 1960′s, so “we lived 3 people to a bedroom, had to relieve ourselves in an outhouse, and remember when the lights first turned on” is a common experience for many people born in the 50′s) But for someone who was born 20 years later than me and their main comparison year is say 2010-2015, it can seem like things have gone downhill recently. I might argue that they’re wrong (stories of the form “things have gotten worse” are much more transmissible than “things have gotten better”, and statistics have all kinds of issues, so you have to carefully check you facts and can’t reliably just go on vibes) but the differences are less stark, and on some metrics things have unambiguously gotten worse in some places that are at the technological frontier or where local governance has had a setback/been bombed into a problematic situation (although for the world as a whole/humanity in aggregate, the story is still firmly “things are getting better”, and I think I could make that case). If your baseline is “America immediately pre-pandemic” or more recent than that, yeah, it’s a lot muddier.
A second thought: I have a simple model that predicts that if you’re comparing what we’ve achieved through technology to what could (one would think) be achieved by using our technological capabilities optimally, it’s always going to seem like we’re far from where we could be, and the distance is increasing over time. My model is: Technological progress is a one-way ratchet giving us new capabilities (mostly—we do sometimes forget or lose technological capabilities, but with a growing population and economy, this is rare). Regulatory burden is another one-way ratchet (usually, in practice—it’s a lot less likely for regulators to decide to remove a regulation that exists than to create a new one), which puts certain things we could do off-limits. Whether a particular regulation is good or bad on net is a matter for debate, but the net effect is that over time absent a civilizational reset, there’s going to be an increasing gap between what’s technologically possible and what we actually do. If we get too carried away, we could even foreclose so many options that what we actually do gets worse, but I’d expect mostly our trajectory of improvement is less steep than it could be. So if your baseline is “look how much less we’re doing than we could be!”, I mean, yes, that seems correct—although I’d also note how far we are from the worst we could be doing, to balance that out.
Re: benefits erase themselves. Not exactly. We just, use the slack offered by technological improvements in unexpected ways. For computers, in the 1980′s it took about 5 minutes for my home computer to load, in 2005 I remember it taking 15 for my work computer to load some days because there were a bunch of GPOs being applied on each login very inefficiently, in 2016 my HDD-based laptop loaded in 3 minutes 30 seconds, and now my work laptop (SSD based, but slow processor and tiny hard drive with a lot of swapping I think) takes a minute or two, and my home laptop boots in under 30 seconds (I’m making the distinction between home and work computers because work computers tend to be slower, for various reasons). So, there’s been some decrease, but it hasn’t been commensurate with the increase from “33mhz processor, single core” in 1985 to “2ghz, 20 cores”. Lots of the processing power and other improvements have gone to things other than making the boot process faster—like, for example, doing millions of background checks per minute to make sure the computer doesn’t do something that crashes it. Or things being written in memory-safe and auto-garbage-collected languages. It’s expensive to move from “the computer does exactly what the assembly language programmer says it should do, even if that results in problems” to “a high-level language program is written and then automatically compiled into inefficient but working assembly language and many, many automated checks are done to prevent problems that used to be common”. Also there are all kinds of malicious code checks running in the background, and hundreds of other processes running doing various things that are mostly helpful. And also, doing high definition video at megapixels of resolution at 60 frames a second with 16 million colour options per pixel is just several orders of magnitude harder than doing VGA graphics at 640x480 with a 256 colour palette. Also, software installs have gotten easier and more likely to just work rather than causing problems that require deep experience with computers to diagnose and fix, and this is partially downstream of “there is more hard drive space, so each program now gets its own sandboxed set of files and directories, rather than having to share bits of code”. Would I trade faster loading for “but there are fewer software programs and the computer crashes so often I have a ‘save your work every 30 seconds’ reflex because software programming that doesn’t crash the computer takes a lot more skill and programming in a lower-level language just takes longer, and also I have to carefully manage drivers and occasionally open my computer up and do something to one of the dip switches so that the sound will work in my new program”? Nah. I think a computer that boots up in under 30 seconds is good enough, and at a certain point it’s OK to focus hardware improvements on other things.
One could even argue that absent technological improvement, we couldn’t afford the level of regulation we have—and if you think that many of the regulations we have exist for reasons like “improves human safety and health, at a cost” or “makes a complicated society easier for less-capable people to exist in without catastrophe, because certain exploits are forbidden and failure-cases are handled”, you could think of this as an improvement downstream of a technology improvement. The benefits may exist, but just may not be highly visible. Like “computers crash less because there are a bunch of background processes running that enforce things like “non-admins can’t do a bunch of things” and “software applications can only do very specific things with the hardware” and “memory leaks are handled automatically” and “even though there are 300 processes running at once and that would be totally impossible for a human to code up such that they didn’t interfere with each other, automated checks make sure they don’t interfere with each other very much”. There are parallels in other areas of society—cars would probably be cheaper if we didn’t have a bunch of safety testing and failure analysis going on, and the burden of the safety measures that are required has gone up over time (when I was a kid, airbags and crumple zones weren’t a thing, and cars used to occasionally explode if you bumped them the wrong way (a slight exaggeration)) - but more people would die in the absence of those regulations. Is that a net benefit relative to a less regulated world? Hard to say, the answer is complex.
Thanks for your response!
Indeed. Writing just the conclusions doesn’t tend to work out, so I waste words being pre-emptive.
It’s not that nothing has gotten better, but that the things which improve and deteriorate seem to cancel each other out. This felt effect is less strong for people who conform, and for those who don’t have strong principles which are threatened by change.
I think “things have gotten worse since 2010” is a much easier argument to make, perhaps it’s too easy, so I will defend the idea that there’s little improvement doing all of human history. I don’t care what stats people have collected as reality takes precedence over derivativations. I yield when I have a theory about something and a source contradicts it, but I do not yield to the consensus when it conflicts with something I’ve personally experienced.
I don’t think the memetics of ideas matter unless they are related to cognitive biases strongly enough to alter ones perception of their past, and I generally expect opinions about the past being worse to come from personal experience rather than hearsay. Of course, the effect of nostalgia is strong, so for some subjective topics, people will say that the experiences of their teens or so were “the best” quite consistently.
The worst parts of the world may be getting better quite consistently, but I think the best parts of the world are getting worse. It wouldn’t be strange if globalism drove things closer to an average.
I agree that technology is likely one-way (Unless Kaczynski’s plan is feasible) and that regulations are mostly one-way (making human freedom tend towards zero, by the way, which is one of my dislikes of modernity).
I’d also argue that technology is neutral, and that while ideal uses of it are possible, bad uses drag down the overall utility of the technology. And every time you make laws to prevent bad uses, you make good uses more difficult, and increase the total overhead of the technology itself.
I’d also argue that exploitation is becoming more common, because it’s almost synonymous with optimization. Thinking in objective metrics is also harmful to the overall experience of life (notice how buildings are getting uglier over time!). In other words, we sacrifice good taste (and everything which is hard to quantify) for efficiency. The past was more human, and therefore less Molochian, because we valued the subjective more. The two values inherently conflict
A lot of modern “benefits” seem to benefit the lowest common denominator, and to make things worse for power users. Perhaps this is another levelling process. It would also be a net benefit on paper (‘lowest common denominator’ is a bigger group than ‘power users’). I won’t deny your personal experiences, but I think there’s also examples of things getting slower and worse over time.
I want to pause future regulation too (if regulation worked, we’d not always need more of it), and I think it feels “necessary” partly because of technological improvements. But it’s admittedly another process, which runs somewhat parallel to technology, and which is influenced by other factors like the fear of being sued. Also by modern morality, which only focus on the bad side of things, and therefore doesn’t notice that reducing the negative aspects of things must necessarily reduce the positive aspects as well. For a trivial example, kids are safer at home than they are playing in the woods, but the life of a zoo animal is not strictly better than that of a wild animal (and I dislike the sort of people who don’t intuitively understand this position). We only track the safety metric, and overlook the tradeoffs, so everything is getting better on paper, but we rightly feel like something is lost as a result, because it is.
