For basically everyone of an age to being reading HN, we've essentially never known anything other than technology (and life in general) improving over time, often exponentially.
If you've never seen this talk by Jonathan Blow, he's makes a rather compelling argument that we don't necessarily have any reason to believe this will continue:
How about this. Tonight, when I want to watch a program on BBC Iplayer, I need to switch on the kindle fire stick, wait for it to load, find the iplayer app and wait for 30 seconds until it loads, search for a channel, with each character I type taking 0.5 seconds to show up on the screen (no kidding), select the channel and wait 10 seconds for it to buffer.
When I was a kid, I just used to press one button on the front of the tv and it was on in less than a second.
Not sure what my point is really but there’s something not quite right with this situation. Technology has improved choice but made the experience awful.
I have to wait many seconds for the "entertainment system" computer in my car to boot in order to simply hear the radio. And when I tune to a different station, it's a touchscreen with UP and DN buttons that I have to tap on to tune ±0.2 MHz, and it takes takes maybe 750ms to lock on to the station. Think about how absurd this is! Compared to my first car made in the early 80s where the radio started as soon as you turned the key, and you had an analog dial that panned through the spectrum instantly with the sound continuously playing.
The first telly I remember was b/w and had three channels and belonged to a neighbour. Provided the dog hadn't recently wazzed on the rubber plant that supported the aerial, in which case ITV was optional and then we only had BBC One and Two.
However, old school CRT screens could handle pans and zooms that my modern LG thing can only dream of. Then again the thing I'm watching now is comparatively huge and "waffer theeeen". A ~50" CRT would stick out from the wall about four feet and weigh enough that I'd be using some of the more robust Civil Engineering things I learned at college to fix it to the wall.
When I was a child it took a while to tune a TV by hand, channel by channel. Remember portables with the little aerials on the end of a wire? Then finding out that to watch the rugby today involved perching the TV on a chair near a window and the aerial held by long suffering (someone) holding it at a strange angle near the ceiling. You missed half the match faffing around.
My laptop runs Arch - that's far more friendly than anything I used in the '70s-'00s. I recall getting an Epsom FX80 dot matrix printer connected to our C-64 was quite traumatic and involved getting a Centronics (parallel) interface card made up and stuff. I still have the C-64 and it now has a USB interface.
Now I press the home button and pick a service on my TV. OK on my TV that isn't one of my RPi driven monsters that uses the MythTV backend. I have an Octo-LNB on my sat dish ...
(Sorry about this (twitch) but it's iPlayer and you were a child, not a kid)
> My laptop runs Arch - that's far more friendly than anything I used in the '70s-'00s.
Not to be too much of a Linux-using stereotype, but it really does seem like the things that have been getting better are those things that are made (usually for free) for users for the benefit of themselves and other users, and not by profit-seeking corporations as closed-source software.
The few exceptions to that rule are those areas that are heavily dependent on technological improvements, e.g. music production, gaming, media editing. But that's just because there are still huge profit-wins to be had just by improving the quality of what the user receives. There's no reason to think wins like that won't dry up.
Nah I was a kid and we had a colour tv. Your setup sounds very impressive but you’re not the average viewer, and it’s the average viewer that has an old fire stick like mine that takes 30s to load the iplayer app.
I assume you’re in the UK if you’re using iPlayer.
Why not just use Freeview? It’s not quite as fast as analogue TV because it has to acquire and decode the digital signal, but apart from that it’s just as convenient, the quality is better and there are many more channels.
I can walk over to my TV, it takes a second or two to start up. Maybe another second or two to open an app. And then I can watch any one of tens of thousands of shows.
Yes, when I was kid the TV turned on almost instantly but then I was stuck watching whatever minimal content was broadcasted. Can't even pause it!
I have the same argument with Jonathan Blow's talk -- he talks about how complex things are now compared to the past but the past was so much less capable. Yes, you can write an OS in 3 weeks as long as it doesn't do very much.
If we don't have choice, we manufacture happiness. Something we predict will be somehow worse than "real" happiness, but studies show it's not worse. If we have choice, we predict we will be more happy, but studies show we aren't.
It seems like all of those other steps allow you more flexibility to do a bunch of stuff you probably couldn't do as a kid, such as watch BBC from any country in the world, or watch something from the BBC that came on earlier, or to pause the BBC so you can get some chips from the pantry.
Every once in a while, Netflix will take like 15s to load. But before I cuss out my XBox One, I do try to remember that as a kid I was happy downloading one picture off a 300BPS modem in like 10 minutes from a BBS (which sometimes took 30 minutes to finally get into) back when I was kid.
The cool thing is that while it's not easy, there's probably never been an easier time to make good stuff. There's a lot of opportunity out there to make better experiences.
My android box running pirated streaming and torrent services (or even IPTV occasionally when I want to watch “TV”) seems to work 100x better than your proprietary tech. Plus it runs Prime and Netflix just fine...
My $50 Chromecast is still the best thing around for watching movies or streams off my computer. Kodi works but it takes set up times which I don’t like investing.
Sounds like you either just have low end tech or bad gov run software services.
And I’m not running anything fancy just your typical Android SoC with a decent remote with a keyboard on the back, which I bought for <$100 max off Amazon.
