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Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

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Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#741

Post by trilbyglens »

While the "things are actually better" argument is certainly true when you look at the data, from a first person perspective people have definitely become very very self absorbed in American society. Not only in the US kind you, but in the west generally there is absolutely a massive cultural malaise in play right now.

Even speaking just about culture, look at how stagnant things are. Fashion, film, music, books. They are all stuck on repeat, making the same old things new again with no actual innovation happening on noticeable scales.

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#742

Post by trilbyglens »

foobarian wrote: post #350
maerF0x0 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear I'm not suggesting that specific advancements aren't being made. It's more like things that matter are going away and the things we're getting do not affect most of us. eg: something like 99.95% of the planet (all but 1-2 Million) have 0 or near 0 benefit from most of those findings (save for maybe the vaccine). But important things are going away -- treating people well, having happy lives, justice and b…

I think the generations that were raised coddled, spoiled, and helicoptered are getting into the workforce and administration, and it shows. Police can do much less nowadays because of red tape. The bad apples can do less damage too, but the rest are less empowered as well and the productivity suffers.

Frankly the boomers were already super coddled. They have never known sacrifice, and raised us milenials in an even more hedonistic fashion. No one has the stomach to make sacrifices anymore, of any scale. Even convenience wins out over necessity.

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#743

Post by jfalcon »

nickdothutton wrote: post #52

> Software seems to be overrun by a mentality that any future cost is worth it to save even 1 minute of development time… From the instant the idea to do something pops into management’s heads, or is explained to them by sales (who heard it from a customer), the clock is ticking. Actually developing the software necessary is just an irritating overhead. Something to be reduced to near zero. A one-dimensional “scalar”…

I see it as the battle between the jocks and the nerds. As frankly from my few decades in the industry, who becomes upper middle management are all the people who you dislike (or they you) in high school. It's just them trying to justify their value to those that truly built or are deemed to be responsible to build out a product/company for the benefit of the shareholders/investors.

This is the sort of environment that leads to [non]great ideas like 'swarming' resources on current 'fad/trend' projects (Mythical Man Month) or rapid development of features at a pace beyond what it took to deliver the 1.0 product (tech-debt inhibiting growth causing tech-death) which causes them to just "reinvent/reboot" the idea with yet another different spin.

You are seeing it in movies where even the scope of time they perform it is getting shorter and shorter. It's not like people are remaking Cyrano De Bergerac despite it's time being due (Roxanne with Steve Martin is my last recall) but they have to retread ideas from my own adulthood yet skip over others - like why reboot DeGrassi and not BJ and the Bear let alone Knight Rider or any of the dozens of other tech influence tv series of our youth.

The reason I think is mostly due to fear. Fear of risking what they didn't like before for something they felt was awesome but not influence by - like Sex in the City or even Return of the Jedi.

If it weren't for the amount of time that has gone by, I wouldn't be surprised if within the next 10 years there isn't an attempt to reboot Firefly with the hope that it hooks as much as people pine for it to have stayed on today.

We're told that most decisions are due to the investors wanting return on money invested - but if the employees are a large holder of the company shares, doesn't that mean that if they collectively feel willing to risk a different tact that it should be abided? Now-a-days it seems that those who are vocal and can pull it off become "king"... like Twitter.

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#744

Post by quanticle »

jraines wrote: post #480
noud wrote: post #7

I think you're way off base. It's called rosy retrospection, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection . As you already mentioned in your comments, you're judging the past disproportionately more positive that the present. If you really want to know if everything is declining, try measure it everyday for the next five years. For example, every day, rate your personal well being, track how (un)happy you are wit…

I’m always a little stunned when this (and many sibling comments) is almost always the first response to something like this. It’s probably generally true, and an appropriate response to the most dire decline narratives or things easily disproven by stats . . . But like also: really? None of this resonates with you on a personal level? If yes are you that distrustful of your own anecdata? If no: I hypothesize that yo…

    None of this resonates with you on a personal level?
Honestly? Not really, no. I think the world has gotten a lot better over the past few decades. My gripes are that, mostly due to short sighted and avoidable decisions, things could have been even better. But if you asked me, "Okay quanticle, I can take you back in a time machine and strand you twenty-five years in the past, would you prefer that?" my answer would be an instant, "Are you kidding? Get outta here."

