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.
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.