The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better

https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better

by sebg • 4 years ago

162 121 4 years ago

Nice to read something that isn’t hopeless, and isn’t fluff.

If you enjoyed this post, I highly recommend reading Factfulness by Hans Rosling. He spent his later years trying to educate the public on the realities of the world. This book contains a series of tips on how to understand facts.

His TED talks are masterpieces as well.

senectus1• 4 years ago

absolutely agree. Hans Rosling was amazing for presenting data in a visual and easy to digest way.

Was very sad when he passed away back in 2017.

mongol2• 4 years ago

Indeed. And additionally, I have often wondered what opinions and impact he would have had during the Covid pandemic

Arkhaine_kupo• 4 years ago

I really enjoyed Factfulness and in general enjoy his work and talks. But I would recommend also reading some of the criticism it received. Some really interesting discussions came from the publishing of that book

klft• 4 years ago

Could you share some entry points to the criticism?

Balgair• 4 years ago

Here's a quick quiz from his team on how you understand your world:

https://upgrader.gapminder.org/

I was surprised at how the world is doing.

polishdude20• 4 years ago

Some of these questions really depend on context. They give you usually three numbers and the right answer is usually either the highest or lowest number.

For example, it asks how many women are CEO's in a America? And it gives the choice of 5% , 10% and 18% . The right answer is 18% which then makes you feel like 'oh that's a lot'.

But I think the sentiment would be different if it started at 18% being the lowest. The result and how you feel about it changes.

joe_the_user• 4 years ago

If we're talking the general state of the world...

The world is going to be much awful-er as climate change unfolds. Climate change is not being addressed seriously currently, at all. And the trend is towards it not being addressed.

The world isn't going to be much better until climate change is addressed - if then.

I think this trumps literally any statistical measure of well-being you could come up with.

Winsaucerer5• 4 years ago

The world is going to be much awful-er as climate change unfolds. Climate change is not being addressed seriously currently, at all. And the trend is towards it not being addressed.

The world has been getting better, and continues to get better. Unfortunately, I don't have a reference to it, but I recall attending a talk that charted out some kind of measure of wealth/welfare/well-off-ness based on various climate change scenarios. The thing that stood out to me was that even on the worse climate change predictions, future generations will STILL be better off than us. Just not as better off as they would be with better climate change action.

Whether or not the data used in that talk was accurate, I'm optimistic about the future, and I think it will be better, with peaks and troughs on the way there. I'm glad to have been born no earlier than I was, and would prefer to have been born later than I was! The main thing that concerns me is that it's going to be the poorest people in the world that will suffer as a result of climate change. I think that's where climate action should be directed primarily -- aimed at either preventing the great harms that will affect the poorest, or compensating them for the harms that can't be prevented, so that the harms of climate change are spread more fairly among us.

vlovich123• 4 years ago

I’m always skeptical of economic models of the present let alone the future. Past performance is not indicative of future results and all economic models have very poor prediction performance over longer terms because of this. Black swan events completely eclipse and wipe out any growth that was sustained over the longer term.

If we miss something in the forecast that results in a rapid ecological collapse, then reality will look different. Additionally, a slowing down of progress is actually a worrying sign if it’s driven by pushback from our world. The reason is that even if we stopped all human CO2 emissions, climate change would continue to get worse because it takes time for the climate to stabilize. And we’re not at net 0. We’re still pumping out more each year than any other in the past and we’re just starting to level off the acceleration of that growth. My point being here that even if one or two might be slightly better, three or four might be slightly worse and the downward slope from there is significantly faster (easier to increase entropy than decrease it).

The only thing that gives me the tiniest bit of hope is that two generations of progress is a significant amount of time for scientific breakthroughs. If we can really unlock our green energy production (which we can with nuclear fission today and hopefully fusion not too far off) and get our sequestration up by many orders of magnitude (which with fission and fission we could conceivably enable but there are other logistical roadblocks), then we might be able to unwind some of the damage. Some damage will be permanent obviously. Still, I think betting on that outcome is a fool’s wager. The outcome scenario of a loss is quite bad. Much better to try to arrest the damage as hard as possible now.

chongli• 4 years ago

Life was much better for those in Europe who survived the black death. They lived longer, healthier lives. They were paid more due to labour shortages. By nearly every measure their lives were better off than those who lived before the plague. That is small comfort to those who suffered and died during the plague.

We're in a similar boat. The winners (survivors) of the climate change disaster will be better off. But if we're to be good Rawlsians [1] then we shouldn't assume that we will be among the survivors.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position

29athrowaway7• 4 years ago

"The world has been getting better, and continues to get better."

Perhaps the tiny surface of the world you interact with now has more conveniences than before, but that is very distant from a reality where things are getting better.

Your perception depends on taking many factors for granted, not acknowledging we depend on multiple concurrent progress traps.

If you go to the supermarket and the shelves are empty, if there's no water running through your pipes, if there's no power coming from your outlets, if there's no internet connectivity, and so on, your reality bubble will be popped.

Overusing topsoil, overusing fresh water, killing all the pollinators, pumping aquifers dry, overfishing, using fossil fuels, having pollution festivals like halloween, air travel for trivial reasons, etc. We live our lives thinking the natural world will adapt to our stupid wasteful lifestyle which gets more wasteful every day. But that won't do. Everyone will have to adapt and have a lifestyle that is more sustainable, and that lifestyle will be very different to the one we have now.

Every society is 3 meals away from revolution, and that revolution is coming in our lifetimes when we finish ruining the planet for ourselves. Terraforming mars won't do shit for the political instability that will unfold as a consequence of failed harvests, water exhaustion, topsoil death, etc. War for the resources that are left is inevitable as resources become scarce.

Toxic optimism won't make things better. Only acknowledging problems instead of hiding them behind layers of abstraction will.

rob742• 4 years ago

The world has been getting better, and continues to get better

...and as a result of that, the world's population has been growing and growing (and the standard of living of this population has also on average improved), which leads to more CO2 emissions, a higher consumption of finite natural resources etc. etc. Now there are two possible theories:

(1) things will continue to get better, if any problems will come up along the way we will surely be able to solve them.

(2) we are accelerating towards a brick wall which we can't see yet, but when we see it it will be too late to avoid the crash.

throwanapple2• 4 years ago

Has the world also been getting better for other species we share the planet with?

https://ourworldindata.org/biodiversity

seibelj2• 4 years ago

The world went through an ice-age while humans were alive and struggling. The world may be warming because of humans, but we have the ability with technology to adapt.

lotsofpulp2• 4 years ago

I assume when people are concerned about the future, they are concerned about the prospective quality of life specifically for themselves and their descendants.

tsimionescu12• 4 years ago

No one is claiming humanity will go extinct. But during that ice age there were probably less than 100k living in the whole world. With technology and our current spread, we won't go so low, but a planet 3-4 degrees hotter is nowhere near able to sustain 7B people. Not to mention the terrible migration and resource wars we'll see as hundreds of millions if not billions of people have to leave places where temperatures routinely rise over livable standards.

AussieWog93• 4 years ago

Climate change is not being addressed seriously currently, at all. And the trend is towards it not being addressed.

While we could be doing better, we've made immense strides over the past ten years, to the point where we've already avoided the worst outcomes and could possibly even limit the rise to 2°C and avoid most harm altogether.

At least, according to Kurzgesagt.

https://youtu.be/LxgMdjyw8uw

Joeri• 4 years ago

Immense strides have been made, but I feel it is dangerous to take a too rosy outlook until the job is done. Complacency has always been the biggest threat to solving the climate crisis. On the other hand climate apathy and fatalism are also real, and equally dangerous.