Indeed, but that does not make such regulations objectively good to me. And try asking older people who did things which are now considered bad or unsafe if they regret their actions or if they’re happy that one cannot have their experiences and memories anymore. The overwhelming majority of people I’ve spoken with prefer the past (random example—many have fond memories of playing multiplayer games back when harsh insults were a core part of the experience, and find themselves repulsed by modern over-regulation)
I think you’d get different answers from older people depending on which bad/dangerous thing you were talking about. Smoking and not wearing seatbelts are two things that immediately came to mind as things that are now regulated away in lots of places and this is an improvement which even former smokers and people who at first protested against seatbelts would generally acknowledge as good. Likewise leaded gasoline and paint, and strong social and criminal penalties for drunk driving. The fact that kids can’t go play together in the local area without adult supervision, in many places, is obviously bad, even though there is risk involved. The fact that your example relates to multiplayer games, suggests you might think of me as an old person—my childhood was before they existed. I mean, there were board games, of course, and like, 2-4 player video games. But the experience of freedom to say socially inappropriate things (I’m pretty sure even the people saying them understood they shouldn’t say them in front of their mother, that’s why being able to say them elsewhere might have been thrilling) during online gaming is one from the generation you’d call older, but I’d call younger. My generation’s internet was dialup, and the thrilling thing (for some people) was to say trollish things on online forums (this was pre-social-media, Facebook got popular after I graduated university). And if I’m correct that you’d count me among the old, I for one would not want to go back. Half of the girls I knew well at all in high school got sexually assaulted by a classmate, but didn’t feel comfortable to tell anyone about it except close friends, who they would swear to secrecy, and worried it was their fault or that they’d somehow brought it on by dressing wrong or smiling when they shouldn’t have smiled. I’d trade a lot of “people have to be more careful what they say” for a little bit of “but the sexual assault rate goes down, and when something like that does happen people can talk about it with less shame”.
”People think of the past as better than the present” is a true fact about human psychology in general, but it does not imply that the past actually was better than the present—nostalgia is a label that exists for a reason. Ask those same people which year they’d like to time travel back to, if they could time travel. Many will say something like a year of their childhood, but then remind them of some good things that have changed since then, and see if they still want to go. And anyone who reads enough history to know what life might have been like before they were born, would not say something like “I want to go back to the 1800′s when tradition and the family were stronger, and people had more freedom”. Because after a bit of reflection, they’d be like “oh yeah, no antibiotics or washing machines, and if I’m put into the body of a random person, I’m 90%+ likely to be toiling on a farm and die in my 40′s, and my main (unlikely) hope will be that none of my kids die before adulthood and my wife survives all the childbirths, and that’s if I’m lucky enough to be embodied as a man ”.
EDIT to add: I’ll also flag that “what it is socially permissible to say while gaming” is a change in social norms, rather than a change in technology/technical capabilities. We’ve drifted rather far from the original point, which was around technology improving or not improving life much for most people, to a more general discussion of whether the past was better or worse than the present, for whatever reason.
Those examples are because of a change in knowledge more than a change in values. The risks of injury from playing are immediate and visible, unlike leaded gasoline and smoking which takes decades to really cause harm, so that’s a change in values.
I think we’ve become thin-skinned cowards, and that we pretend cowardize is virtue. Worse still, the popular form of signaling is now being offended or hurt on other peoples behalf. The degree to which people feel sympathy for my life experiences does not line up with how much pain these experiences caused me. Neither does socities stance of problems mirror the degree to which said problems affect me.
Many experiences are both good and bad, with the good outweighting the bad. But the modern world only focuses only on the negative aspects, which is disasterous (for the same reason that being perfectionist will be disasterous to ones schooling). Such philosophy is provably unworkable, it assues inaction is better than action (as less mistakes are made), and that people dying is good (less people alive means less suffering, and dead people don’t cause others pain). I dislike modern metrics.
If you talk with people in Thailand, most will still reject the idea that seatbelts are necessary, despite knowing how we feel about them and why. Most people project their current values through all human history, judge them retroactively, and fail to differentiate value judgements from rational judgements. If your experiences in high school were distressing at the time, and not just looking back , then I consider them valid.
The reason we feel less shame is because we removed weight from sexual relationships. This makes relationships more superficial, and sex less intimate. You can always make this trade-off. Reducing suffering is trivial, just care less. Take lithium and SSRIs and you will remove both the valleys and the peaks of life. The sum of positive and negative emotions won’t change, but to those who only count the negatives, this is experienced as improvement.
> Nostalgia
Applies specifically to ones own childhood. The position I’m arguing is quite a lot harder since it extends further back.
> We’ve drifted
Right, but the future will be made worse by technology because our values have become degenerate, and I think tech also causes our values to worse, so the two problems are hard to separate. Advances in tech will be used against us more than for us.
