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by eropple
849 days ago
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> So one thing you could say is, well, every generation says that there were less strikeouts in third day. But there's actually data on this and..... it's true! Almost every decade, from the 1800s through every decade of the 1900s through now, strikeouts really have been going up year to year. And so that intergenerational commentary, well, it's describing a real thing that really is happening. I agree with the factual observations in your post, but there's an additional bit here, and that there's qualitative value being assigned to what The Youths don't mind and The Olds protest. In baseball, the guys who strike out a lot but hit a ton of home runs create more runs, and therefore create more wins, than most base-hit machines (obvious outliers exist, but you get the idea). On my computer, VS Code does more things that benefit me than vim does (and the outlier here, I guess, would be "a lovingly crafted vim monstrosity that uses all the LSPs etc. designed for VS Code et al in the first place"--doable but not the happy path, etc.). There's also (and IMO this is more in code than baseball) some kind of bizarre moral valence assigned, and that I don't even pretend to understand, but that's a different story. |
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A few things here. I want the main center of gravity in the point that I'm making to be a way of approaching intergenerational reports of a given phenomenon, namely that they shouldn't just be dismissed as a function of old age or a function of changing perspective. After that point, pretty much any point you want to make is fair game as far as I'm concerned. In the case of baseball, there are positives and negatives. It clearly seems to be a positive trade-off for hitters who are choosing which style to take. I suppose there's another consideration at a higher level as to whether it benefits the game itself. So that can go either way in my opinion depending on what's important.
I tried at the end to throw in some other examples, shortening of attention spans, and environmental degradation. I think in those cases it's clear that there's something negative going on. But in general we don't have to agree with the value judgment if it's negative, but I think the positive or negative value judgments is an independent thing from the phenomenon of multiple generations attesting to some thing happening.