I'm not sure I'd use the term "improving" but would instead say "changing." The perception of those changes has certainly been weighted towards "improvement" but some of that perception is a hangover from the popular mid-century views that most people held regarding science and technology (others held such views prior to that time but I wouldn't say they were the majority).
By "things" it seems you ignore the key bit of the parent I was replying to... namely "technology," especially within the confines of the main article which focused on UX.
Specifically I used the word "changing" rather than "improving" because within the tech world (and to a degree the larger world of product) there is a long history of new and novel equating to better, hence the tired ad slogan "new and improved!" That emphasis on newness as desirable is a result of the many measurable improvements that did result from the rapid pace of innovation that occurred in the 19th and 20th century, improvements that were obviously perceptible in that they resulted in large leaps forward vs incrementally over long time periods.
Also, to claim that there has been improvements for large-scale populations via some new thing is nowhere close to being sufficient to explain how that new thing is an improvement for the individual customer.
Which one should I read first? I read Taleb's critique, who comes off as a raving lunatic in this context, and Gladwell who must have some axe to grind since he doesn't actually address the concrete metrics that Pinker brings up.
Lower childhood mortality, less poverty, longer life expectancy, less violent crime, less disease, more equality, less war. Things are getting better, along almost every metric we can think of. It's not just "different". It's also not just Pinker's work confirming that, OurWorldInData is good on this topic too.
The only sensible argument I've heard to the contrary is that our systemic tail risks have gotten bigger. Which is accurate but doesn't change the fact that things are much better for almost everyone presuming that such risks can be mitigated.
Jason Hinkel's article raises some good points but is hardly a valid rebuttal. It's extremely weak. I'm still firmly on the side of Pinker's narrative, which clearly fits the data far better.
(1) Hinkel falsely concludes that "The poverty rate has worsened dramatically since 1981", using a graph of the number of people in poverty (which increases by ~31% between 1981 to 2013) as justification. The rate did not increase. The ratedecreased according to his own graph! The population increased by 59% over that same time period, so the correct conclusion from his own data is that the poverty rate actually reduced over that same time period.
(2) Not only is poverty better, but almost every other meaningful metric (disease/mortality/war deaths/crime deaths) is also better, which he hand-waves away in a single paragraph after falsely asserting that the poverty rate has gone up!
It is borderline dishonest, or perhaps at best he is innumerate. If this is the best rebuttal then I am even more confident in the conclusion that things are getting better - MUCH better - aside from a number of existential tail risks that we need to mitigate.
Excluding China, the graph in [1] shows ~3pp decrease in poverty over 30 years, and a good portion of that time was above the starting point so it might just be random fluctuation.
Also,
> only 5% of new income from global growth goes to the poorest 60% of humanity – people living on less than $7.40/day.
Excluding China is motivated reasoning - and even doing so still shows the opposite conclusion to the one he's clearly desperate to validate. What if I excluded Venezuela or North Korea in order to boost the conclusion that I've decided on a priori?
He explains why it makes sense to handle China differently -- basically because China hasn't applied the policies that Pinker advocates, so it shouldn't be used as evidence for them. China's policies have been very different. He should treat other countries the same way, as you suggest, though China's impact is likely larger than the others.
This is motivated reasoning on his part. If the question at hand is "is the world getting better?", then excluding China makes no sense in the pursuit of answering that question.
It's also ridiculous for him to say that China doesn't use policies that Pinker advocates for. That's absolutist and binary thinking. Pinker would advocate for the open market liberalising policies of Deng Xiaoping relative to Maoist economic authoritarianism, which helped to lift millions out of poverty in China, even though there's still a lot that he doesn't agree with China's system.
If Pinker doesn't like Putin's strongman behavior in the region should he exclude Russia from his statistics on improving world peace? If Pinker doesn't like the US healthcare system should he exclude the US from his statistics on childhood mortality?
This is a dishonest rhetorical strategy that Hinkel is employing. It's clear to me now that Hinkel is a bad faith salesman who has set out to demonstrate his hypothesis at all costs.
If the question is "is the world getting better?" then yes, treat everything the same. But that question isn't as useful as others that could be asked, such as "which policies make the world get better?"
Hinkel's argument is that Pinker uses "is the world getting better?" as a proxy for "are my preferred policies making the world better?". If policy evaluation is their goal, the ad-hoc exclusion of China is overly simplistic, but so is drawing policy conclusions from overall trends without examining what's driving the trends. Both Pinker and Hinkel should be measuring the degree to which various policies were applied and evaluate poverty-reduction against that quantity.
I'm sure you can think of other dimensions in which things are worse than they used to be. (Not being snarky, I just think things are usually more complicated.)
In decade 1 as the author describes it, there was still patience of investors that there ROI would come, and AI/data wasn’t feasible enough, so good UX was the name of the game. Think of carts that needed to be 1 click affairs.
When I did my training in advertising, the first line uttered by my teacher was “We are learning you to lie here” , and indeed the rest of the course was about how to deceive the customer by pushing the right buttons.
That’s the state of affairs of most of the commercial web. And I think you are right it won’t change.
If you've never seen this talk by Jonathan Blow, he's makes a rather compelling argument that we don't necessarily have any reason to believe this will continue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko