nostalgebraist:

wirehead-wannabe:

nostalgebraist:

I guess the Pinker book kinds of appeals to my pessimistic-but-progressive preconceived notions about history.  Like, many things are terrible now, but what we’ve done is managed to at least get the first-order correction right.  Things used to be much, much more fucked up than they are.

And people say “but there are still these O(ε) terms” and yeah, there are, but the right answer to that isn’t nostalgia for the distant past, because back then the awfulness was O(1).  This O(1) badness had its O(ε) silver linings, and they look big now, because we’re only seeing on the O(ε) scale.  We forget about all the infant mortality and the diseases and the constant warfare and the routine use of grotesque torture and we focus in on things like, weren’t people back then stronger and hardier and cooler, and not soft and weak like us?  But that’s an O(ε) effect that only an O(ε) mind could see.

(Go ahead, you try living in the very-morally-improving conditions of 14th century Europe or whatever for a while and tell me which bits of it stand out to you.  You are not going to come back saying “well, it was tough, but it sure got me into shape!” like it was some kind of fucking backpacking trip.)

What about people who say that we were happier as hunter-gatherers despite the increased infant mortality, violence, and disease? (I do agree 100% that we’re at the best point we’ve ever been since the beginning of agricultural civilization.

It’s possible, but given that I think we have almost no chance of voluntarily becoming hunter-gatherers again regardless of whether it’d be a good thing (we might nuke ourselves back to the stone age, but not for that reason), it’s sort of hard to care about.

Mostly what I’m thinking about is people idealizing the cultures of the past, which (even if you leave aside the bad material conditions) tend to be O(1) bad with at most O(ε) silver linings.  Like, one response to complaints of the genre “has feminism gone too far???” is “my god, who cares; what’s clear is that for most of history it had really, really not gone far enough.”  Even if you choose to believe 100% of what culture warriors say about how our culture is going down the toilet, the toilet they’re talking about is still pretty appealing in historical perspective.  Half of the human race used to be treated as literal property and now we’re concerned about people being a bit too mean on the internet, or giving the Hugo Award to the wrong book?  The very fact that this is the kind of microscopic shit we care about shows just how far we’re come.

To be totally clear, I’m not saying that every moral concern in the present is unimportant because of how bad things used to be.  Stuff still matters.  I’m just saying that if we try to import any cultural elements from the past, we’d better be sure we’re not dragging an O(1) monstrosity out of the depths along with the change we actually want.  (Conservatism about conservatism: be careful when going backwards!)

(via nostalgebraist)