Ok, now you’ve gone on to “modern culture is worse than earlier culture”. I don’t feel like I have a good handle on the culture to which you refer, so I can’t really comment, in the sense of going “you think modern culture is like X, but I think modern culture is like Y, let’s discuss”. You seem quite sure of your opinions, but I don’t know what your evidence is.
I will disagree with this, though:
When I spoke about people feeling less shame around having experienced sexual assault now than in the past, it was definitively not because they came to place less weight on sexual relationships. Maybe different generations have different opinions on sex, but I’m skeptical that the people I grew up with have radically different views on sex now than they did when we were younger. The reason for reduced shame around having been sexually assaulted was common knowledge that it was happening to many people, and the women who had experienced it feeling less alone. I base this statement on conversations with women I know, before and after 2016 (the MeToo thing was when common knowledge of a societal problem was established). It is possible that young people today place less weight on their sexual relationships, I don’t know, but that sounds like a talking point a Catholic might have made about what would happen when birth control was new technology in the 1960′s and early 1970′s—I don’t see a technological reason why it should be the case now. And statistically, surveys appear to show that young people are having less sex than prior generations, which isn’t what I would expect if they were like “meh, sex isn’t a weighty matter”.
I have seen opinions like “modern people are weak degenerate hedonistic cowards who revel in copious casual sex” expressed online, but I’m aware that attention-based filters are being applied to what I see, and also 90+% of all comments are made by a small number of constantly online people with an axe to grind. So I don’t consider what I see online as strong evidence of what the culture I live in is actually like. I weight more heavily the conversations I have with people around me, or people I know well who have moved away but we keep in touch, or statistical research with some attempt at rigor. And the people I have spoken to, are generally not weak degnerate cowards who treat sex lightly. I know people both young (in their 20′s) and old (in their 80′s), and the young people seem basically good, and the old people seem proud of their grandchildren’s many virtues, and generally impressed with the younger generation, relative even to their own kids in some cases.
Separately from what you see online from people unknown to you, what are the people you talk to offline, or know well, like? If you were to base your statements about what people are like only on what you know about people you know fairly well, what conclusions would you draw about what people are like in society today? The same as above? (It is of course possible that the people I know aren’t representative of society as a whole, and neither are the small number of people you will know personally, but I’m curious what your experience has been).
I looked it up, and while younger generations have more permissive attitudes toward relationships, it seems that both rates of cheating and socities attitude towards it are stable. Acceptability of premartial sex about doubled since 1970. But according to the data I just found, neither the average nor the mean number of sexual partners is increasing over time. Rate of virginity seems to fall from 60% at 18 years old to 2% at 25 years old(!). Virginity at 18 is increasing over time, but virginity at 25 is decreasing, so I was almost mislead by the increasing age of consent (another global pattern of change). I’m still pleasantly surprised by this data, which is the same as me admitting that I was somewhat wrong about it.
I may be biased in that I’m getting older, which means that the people around me generally care less over time. One becomes much more superficial and practical from age 15 to 30. I’ve gone from meeting multiple people who wrote the name of their partner in their arm with a kitchen knife, to hearing people say things like “Our relationship wasn’t practical so we broke up”, so it’s no wonder that people seem less deep over time.
>what conclusions would you draw
I grew up around many bad people, and stopped interacting with people from my own country as a result. But the online friends I know on a personal basis are quite sexually open, even though I feel like I’m filtering away hedonists and nihilists. By the way, when I started using the internet in my pre-teen years, it was dominated by intelligent libertarians, and today it’s mostly dumb conformity and brainrot, so it’s no wonder I feel as if that’s getting worse, too.
I’ve noticed a large increase in how much people care about politics. A large decrease in individuality and strength of character/personality. Increased socialization (homophily). Also a huge decrease in the desire for freedom to step outside of the Overton Window, and a large increase in wanting freedom within the Overton Window. The crabs in a bucket mentality also seems increasingly common, and one is expected not to behave in ways which can be misunderstood by those who look for the worst in others. If one doesn’t signal that they don’t hold value X, they’re now assumed to hold value X.
Do you remember how people made myths up around video games? “There’s a mew hidden behind the truck!”, etc. There’s no hidden information anymore, no exploration, and therefore no soil for culture to grow. Everyone just follows the current meta. In the same exact sense, our current society feels increasingly Plaza-like, whereas it used to feel Warren-like. This seems to have a bad influence on socialization.