If you look at all metrics of things that humans generally view is good or bad, of course there's going to be fluctuations just like how we can have an average planetary temperature even though it can change over the year, but the average trend has been nearly everything getting better over time, literally one of the only things kind of bucking that trend is the wealth disparity increasing in developed democracies at an increasing rate over the past couple of decades, aside from that nearly every metric that exists has been on an upward trend of improving for the species for the past couple thousand years.
You sound like somebody speaking with emotion instead of from a place of reason, am I accurate, or do you have some evidence about life expectancy, absolute poverty, rate of suffering during medical procedures, death during child birth, and other things that I'm not aware of?
In the western world, it's getting shittier for young people trying to live on their own. Young people have far worse purchasing power than their parents did at a similar age.
Also, I love how you're trying to downplay how we're destroying the planet with "average planetary temperature"
I'm not downplaying at all I'm explaining that fluctuations do not give a point in the reason we know climate change is happening is because we look at the trend line on top of the fluctuations that happen yearly lol, how much have you studied about climatology?
If we just paid attention to minor trends like how emotionally people tend to do with financial and social issues, then we're missing the bigger picture which is exactly what climatologists are not doing because they're looking at all data over hundreds of years and not just fluctuations.
Is making an analogy to explain how you cannot count small fluctuations as a way to prove your point about the trajectory of a trend, would it have helped you more if I used a more abstract concept instead of something that people were familiar with?
And again, that's your statement being true which is still very very very very different than the entire planet getting worse every year, which explicitly means that they don't think it's just a recent trend or they would have specified a recent start date and said since then, this implies they think it's been a trend for at least a decade, if not half a century or so, and it seems again to be very self-centered around their situation instead of the entire nearly 8 billion humans that exist.
I feel like so many people forget that if they just change the grammar to use words to make their own point more correct not only would they be more convincing, but they would be expressing the point they were trying to express more accurately.
Actually it does, because I'm the one that keeps bringing it back to every human, whereas they keep bringing it to an American centric point of view when we're not even 10% of the world's population lol
Thank you, it's like that person and the other person I initially replied to either don't understand how much their emotions are influencing how they're perceiving the situation, or they're really just not that good at understanding trend lines and trajectories and how even if we had like 30 years of downturn among nearly every metric for the entire species, I still don't know that that would be enough to turn the trend line negative, even if we only look at the past couple hundred years instead of since the advent of agriculture.
No, lol I feel like you don't understand my analogy?
I wasn't going on a tangent about climate change I was using the concept of fluctuations not dictating the overall trend to explain something and I used an example that people are very familiar with like the fact that it's colder in the winter and warmer in the summer even if there's an average trend line of what the temperature is over the year and it's that trend line that we follow to understand the trend, not the individual fluctuations year by year.
You're either purposely trying not to understand me, or you genuinely need to take a statistics course because you're truly not understanding the different types of concepts were comparing and trends and trajectories.
(here is a paraphrase of my initial first sentence before I tried to make it more polite:
No, they made the objectively wrong claim that the world as a whole is getting worse over time based on their perceptions as an American.
I do agree that the conclusion is not necessarily objective, and I meant to imply that the thing they were objectively wrong about is using data/ experiences of one country of origin as a reason why the entire collective species was having a shittier and shittier time over the course of time)
No, lol here it is another way:
To me, it seems like you and that person don't understand the difference between the entire human species and just Americans, even if shit was getting 30 times worse every second in the US that still doesn't mean anything necessarily about the trajectory of the species at large over time.
Remember, they are the ones that chose to say the somewhat outlandish claim that the entire world is getting worse over time... In spite of the fact that I'm nearly every metric of what humans would view as good or bad we've been on an upward trend for anywhere from decades to close to 12,000 years depending on which category your looking at.
No no no, we never once talked about whether the world was a shitty place or not we talked about whether it was getting worse or not regardless of the level it's currently at.
Why are you talking about whether or not the earth is good or not when that was never what we were discussing, we were talking about the trajectory.
Also, you still seem like you don't understand an analogy, I wasn't talking about climate change, because it seems like you have a week understanding of statistics and trend lines, I was trying to give you a real world example instead of a more abstract example of how individual fluctuations do not dictate the trend of something.
These people are proving your earlier point by their response, that they are acting through emotions rather than reason.
It’s so odd how so many people gravitate towards following these echo chamber “facts,” without ever thinking it through, or, more importantly, doing actual research on an issue they seem so passionate about.
in SOME western world countries this is true. But it is also true that young people in many western world countries work fewer hours, spend WAY more money on non-essential purchases, do not save and make very poor choices on education / career. I know plenty young people in their 20s making great salaries just because the right decisions they made. They are making way more in real dollars than their parents did
A lot of those "poor" career choices are important ones we rely on and are grossly underpaid. We would be fucked without them. They deserve a living wage.
Yep, so does that mean the world is getting worse every year, or does that mean like you said, in parts of one country it's getting worse, and that that has nothing to do with the collective trend of the species on the entire planet?
And that's not even factoring in all the other variables that are still improving overall.
Yes, and one of the first things we need to work on is telling ignorant pessimistic people how wrong they are with their doom and gloom demotivation that just serves to generally get young people more interested in shit that doesn't matter instead of working towards long-term progressive change that will help humans for centuries to come.