The best source for the amount of warming we are heading for is the yearly UNEP emissions gap report, which takes all the national commitments and calculates global outcomes. With the currently planned measures we are heading for 2.7 degrees of warming by the end of the century. If the countries that have promised a net-zero strategy actually implement one we are headed for 2.2 degrees. Realistically there is at present no path to less than 2 degrees of warming without major political upheaval or technological revolution and we are probably heading for 2.5 degrees of warming. Even at 2 degrees the consequences are severe. We are looking at a near-total loss of coral reefs and one fifth of insect species, 40% of humanity will become exposed to extreme heat waves, many coastal areas will need to be abandoned displacing hundreds of millions of people. The effects get disproportionately worse when temperatures exceed 2 degrees of warming. So, the situation is not hopeless, but without further action we are still locked into some pretty bad outcomes, and we need to keep the pressure on with all governments to take further steps.

https://www.unep.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2021

throwanapple2• 4 years ago

Any thoughts on this response video?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCuy1DaQzWI

tsimionescu12• 4 years ago

While we could be doing better, we've made immense strides over the past ten years, to the point where we've already avoided the worst outcome

This is only perhaps true if you project the current progress into the future as if this is a foregone conclusion. That is dangerously wrong - most of what has been done to combat global warming is the table stakes, the things that its easy to do and should have either been done decades ago, or are simple economic shifts (transitioning some coal power to wind and solar).

But reaching net 0 emissions is going to be extremely hard, much harder than halving our past emissions. And we have to do that in the next 30-40 years to avoid 2 degrees of warming, which is already catastrophic.

To get to net 0, we would have to replace virtually all transportation in the world with BEVs (cars are easy to replace, planes, trucks and cargo ships almost impossible, and definitely not in 30 years).

We will need to produce at least twice as much electricity as today while closing virtually all coal and gas power plants (but we don't have anywhere near enough energy storage to run the whole grid off renewables, nor is there any realistic chance to do so in the next 30 years).

And finally, we will have to close down the vast majority of industrial animal farming pursuits, which supply much of the world's food.

There is no real chance that the current rate of improvement will lead anywhere close to curtailing emissions enough to avoid 2-3 degrees of warming. Plus, the appetite for these changes may well sour as the bigger impact ones will come to pass.

Barrin92• 4 years ago

But this fact – that it is possible to change the world and achieve extraordinary progress for entire societies – is something that everyone should know.

Everyone does know that. That the world changes, gets better or gets worse isn't exactly a hot take. What these 'progress studies' are about is ideological in nature. It's using 'the state of the world' which nobody cares about as a means to re-frame local issues, which people do care about.

I mean the article is even quite explicit at the end that what it's really about is selling 'effective altruism' as a belief system. However instead of pretending that this is some value-neutral question of 'data' as if the average European or American citizen doesn't know that Somalia is poorer than France (or could theoretically be less poor) is kind of silly.

darth_avocado• 4 years ago

The world is awful. The world is much better.

A better way to look at this is that we've made significant progress when it comes to solving some of the problems, but we've also created new ones that make it much worse than before. We can now grow enough food to feed the world (although we're doing a terrible job of distributing it to the world). However the food is much less nutritional and much more toxic than before. We can now travel distances in a time that was unimaginable before, but we breathe the poison as a direct result of it.

nostromo• 4 years ago

although we're doing a terrible job of distributing it to the world

Are we? Starvation and malnutrition used to be common and is now rare.

https://ourworldindata.org/famines

tomnipotent2• 4 years ago

This is true, but it's also true that the world produces enough food such that no ones needs to starve, and yet people still starve. A quarter of food produced ends up in landfills (Europe estimates 20% food waste, as high as 30-40% in US).

imtringued2• 4 years ago

Almost a billion are still going hungry.

inglor_cz• 4 years ago

Slowly but surely, the main problem with food is changing from "starvation" to "obesity".

