Pessimists Archive

by Jugurtha • 5 years ago

63 36 5 years ago

dash22• 5 years ago

Yeah, up to a point, right? It's interesting they have TV in there but TV addiction is (probably) a real thing (http://sites.oxy.edu/clint/physio/article/televisionaddictio...).

Jugurtha• 5 years ago

Wouldn't TV addiction be an addiction problem?

There also are knife accidents, car accidents, swimming pool related drownings, email addiction, work addiction. These exist, but what are the externalities in general?

dash22• 5 years ago

Heroin addiction is an addiction problem too... but TV addiction, like heroin addiction, seems quite widespread. (Average screen use is now something like 8 hours per day, IIRC.)

There might also be externalities. Suppose you want to play outside, but all your friends are watching TV.

0xdeadb00f• 5 years ago

TV addiction is almost definitely a real thing. So is social media addiction.

jl6• 5 years ago

We desperately need longitudinal news media.

Current news works like this:

1. Something looks bad 2. Generate outrage 3. Forget all about it 4. Go to 1, on another topic.

Can you imagine a form of journalism that picks its topics for the year, then relentlessly follows up on them every day, not getting distracted by passing outrage, but actually digging deeply?

Sites like this could be a start, to help us stop forgetting.

qsort• 5 years ago

Digging deeply into anything requires time and focus most people won't put in if they have any choice at all.

We have far greater means to temporally cross-reference media now than at any other point in history, and yet most news outlets outright abitually lie about publicly available information.

We vastly overestimate how much people care whether things are true or false.

crtasm• 5 years ago

https://private-eye.co.uk/ do some excellent investigations and special reports, I think mostly only available in the print copy though.

rTX5CMRXIfFG3• 5 years ago

In many ways, the news that we get is the news that consumers of news generally care about—so if an issue gets buried under much more current ones, it’s just a consequence of people caring about the current ones. We’re pretty much asking for human nature to change here. You also can’t reasonably expect journalism to report on something where there is nothing new or significant to report, which happens a lot in long legal cases.

mjklin• 5 years ago

That’s one reason I appreciate podcasts like “You’re Wrong About” that revisit past news stories and tell them properly.

shaolinspirit• 5 years ago

this is hilarious. I'm wondering if blockchain will be there :D

tolstoywasright• 5 years ago

Not surprised seeing Pinker is a fan. These are the same type of people that parrot the "technology is neutral, it's how you use it" line.

"Only by looking back at fears of old things when they were new, can we have rational constructive debates about emerging technologies today that avoids the pitfalls of moral panic and incumbent protectionism."

Sure ok, start with this: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/228250.Four_Arguments_fo...

kspacewalk22• 5 years ago

"technology is neutral, it's how you use it" line.

Seems like such an obviously true statement to me, that the only thing to add is that you cannot un-invent, abolish or wish it away. Folks who believe in the "complete nuclear disarmament" fairy tale have a hard time with this.

dane-pgp• 5 years ago

You might not be able to wish away nuclear weapons, but if all countries in the world wanted there to be no nuclear weapons, they could (after solving climate change) introduce a global ban on nuclear energy and the possession of fissionable elements.

This would have to be accompanied by a powerful inspections regime, with big rewards for whistleblowers. Also, if a country did announce it had secretly produced nuclear weapons, or was discovered to have them, that would probably have to be treated as a casus belli, and all other countries would have a legal duty to launch a massive (conventional) bombardment of that country.

janto2• 5 years ago

Is Twitter neutral?

mrzool• 5 years ago

When the car began replacing the horse, pessimists didn’t treat it like a great new tool. They called it “the devil wagon,” and said its mission was to destroy the world.

They were absolutely right.

i_cannot_hack• 5 years ago

The authors of the website really undermine their own point by including a lot of "hysterical" comments that are still reasonable warnings or complaints, were completely reasonable at the time (things change!) or are just sensible questions.

The sections on computers includes an article matter-of-factly informing about a virus being found on 3000 computers. Calling the virus a time bomb is not hysteria - it was literally designed to be one. And surely computer viruses are an even bigger problem today?

The clipping titled "Perils of the lazy age", which predicts that people sitting down in front of the television instead of chopping firewood will make people "unable to stand on their own feet" sure is obnoxiously written, but the sentiment is not wrong: Obesity and cardiovascular disease is basically an epidemic today.

If these are some of the best examples of past hysteria, I guess we should listen more to those we consider hysterical today?

Flankk3• 5 years ago

I'd blame obesity on diet before I'd blame it on television. Six of one, half dozen of the other though. The entire food chain is GMO and soaked in poison.

chriscjcj2• 5 years ago

You have some Texas sharpshooter fallacy, and some exclusion fallacy going on here.

Destroying the world was never the automobile's mission. Like many inventions that have benefited mankind, it has come with unintended consequences, both positive and negative.

I would not discount the negative effects the automobile has had and will continue to have. However, I would argue that the effects of the automobile's existence are so profound and far-reaching, we are incapable of arguing whether the world is, or will be, ultimately a better or worse place as a result of its existence.

rTX5CMRXIfFG3• 5 years ago

I feel like leaving the subject of whether automobiles are good/bad as something that cannot be determined is just shying away from the question, and the possibility that the answer to it is that it is generally a bad thing. When you design cities and cultures and entire lifestyles around the assumption that everyone has or must have a car, all the unintended consequences of the automobile become bigger—necessary places aren’t walkable, air becomes so polluted you can’t jog outside, you create huge market demand for cheaply produced energy, and so on.

I’d like to hear anyone’s thoughts to the contrary? Are there any benefits that are bigger than the cons?

janto2• 5 years ago

This is representing only one quadrant of the predictions × outcomes matrix.

Where are the pessimistic predictions that turned out to be accurate? Where are the optimistic predictions on disruptive tech that did turn out net negative? Where are the nuances?

gameswithgo• 5 years ago

How many bad outcomes did the pessimism prevent!

ForHackernews• 5 years ago

Ok, but television really did make the world worse. Arguably also the personal automobile.

kspacewalk22• 5 years ago

It's certainly the case that neither television not automobile were inventions completely free of negative effects. But to say that they made the world worse is a very myopic view, focused on first world moral panics rather than attempting to evaluate what these inventions meant for a Turkish or an Indian village, for example.

spedru• 5 years ago

The website decided to randomly turn into a blank white page after clicking through a number of items on the timeline. Said timeline also obscures the bottom of the tweet embed on a small viewport. Between that and the cutesy center-justified monospace, perhaps the pessimists were at least right about Web Technologies™.

nbzso• 5 years ago

This is bias in propagandist form. Give me pessimistic archive with right vs wrong facts. Why in the era of digital information we don't have public tools to fact-check political and corporate propaganda vs scientific evidence. This will be a good nonprofit"startup" :)

rTX5CMRXIfFG3• 5 years ago

What is a “wrong fact”?

po1nt• 5 years ago

I really hope AI will be added in future.

wayeq• 5 years ago

The 2015 bitcoin entry will just be a link to news.ycombinator.com

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