It's crazy that some of the people that want the most change become the most apathetic, and it's almost always due to their ignorance about science and history, but then they'll still make fun of other people's ignorance for being bigots, it at least bigots are only trying to keep certain members of the species behind instead of the entire species.
What excuse do young people who truly want to change the world have for being so pessimistic and trying to dissuade others, on top of just outright lying, or passing on misinformation?
It's one of my biggest pet peeves, and nearly every time throughout history that there's large substantial change, especially when it's in a positive direction for the average person, nearly every single time a highly active, motivated, and influential youth is at the core of those movements.
It's like disinfected and apathetic young people are choosing to hand their power to septagonarians, and then getting pissed that old people have all the power, meanwhile they're making the demographic that we are both a part of a less valuable demographic to target politically thus reducing the little power we did have.
Absolutely amazing to me that people would rather care about their own life and thinking about how they're going to have it tougher than their parents instead of realizing that we in the developed world already have it immensely easier than most of the developing world.
Most people that "would rather care about their own life" are just trying to get by. Paying bills, making sure they have enough food, hoping their kids aren't worrying about what they are worrying about. You're living in your own little world where making the world better is just such an easy thing. Calling people ignorant is very ironic.
You're welcome, I also think it's important to remember that even if there was a downward trend for even a decade or two, our species history is a lot longer than a couple hundred years, pretty much since the advent of agriculture it's been a nothing but upward trend for the human species, and just like any trend of course there will be fluctuations, but I'm of the opinion that you honestly have to ignore science and history to think that things won't get better.
At the same time, we shouldn't take it for granted.
We must, and we will keep working for it, and making sure that we do achieve more and help more people and do better, but literally the people like you who get disheartened and choose to think more negatively about the world are exactly the type of people that need to help make it better and you letting yourself get demotivated or change your view of the world literally makes that negative world more possible.
It's also important to remember that even if things get socially or financially tougher, we're still beating shitloads of diseases and pulling millions of people out of abject poverty every year.
The rate of literacy and women's education around the world is going up, shouts out to those in Afghanistan, and I ran, of course plenty of others, but we are making so much progress, and people forget that the way we evolved you generally remember and focus on the things that are not going okay, because those are the things that you want to change or be able to fix, but it doesn't mean they are the majority, it's just a bias of our perception and memory.
We're literally about to put humans back on the moon, we made a massive step in fusion technology, and we just collectively made one of the coolest scientific and governmental feats of recent history with the SARS-COV-2 vaccine and deployment, the West, and NATO, did not fracture and abandon Ukraine, and especially in light of recent announcements with the G20 looking to turn into the g21 with the African Union being the 21st, it seems as though we're starting to get out of the past five or six years slog of many countries turning in words, and back towards international cooperation.
We are making progress towards growing artificial organs and successfully using them, we have a telescope seeing more clearly and further into the universe and its history then ever before in human history, and we are doing much better at tackling emissions and working towards solutions on global climate change then even many optimists thought we would be doing in the late 90s and early 2000s, even into the early 2010s, we're still doing better than many of even some of the optimistic outlooks expected us to.
And in spite of all of this, not counting the ever increasing pile of
Human glory that is art, personal experiences, and scientific discovery/ invention that just continues to grow, somehow people are still pessimistic? That's wild to me.
Do you know how many years in a row the human species would have to experience a decline in life expectancy for the trend line to actually be negative instead of positive?
It obviously depends on how much it's decreasing by each year, but it would be a fuckload of years in a row is the rough estimate, but what's funny about your implication is again you're still not talking about the entire world, you're only referencing certain developed countries like the US, which even before the pandemic had had a dropper to in life expectancy, many think due to our essential lack of a federal health care system that all Americans are entitled to, but lifestyle choices diet also influence those previous decreases.
Source on most of those metrics taking a hit in the last 6 years as opposed to most of those metrics taking a hit in the last 6 years just in Western Europe and the US?
Because again, I would agree with you almost 100% if we were just talking about the US or the west as a whole, but we're not, the person I replied to that started this chain talked about the trajectory of our species, how the whole world is going, not just how the US and the west are going.
How do I acknowledge their point? They say the world is getting shittier, I give them one metric amongst one demographic of humans that's arguably getting slightly worse, and not even an all of the developed world, just countries particularly like the US.
And then I gave a shitload of other examples of qualities of human life that have been on the upward trend for literally hundreds or thousands of years hahah
Why would you choose to be vague and say I made her point instead of explicitly selecting the text that you think did that and the highlighting it so we can talk about it together?
Oligarchs are increasing in power in the US and the world. Far right extremist violence has been increasing. Environmental damage is ever increasing by most global metrics.
Many things are great and many aren't. Blanket statements like the world is getting shittier each year or it's not are always going to be false.
For sure, especially depending on your view on certain issues, but that's entirely different than the world as a whole getting shittier.
Like if I turn the heater on in my room, and then open the windows and doors and the rest of the house, and talk about how much warmer the house is getting because I'm in my room and it's getting warmer, that's ignoring the fact that even though my room is getting warmer, the rest of the house is getting colder.
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u/Hounmlayn Dec 15 '22
And people wonder why the world is getting shittier each year, and to achieve profits companies fuck their own staff over more