Which is arguably just a different form of malnutrition, somewhat less deadly, but more of a chronic burden on the patient and the society.

safety1st2• 4 years ago

In 2017 when that article was last updated, yeah sure. Not sure you can make that declaration in 2022. The combination of record poverty caused by Covid lockdowns and food supply chain disruptions caused by the war in Ukraine has put millions of people worldwide in famine conditions: https://www.reuters.com/world/world-faces-unprecedented-glob...

Exactly how bad it will get remains to be seen. But the causes of famine are generally political and in terms of total body counts the worst ones are basically "big country X really screws up" (e.g. China and the Soviet Union in the 20th century) and/or wars and I don't think we have any guarantee that those things won't happen again.

29athrowaway7• 4 years ago

We can now grow enough food to feed the world

We grow food on topsoil.

Topsoil is soil with microorganisms, worms and insects in it. You cannot grow food on sterile soil.

Topsoil takes a long time to form, and very short time to be consumed.

We are using topsoil at a higher rate than it is replenished. The rate at which we use topsoil increases over time.

We are very wasteful with our use of topsoil. We discard ugly vegetables, or vegetables outside certain arbitrary parameters despite them being perfectly edible, or simply to keep prices down.

The reality is: over time, that statement is false. Topsoil is dying, and so are we.

carapace5• 4 years ago

We're learning to grow food in ways that increases the amount and fertility of topsoil, so it's not a foregone conclusion. E.g. Permaculture, Syntropic and Regenerative agriculture, etc. Check out the transformation of the Loess Plateau in China. It was rendered into a wasteland by bad farming practices and then re-vegetated and revitalized: http://eempc.org/lessons-of-the-loess-plateau/

hackerlight• 4 years ago

There is more nutritious food than before, and there is more toxic/unhealthy/processed food than before.

What's changed is the ratio between the two, but the absolute level per capita of both is higher, which is great for anyone who is discerning and self-controlled enough to avoid the toxic stuff.

AnimalMuppet3• 4 years ago

We can now travel distances in a time that was unimaginable before, but we breathe the poison as a direct result of it.

A city full of horse manure wasn't all that healthy, either.

jillesvangurp• 4 years ago

I'm only 47 years old. I've lost count of the number of things that improved exponentially during my life time. More has happened in the last half century than in all of humanity before that in terms of scientific progress.

Perhaps a different way to look at things is that while people are causing no end of trouble for each other, the planet they live on, etc. they also have a knack for just continually figuring out how to do things better and differently. People don't get exponentials so they get caught by surprise by them even when they shouldn't.

People can be fatalistic when faced with big problems. But when faced with smaller problems, they just start solving them. And lots of big problems can be broken down into lots of small problems. A big problem may seem insurmountable. A small problem is just work that needs to be done. Lots of people working on lots of small problems, means a lot of those problems simply get solved and melt away.

I don't have all the answers when it comes to world peace, clean energy, hunger, child mortality, sea level rises, etc. These are really big challenges. But I'm an engineer and solve problems for a living. A can-do attitude goes a long way to just getting stuff done.

A wise lesson that I picked up in some communication training is to try to steer workplace discussions towards being constructive rather than being dismissive, argumentative, and negative. By simply talking about challenges rather than problems you can rephrase things such that people start thinking about how they can make things better rather than how hopelessly bad they are. They get excited instead of angry. Using a "yes and .." instead of a "yes, but .." is a very subtle way to say the same thing in a way that is constructive.

In a workplace, prolonging a bad thing serves no purpose so getting people to talk about how to improve a thing is more productive than having them provide endless reasons why a thing cannot, should not, or must not be done. Get people to think about how they can do it better rather than talking each other out of doing constructive things. I can't fix everyone around me but I can fix how I voice my own criticism. That little lesson has served me well over the years.

As a startup CTO I have to be constantly mindful about the epic amount of shit I cannot possibly deal with while still making sure things get better month to month. For any twenty problems, pick two to solve right now. Ignore the rest. I can't afford apathy or fatalism. Neither is constructive. But I can park one thing and focus on a feasible thing. Once I solve that, we can see about the other thing.

