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by mckirk
1456 days ago
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The thing I don't like about these 'well people have been complaining about this forever' arguments is that, it's entirely possible to have a) people pointing at an issue for a long time and b) still have that issue get progressively, objectively worse over time. There's that example of people pointing out smartphones might be bad for children, then someone counters with 'well thirty years ago people complained about children reading too much instead of playing outside', with the implication being: adults of all ages will find some fault with newer generations, and not to worry so much. But just because it is true that adults will probably always worry about 'new, evil things' corrupting the youth, this does not mean that the 'new, evil things' aren't getting _objectively more dangerous_ over time. Today adults would be happy if children still had the attention span and motivation necessary to read a book. They'd be happy if they themselves still had it, actually. Graphing the progress of a sinking ship and pointing out that the downwards gradient has been stable for a while now and we should therefore be okay is generally not a useful extrapolation, I would say. |
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I like this analogy. I've had similar thoughts for a while too. Granted I also saw some research that society has been objectively getting better in a lot of areas people think is getting worse (like violence, specifically police abuse) compared to the past. theoretically this is because we have a lot more information now than before, so smaller occurrences are generating a larger impression.
that said, I still very much agree with your point and that it is very applicable to specific individualized issues. Saying that people have been concerned for a while and nothing bad has happened yet is accurate for the situation where nothing bad will happen, AND the situation that it was bad then and is worse now, AND the situation where we are approaching a tipping point / threshold where the bad will start.