[rewq4321]

I think there's a general failure of communication here, and throughout the current social discourse on "cynicism".

There's a sort of false trichotomy at play in this post, and on Twitter I've noticed a dichotomous version: "Should we be happy that we're improving, or sad that there's so far to go?" (That's my summary of it, anyway)

Why not both? We should appreciate how far things have come (it is truely astounding), but of course that doesn't imply that we should be content with where we are. We should be deeply discontent - at least to the extent that it motivates us to fight towards a better future. A magnitude or type of discontent that leads to depression/apathy is obviously not helpful.

It seems like a significant portion of tribal "controversy" on social media is stoked by mouthpieces on either side that are almost purposefully playing into the dichotomy perspective, because adding subtlety into the discussion would throw water on the flames, and that's just ending the "fun".

[drewcoo]

Call me cynical, but I think the communication here is just virtue signaling. Both the content of the message and the act of displaying it.

[netcan]

OK.

I think this comment is a good example of a type of cynicism that we're discussing, probably the type that most instinctively jumps out as "cynical."

Like pessimism and optimism, cynicism often boils down to a bias.

The key word is "just" (virtue signalling). Blogging, commenting, and communicating generally are various things as once. We're pursuing intellectual curiosity, showing off, participating in a culture, signalling virtue, signalling other things... to ourselves and to others.

Our bias and/or perspective lens dictates our focus. A lot of cynicism, certainly within my generational cohort, is also about signalling. Signaling that we're not naive, that we're cool, grunge, etc. If you hate grunge, hippies, Diogenes or whatnot, you're more likely to adopt a perspective whereby they're "just" bunch of virtue signaling posers.

You can always plausibly adopt this perspective. Grunge, hippies, Diogenes & whatnot are attention seekers. They are cultural figures, which is kind of virtue signalling by definition. They're also other things though. Reducing these to "just" virtue signalling is cynicism regarding these things.

You can also have a general cynical viewpoint, but it's pretty hard to do without also adopting arseholery. As a general cynic, you pretty much assume that base motivation for everything. OP is just virtue-signalling optimism. Drewcoo is just edgelord cool-signalling. Netcan is just cool-signaling.

I think what is true from reading reddit, HN & the internet broadly is that cynicism is very "in" right now, to the point where it's annoying. Hence, I suppose, why such posts do well.

[KarlKemp]

It's signaling something, but not virtue: criticism implies expertise. People observe the respect experts get and start imitating the behavior. Since they don't have anything actually insightful to add, they fall back on generic opposition to everything, also called cynicism.

It's cargo-culting for non-(non-?)academia. HN, the world's #1 source of smartitude, may just be its purest crystallization.

[hutzlibu]

"Should we be happy that we're improving, or sad that there's so far to go?"

A hardcore cynic might say, there is no improvement, only change. We might have come so far with some things, but lost or destroyed so many others in exchange.