My attitude to all the big problems in this world is the same. Yes they are big but there is progress and plenty of opportunities for more progress. Don't tell me how royally screwed we all are, tell me how things could be better and I might be able to do my little part to get us there.

tsimionescu12• 4 years ago

More has happened in the last half century than in all of humanity before that in terms of scientific progress.

The vast majority of scientific advances in the last hundred years happened before World War I and right after - most notably, special and general relativity, and quantum mechanics. Computing was discovered right after WWII, as was the transistor. Lisp and FORTRAN are older than 50 years. We landed on the moon more than 50 years ago.

Nothing discovered since the 70s compares to the advances in science and technology made in the first half of the twentieth century.

Edit: tone. Also, remembered that flight was also discovered in the first part of the twentieth century, as was radio transmission. Basically the world went from steam and letters and thinking about mechanics roughly in terms discovered in the 1600s to planes, mass media, computers and understanding the structure of matter and space time from 1900 to 1960. Anything that happened since then is only minor iterative improvements.

philovivero• 4 years ago

Nothing discovered since the 70s compares to the advances in science and technology made in the first half of the twentieth century.

Not buying that in the slightest.

Reusable rocket boosters? Battery tech? International money movement? Everything in tech from 2000 to present?

Sure, if you just define "everything since the 70's doesn't spark my imagination" then you win this round of nihilism, but the last 50 years have been amazing.

AnimalMuppet3• 4 years ago

The vast majority of scientific advances in the last hundred years happened before World War I and right after - most notably, special and general relativity, and quantum mechanics.

Specifics: Higgs boson. Discovery of neutrino mass. Quantum chromodynamics. Imaging the event horizon around a black hole. Gravitational wave detection.

More generally: General relativity came out in 1915. That didn't mean that we knew everything about gravity in 1915, though. We only were able to do certain more detailed calculations recently. Do you ascribe all of that progress to 1915?

And, if something similar is discovered today, the later pieces - the more detailed calculations - haven't shown up yet. That makes it hard for anything today to have the impact of things 100 years ago, since much of the impact hasn't happened yet, even if the one-time-event discovery has.

andrepd• 4 years ago

It's amazing how many people don't get that these three things can, and are, true at the same time.

Yes, things are so much better: child mortality keeps falling, people in extreme poverty have (slowly) fallen, wars are less frequent.

Yes, things are awful: climate catastrophe is incoming, income inequality is pushing gilded age levels, democracy has been backsliding for the past 20 years, there are more slaves today that at any point in history.

Yes, things can be better: we have not reached the end-stage in political and economic development, and we will move to something better than neoliberal capitalism, we can tackle climate change with massive concerted action.

m463• 4 years ago

I enjoyed the book "The Rational Optimist" by Matt Ridley which is (surprise) optimistic :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rational_Optimist

BrandoElFollito• 4 years ago

Is there a consensus on this organization (givewell.org)?

I donate to French organizations I know and see their work directly, but have no experience with international ones such as this one.

I would be most interested in ones that provide education capacities to girls but the one from the post concentrates on health related ones (which is of course great as well)

Zhyl• 4 years ago

Give Well is a research organisation that publishes reports on the effectiveness of charities.

They do select a 'Top 9' of best charities for a range of issues, and also run a 'donation index' where you can allow your donation to be distributed to the top charities (purportedly without a fee being taken).

I've heard of Give Well being mentioned on various Stats podcasts (e.g. the BBC's More or Less) and Our World in Data is very reputable.

benjaminclark• 4 years ago

In my corner of the world/philanthropy discussion, I'd consider GiveWell one of the most well-known organizations and with a reputation of high quality, thorough research. In terms of charity evaluators who focus on the impact per dollar spent, I'd have a hard time thinking of anyone comparable.