Just personally, when my family and I came over from India, roughly twenty-five years ago, we could only afford to call our relatives in the home country once every other month, for five to ten minutes at a time. And, on half of those phone calls, the line would be too noisy to actually hear or make out anything from the other end. Today, my mom (in the US) and my grandmother (in India) speak for anywhere between ten minutes and two hours, every day, in high resolution video. No, things haven't gotten worse. We might not have gotten flying cars, but we did get videophones, and that's pretty cool.

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#745

Post by jfalcon »

dw_arthur wrote: post #29

Companies have to continually increase their revenue or profits out of fear of their competitors becoming larger and taking over the market. The internet has allowed almost everything in physical space to become commoditized. You also have a society that does not appreciate quality. Combining all this together I don't see how things don't keep getting worse.

There is a difference between a company making good products and a company that is making bad ones yet only by proxy of the revenue generated making something else.

Look at GE - it just recently spun off it's healthcare business from the parent and now only has the Jet Engines division left under the parent company. It used to make just about everything and did massive testing at one point - what changed? The company itself. It was in so much competition by others who stepped up their game or the company got into places it never should have been and lost. A long way from being the offspring of Thomas Edison and JP Morgan.

Hell, did you know that GE was even an on-line service at one time? GEnie. Who beat them? H&R Block for some weird reason (CompuServe). But not by much because Time magazine - the most read magazine in the world for almost 75 years at that point - thought it could do it all (AOL). The only problem: Warner Communications (Warner Brothers) - who seem to not have learned their lesson from Atari. But it was on top for a while. Now it's back to Bell and those who competed with them (Verizon).

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#746

Post by jfalcon »

talkingtab wrote: post #414

People, humane beings, have grown and prospered in the past because they were able to form and act as communities. We are good, really good at that. If you want a modern example of how effective functional communities can be, you can look at the Ukraine. Or at revolutionary war era Americans. Or hunting mastodons to extinction. As communities we do exceedingly well. If you take away our ability to form and act as com…

You are 100% correct. And the fact that laws on the books often do not reflect the times they're in. I'm still shocked by how we haven't put into effect a national GDPR yet at the same time that Newt Gingrich's "Anti-Cell Phone Listening" law is in effect. The law was outdated before it was even ratified yet is still on the books today.

I think a bigger problem is the blindness in our tech culture to pursue that which takes away from us at scale without codifying limits or laws to enforce guard rails for when they're broken - and at a cost greater than the cost of "doing business" (like how Boeing is now facing Criminal charges for 737MAX after the Civil part has more/less gone the course).

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#747

Post by jerome-jh »

noud wrote: post #7

I think you're way off base. It's called rosy retrospection, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection . As you already mentioned in your comments, you're judging the past disproportionately more positive that the present. If you really want to know if everything is declining, try measure it everyday for the next five years. For example, every day, rate your personal well being, track how (un)happy you are wit…

I agree with the OP over the last 5 years. I think he/she's right and it is not an effect of being depressed or what.

Over the last 5 years, wealth distribution, general wellness, world order, SW reliability have all declined. There are data points for some of those items but no all of course.

For SW reliability, I include: buggy websites, product requiring cloud access making them intrinsically less reliable and less trustworthy, the services needlessly requiring authentication making credential theft wide spread and spam/scam campaigns more likely to succeed, companies pulling the rug under paying customers feet, dark patterns...

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#748

Post by jfalcon »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #464

I think it's hard to pick an overall narrative, because the world is complicated, memory is unreliable, and what's actually visible to regular people changes with the times. In many ways, I think the trend for the individual person's most likely experience has been sharply positive over the past century. I share your frustration with the level of unpunished grift and abuse of power in our society, but I suspect that…

Uh... there is governance.

