561–570 of 970 posts
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That, frankly, would be a small price to pay to stop hearing arguments about specialness of that generation.
... arguments which are nothing like the ones made on behalf of, say, "The Greatest Generation" that immediately preceded Boomers.
Our eyes are being averted from the actual problem, because it's believed that the more we look at it, the worse it becomes. I reject this anti-intellectualism, therefore present you why everything is actually falling apart.
The more humanity advances, the more we lack eros (loosely love for things we do not have) and the eros we have becomes weirder or outright bizarre. As this happens, we lose hope, that's the fatal hit. For example, access to porn has demonstrably been extremely detrimental to sex. For every passion we lose, we lose hope or replace it with a fetish. When we lose a healthy passion for clothes, we stop caring about what we wear or (more common in the west) become fetishized with bizarrely priced brands. When we lose passion for work, we stop caring about the future entirely (common in the third world) or become parasitical bureaucrats. It all adds up and often materializes into drug abuse. For an extreme example, look up the catalytic converter gangs in Kinshasa [0]. This loss of hope is monotonically increasing globally, and the manufactured divide has nothing to do with it. In fact our elites believe a little infighting and polarization may be good, as extremists are generally hopeful when they see things going their way, and more traditional solutions like education don't seem to be working these days. I don't think this theory has a name yet.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20210927195719/https://nypost.co...
I keep expecting some kind of system of phyles. Like "pick your own adventure", but for real life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age#Phyles
Instead, bad people weaponized k-means clustering to lock-in us-vs-them.
> The inexorable march of information technology, combined with the psychology of tribalism, has heightened turbulence, loathing, and delusion before, and it’s doing that now.
Yes and: Decreasing costs seems to accelerate winner-takes-all outcomes.
We technoptimists thought that improved production, distribution, discovery, and consumption would lead to a better signal-to-noise. We were wrong. Sure, we got a lot more content. But now anti-information dominates.
Why? Some scattered notions:
I guess we didn't anticipate the attention economy, how an over abundance in content (opinions) would create a scarcity of attention (deliberation).
I definitely didn not anticipate automating the hate machine with recommenders. (Parisi's filter bubble thesis was a near miss.)
And I was totally ignorant about rent seeking, financialization, and usury. How our economy's transition from manufacturing to services would accelerate inequity. The resulting anxiety is a huge part of our current hysteria.
h/t Clay Shirky's obervation about power laws, Chomsky's theory of the 5 filters, Brandolini's law, Marshal McLuhan's Understanding Media.
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Oh yeah no doubt; I collate trends into reports for rich investors. Lately they have been focused on youth trends, and some numbers are wacky. 40% point drop in 16 year olds getting a license since the 80s as urbanization puts people closer to stuff and ride share appeared. Youth participation in sports, especially full contact sports, had been going down since before covid which just accelerated it, leading to forec…
Your observations about minimum wage work and globalized JIT supply chains are, I think, pretty valid. > Source? The only recent poll I could find on this was a 2020 poll from Pew, and in that poll the number is still over 80% [1]: "more than eight-in-ten American adolescents say they believe in God or a universal spirit." > most people can’t grow a potato for themselves. Not new, especially if meant literally, but a…
Same goes for traditions like coin and paper money; they consume a lot of stuff and energy. That’s become a repeated talking point when polling people why they are interested in crypto, which was unexpected.
The data models I’m asked to build include more than just opinion polls though, as it’s felt by the folks I work with opinions are biased by media, anxiety of going against the grain, and frankly, lack of imagination and considering alternatives on the part of the public.
See a quote commonly attributed to Adam Smith about extreme division of labor resulting in humans dumber than animals; there’s no exploration across contexts; a farmer is a farmer and that’s it. Proper Anglo tradition of staying in lanes dictated by aristocracy.
Generational churn won’t end reality itself, or be so dramatic we stop using English. It will curve agency away from old forms of agency to new. A lot of people freak out about that.
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It's an endless cycle. As the saying goes... Hard times make strong men Strong men make good times Good times make weak men And weak men make hard times.
I've always thought that saying is pretty weak, not only because of the bias that anyone believes it will tend to characterise themselves as one of the "strong men", but also because what one side characterises as good times, another side will characterise as bad. The end of WW2 was a good time for the allies, pretty devastating for Germany, and yet we don't see Germany in current times as on a completely different t…
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I have a much different experience. I have a dozen family members that were part of the auto industry in Michigan. They were on top of the world for decades. It ended with most of them thinking society has collapsed in the 80s and doubting they'd actually get their pension. My grandfather spent the last 30 years of his life in retirement collecting a pay check that he thought might be his last.
This is why defined benefit pension plans are so risky for retirees, employers, and taxpayers. We need to completely eliminate them and use defined contribution plans such as 401(k) instead. That way retirees actually own the assets in individual named accounts and those can't be taken away if the employer is sold or goes bankrupt.
I think some things are falling apart but not everything. If you had the foresight/luck/guidance to get into a stable white collar career, find a partner, and buy a house before 2022 I think you're on "the train". This train is currently pulling away from a burning station containing everyone else who hasn't done those things yet. It's still possible to escape the station by running down the tracks but at this point…
While I agree that buying property has become very difficult, what has changed in 2022 that prevents you from getting a stable white collar job or finding a partner? If you have the requisite skillset (which can be acquired more easily than ever thanks to the internet) getting a stable white collar job is very possible. And in the age of dating apps, so much friction has been removed when it comes to finding a partne…
Everything is not falling apart, though certain institutions may be falling apart. In America, there's definitely been a breakdown of belief in its own institutions. Far more people are skeptical of things like journalism and Silicon Valley; it really wasn't that long ago that the former was constantly salivating over the latter, but now it's more of an openly vulture-carrion relationship because that caters to publi…
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> For what it's worth, the decline of trust in institutions is primarily among "Republican/lean Republican" respondents, who are a minority of American voters and likely a minority of American non-voters as well. The problem with this line of thinking is that "Republican/lean Republican" is not a fixed trait. People can switch to that category instantly, overnight; so dismissing them just because the last time there…
I think it depends on exactly which institutions too. I would guess that law enforcement is an institution that more liberals distrust and more conservatives support.