Regarding what type of programs GiveWell currently recommends, they do evaluate a wide range of types of programs. For instance, here is a page on their website summarizing some of their work on education: https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/ed.... However, with the facts as they exist in the world today, their analysis is that for a given amount of funding, more good can be done with certain specific health interventions.

atlasunshrugged• 4 years ago

I think Givewell is excellent if your goal is to donate to charities that have been vetted for maximum impact (measured in terms of cost-effectiveness of dollars donated to saving lives) but if you are looking for a charity in a specific sector outside of one they have judged, they're not the best for that. But if you're a founder by chance, founderspledge.com supports people in figuring out where to donate based on their interests (and also publishes some of their research).

revskill2• 4 years ago

The world is aweful because the economic and political system is aweful. They're aweful because they're run by aweful people, who should spend time on something else rather than being a bad leader. And they're aweful because of the world is aweful.

miffy900• 4 years ago

The world is aweful because the economic and political system is aweful. They're aweful because they're run by aweful people, who should spend time on something else rather than being a bad leader. And they're aweful because of the world is aweful.

Is there a reason you're spelling it that way?

revskill2• 4 years ago

Because when things get better and awesome, this sentence is still true, "aweful" mean both awful and awesome, depends on the context.

imtringued2• 4 years ago

Instead of getting cause and effect backwards over and over again maybe one should think that the reverse is true instead?

It is so easy to blame politicians because that means you get to blame someone else.

What if the economic system is broken to begin with and the only thing you can do is shift the suffering away from your interest group to another interest group?

In other words, the economic system itself has created interest group politics.

From that perspective having better leadership is irrelevant. Not even a centrally planned economy can be the solution since it can only shuffle the suffering around.

What is the underlying problem? Increasing your personal share of wealth without creating new wealth aka rent seeking. If politicians were merely in the business of getting rid of rent seeking, their "competence" would hardly matter.

robertlagrant3• 4 years ago

Not even a centrally planned economy can be the solution

A centrally planned economy has the worst track record in history. It definitely won't be the solution.

TheAceOfHearts• 4 years ago

There is a severe lack of competent and inspiring leadership. With no clear vision for the future people become trapped in pointless political squabbles.

What makes life worth living for you?

js2• 4 years ago

My wife. My kids. My siblings. My cousins. My parents. My dog. Coffee. Bourbon. Ice cream. Scrambled eggs. The smell of baking bread. The smell of fresh rain. A walk on a sunny day. Sex. A really satisfying crap. Movies. People watching. A funny joke. A bad joke. Puns. A good story well told. The stars at night. The sound of cicadas. A hawk screeching overhead. The beach. The mountains. A friendly smile. A hug from a friend. A hug from a stranger. Jitters at the start of a marathon. Elation at the end of a marathon. A symphony orchestra. That guy playing guitar at the John Lennon garden in Central Park.

But yes, competent and inspiring leadership is good too.

agentwiggles• 4 years ago

Cheers to all that and may you experience it all many more times!

agensaequivocum• 4 years ago

Doing God's will.

epsteinisntdead• 4 years ago

Why can't God take care of that himself?

throwaway6734• 4 years ago

Passing the blessing of life that my parents gave to me onto my children.

It's not a lack of leaders that's the issue today, it's a lack of gratitude

pmoleri• 4 years ago

The statements are true. Period. There's no need to imagine a place where all three overlap, they are already true. Specially since the last one is just a possibility.

birksherty• 4 years ago

It's too selfish for humans to say world is better. Is the world only for humans? Does it belong to us only?

Every other species is in terrible condition than before or they got extinction.

And the better is not going to last. All the progress is because of extreme fossil fuel usage. The effect has started to show, to be honest it's going to get much worse in coming decades.

It's like a person falling from a building says life was never so exiting while going down each floor, even just before hitting the ground.

mandmandam• 4 years ago

Why are you booing him; he's right.