>- Nuclear Weapons

The several non-nuclear proliferation treaties and disarmament talks that have reduced the number of warheads down by about 2/3? Just because there may be more "threat actors" doesn't mean that we're not safer. Look at South Africa, it was a nuclear power and gave it back.

>- Genetic Engineering

There are many laws in place. Some that are even hampering valid benefit (Umbilical Stem Cells). Some that are straight up asinine (Abortion Bans legal again) and some that should be observed but allowed (Crisper) as what we knew even 30 years ago is magnitudes more than the previous 30 to that. What will we learn 30 years from now?

>- Chemical production and pollution

When was the last time the Ohio river caught literal fire? It's been a while. My whole lifetime. But it did at one time. That one case was a tipping point for the formation of the EPA. The plastic island in the Pacific? It's being cleaned as we speak. Will we be zero pollutants in our life time - probably not, but the same could be said about racism or wealth inequality which is much easier to education and manipulate in contrast.

>- AI

Again, much easier to legislate and manipulate. The biggest problem: public understanding of how it's made and capable of to an uneducated population. Where it can go wrong? The profit motive. Where it can save us? It's already happening today in medical diagnostics.

>- Social Media

Same deal here... legislate and manipulate. The biggest problem is engineers and lawyers actively pursuing ways to game the system once sold to business people. It's already benefitted us to help provide places to discuss and connect in ways that were never possible without resorting to being held by a geographic or cultural chain.

>- Nanotechnology

See the other answers. However when the robots do a better job of co-habitation and evolution than humans, better be ready to swallow one's pride as they hit singularity before us.

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#749

Post by dandanua »

alfor wrote: post #258

Loss of religious grounding. Christianity was the north star for our societies, it organized people, align them to work together, put the future(love) before personal interest(excess pleasures, sins) Without religion we are going to fail. There never was a working society without religion. Yes we are in a different time, we have to update our stories, but if we throw them out we are going to collapse. Ex: does a doct…

The downvotes are showing that you're right. People have lost faith.

Today people believe science. It explains that humans are born not because of love, but cells interaction when people have sex. Science explains way more things than religion.

At the same time (and paradoxically) people have stopped respecting the truth. The power is what matters. Because people with power are those who create the truth that affects you and your life.

The consequence is that societies are transforming into hierarchies, where top levels feed on lower levels. Just like in the animal world. Just like what we do with cattle.

Thus, the modern sense of life is to reach the higher position in hierarchy. To raise your status. The ever expanding gap between rich and poor only catalyzes this primal meaning of life, causes everyone else to follow it. Otherwise, you and your descendants are doomed to stay low for many generations ahead, and extinct in the case of cataclysms.

For example, in Ukraine many civilians have died because they couldn't leave their homes in the war zone - they have nowhere to go and no resources to afford living elsewhere. At the same time, some deputies and oligarchs are freely travel to Dubai or other luxury places, while there is still war in Ukraine.

This world is fucked.

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#750

Post by ben_w »

dorkwood wrote: post #650
nabakin wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Innovation is coming to a standstill Machine learning is getting significantly more powerful by the month, nuclear fusion technology has been advancing at a much faster pace recently (not even counting the NIF's breakthrough), though shrouded in scams and misrepresentation the technology behind cryptocurrency is extremely impressive, the cost and efficiency of green technology just keeps improving, the cost and eff…

> though shrouded in scams and misrepresentation the technology behind cryptocurrency is extremely impressive Can someone explain in layman’s terms what the impressive parts are? The mania surrounding NFTs left a bad taste in my mouth. I’d like to keep an open mind about the technology.

Likewise. Here's the most convincing video I've seen trying to explain that, but even this explanation doesn't feel great: https://youtu.be/qBAOsB6ETrY

It's from the Computerphile channel, so I trust it more than random YouTube.

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