> Consider, for example, this observation, conveyed by the Dutch sociologist Ruut Veenhoven: “the average citizen lives more comfortably now than kings did a few centuries ago.”
> A Snickers and a power shower would blow Henry VIII’s mind.
That's such a narrow, snapshot view of humanity. Comparing one epoch to another directly, skipping the trend, seems inconsequential.
For the majority of human history, descendents did better than the previous generation. There's nothing surprising or awe-inspiring about that.
Henry VIII did not expected warm baths and chocolate bars, but he expected (in theory, I know, don't fret about it) everyone to have a little more, then in the next generation, a little more, and so on. That trend eventually leads to somewhere like chocolate bars and warm baths, even if you don't land on it exactly.
However, _this is not true anymore_. There's an argument to be made that we are not on this trend anymore. Where before young adults could buy houses, now they can't, for example.
It seems like we went over peak humanity, then dropped a little. Some very important things got a lot worse.
Under this light, talking about how anyone now lives better than a past king, sounds disconnected from a reality where mostly everyone feels like shit. You can't convince me that I'm in the best phase of humanity if I can quite easily point out some better paths we could have taken. We were supposed to be better than we currently are, or at least something manufactured that impression in large scales. Either way, something feels off.
everdrive•3mo ago
>For the majority of human history, descendents did better than the previous generation. There's nothing surprising or awe-inspiring about that.
I'm not sure this is true. This has probably been true subsequent to various industrial and agricultural revolutions, but I would imagine that much of 3000 bc --> 1400 ce did not see clear cut generation-by-generation improvements in quality of life.
I definitely take your other points though; in the 1970s the president of the united states would not have had the capabilities of a modern smart phone; but the fact that this is true does not actually improve the quality of my life in any way. Part of this is just because not all technological advancement necessarily speaks to quality of life improvements. Some obvious examples might be: indoor plumbing (clear improvement) vs. social media. (mostly a detriment)
alganet•3mo ago
The idea I'm trying to convey is that there's an upwards trend in history. Until very recently, we can say humanity was doing very good (awesome hits and a few blunders).
Think of a graph. Each time life unquestionably improves the graph goes up. On blunders, it goes down.
Now, even if you have lots of blunders, you can still point to a relative place in the past you were doing worse than now. You could claim "that in the big picture" you're ahead, despite having had a lot of recent blunders.
To avoid this illusion, we must always do the comparison step-by-step. Is now better than 10 years ago? and that was better or worse than further 10 years prior? and so on. If you consider that this is the way of doing this, then this line of reasoning becomes unviable.
Furthermore, history is not segmented in equally distributed steps. The further you go into the past, the larger are the segments, and lower is your resolution to see what happened. It's another illusion.
Do you understand why comparing _exactly now_ with _exactly 500 years ago_ while conveniently hiding a lot of in-betweens is a fallacy? It could be that it's right, and we're on a win streak, but the very means the argument uses to showcase this idea are, in principle, not very solid and could hide a lie.
I often prefers ways of investigating history that cannot possibly hide lies within, which leads me to question when someone tries to push a way that could be hiding a lie or not.
It's definitely not about my quality of life. Also, the critique I'm making to what I called "snapshot" comparisons could be used for any other similar metric. The discretization of steps and the choice of snapshots can hide misinformation, and it represents an unreliable line of reasoning.
alganet•3mo ago
> A Snickers and a power shower would blow Henry VIII’s mind.
That's such a narrow, snapshot view of humanity. Comparing one epoch to another directly, skipping the trend, seems inconsequential.
For the majority of human history, descendents did better than the previous generation. There's nothing surprising or awe-inspiring about that.
Henry VIII did not expected warm baths and chocolate bars, but he expected (in theory, I know, don't fret about it) everyone to have a little more, then in the next generation, a little more, and so on. That trend eventually leads to somewhere like chocolate bars and warm baths, even if you don't land on it exactly.
However, _this is not true anymore_. There's an argument to be made that we are not on this trend anymore. Where before young adults could buy houses, now they can't, for example.
It seems like we went over peak humanity, then dropped a little. Some very important things got a lot worse.
Under this light, talking about how anyone now lives better than a past king, sounds disconnected from a reality where mostly everyone feels like shit. You can't convince me that I'm in the best phase of humanity if I can quite easily point out some better paths we could have taken. We were supposed to be better than we currently are, or at least something manufactured that impression in large scales. Either way, something feels off.
everdrive•3mo ago
I'm not sure this is true. This has probably been true subsequent to various industrial and agricultural revolutions, but I would imagine that much of 3000 bc --> 1400 ce did not see clear cut generation-by-generation improvements in quality of life.
I definitely take your other points though; in the 1970s the president of the united states would not have had the capabilities of a modern smart phone; but the fact that this is true does not actually improve the quality of my life in any way. Part of this is just because not all technological advancement necessarily speaks to quality of life improvements. Some obvious examples might be: indoor plumbing (clear improvement) vs. social media. (mostly a detriment)
alganet•3mo ago
Think of a graph. Each time life unquestionably improves the graph goes up. On blunders, it goes down.
Now, even if you have lots of blunders, you can still point to a relative place in the past you were doing worse than now. You could claim "that in the big picture" you're ahead, despite having had a lot of recent blunders.
To avoid this illusion, we must always do the comparison step-by-step. Is now better than 10 years ago? and that was better or worse than further 10 years prior? and so on. If you consider that this is the way of doing this, then this line of reasoning becomes unviable.
Furthermore, history is not segmented in equally distributed steps. The further you go into the past, the larger are the segments, and lower is your resolution to see what happened. It's another illusion.
Do you understand why comparing _exactly now_ with _exactly 500 years ago_ while conveniently hiding a lot of in-betweens is a fallacy? It could be that it's right, and we're on a win streak, but the very means the argument uses to showcase this idea are, in principle, not very solid and could hide a lie.
I often prefers ways of investigating history that cannot possibly hide lies within, which leads me to question when someone tries to push a way that could be hiding a lie or not.
It's definitely not about my quality of life. Also, the critique I'm making to what I called "snapshot" comparisons could be used for any other similar metric. The discretization of steps and the choice of snapshots can hide misinformation, and it represents an unreliable line of reasoning.