While the article immediately addresses the acceptance of both awful and fantastic changes, it doesn't address our effect on the other species of the planet - which has been rather unambiguously horrific. On a scale that's basically impossible to comprehend without lifetimes of study across diverse fields.

This needs to be addressed more. Every hour of every day, until we have accountability for the people responsible and genuine changes.

I want our future to be one that respects the biosphere and all species, not just one. It's not just altruistic either - we've lost so much already, and people don't even know.

slothtrop2• 4 years ago

It's not just altruistic either

Then it's factored in to the "is the world better for humans" category

perrygeo• 4 years ago

Exactly. The article claims that the world is "better" because we have improved child mortality rates. They state (correctly) that the improvement is a consequence of alleviating poverty and improving material living conditions. But how did we DO that? Did we just put our heads down and chant "economic growth for everyone"?!

No. This growth was, and will continue to be, driven by industrial capital, mining, and fossil fuels. How are children born today going to raise grandchildren in the likely decline of those advantages? And there must be a discussion of the costs: pollution, climate change, resource depletion, species extinction, and myriad other social and environmental externalities.

Are things really "better" if more kids are born... into an unsustainable system? I think the younger generation today is ALREADY seeing the cracks, getting less from the system while paying higher costs to buy in. The energy-blind adherence to growth at all costs is a philosophy that does a disservice not just other species on earth, but future humans as well.

fallingfrog• 4 years ago

I’ve often thought that if you drew a line with the witch burning dark ages at one end, and a society where everyone can achieve their true potential at the other end, we’re somewhere close to the halfway point now. Massive progress made, massive progress still to be made. So yeah I’d agree with all three statements.

TheCoelacanth• 4 years ago

To be pedantic, the peak time period for witch-burning was in the Early Modern period (15th-17th century), not the Dark Ages (5th-10th century)[1].

In the Dark Ages, church and civil authorities often took the position that witchcraft didn't exist, while later on they tended to give the idea more credence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch-hunt

stuckinhell• 4 years ago

I have a hard time believing the fundamental problem is the world is "culture". After Covid-19 and a personal battle with Toxoplasmosis, I think people need a reminder of the unforgiving brutality of nature and evolution.

The Toxoplasomsis parasite infects over 800,000 persons each year in the United States. We are finding out our models were wrong, and this parasite can cause cysts and behaviorial modification(probably via hormones) in human brains.

No one talks about this, and I only found out because this parasite was giving me polycystic ovary syndrome! It's all an absolute nitemare, and a great awakening about how these parasites violate our bodies and minds.

I think Evolution is the biggest enemy that we as humans must overcome with technology.

azekai• 4 years ago

I think Evolution is the biggest enemy that we as humans must overcome with technology.

I would ask for clarification on this point. Is it that blind, unguided evolution is our biggest enemy? Or how parasitic infections are so well-evolved to exploit our biological weaknesses? Evolution is adaptation to environment over time, the capacity for change. Claiming that evolution as an enemy seems about as useful as raging against the sun or oxygen.

jwarden• 4 years ago

This is the theme of Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now. It compiles a tremendous amount of data and research on progress in health, wealth. justice, equality, and happiness.

It is a great antidote to the distorted pessimistic view of reality that comes from constant exposure to news, social commentary, and political activism, which focus relentlessly on the negative.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_Now

nickersonm• 4 years ago

I personally preferred The Better Angels of our Nature [0] as a deeper look focusing on the assorted statistics. Enlightenment Now recycles a lot of it and summarizes. There's some minor updates as well.

[0] https://stevenpinker.com/publications/better-angels-our-natu...

jfengel• 4 years ago

Thank you. It's very good to have the affirmation of a fellow straight, rich, white man that everything is hunky-dory. We can just take everybody a standard deviation or two off from the median, and just chop those tails off, neat as pie.

Now everybody is doing great and we don't have to think about the negatives at all!

AtlasBarfed• 4 years ago

Warning: specious venn diagram.

The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better

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