Kids these days

[gfish]

1) There is a natural cognitive bias, the older one gets, to see society as going downhill.

2) I have been increasingly worried about social trends for several years now.

It's getting very hard to write off my worries as just being a symptom of #1. All the antisocial behavior we kept excusing as something "just on the internet" has been leaking more and more into the physical world. We all spend all our time in an environment where the only response to the most hideous of attacks is just "oh, ignore it, it's not serious". Of course empathy is becoming increasingly unfashionable! Even traffic is getting more aggressive, with people breaking the speed limit much more consistently and to greater average degrees it seems. But obviously it's hard to trust those observations.

Is there an intellectually rigorous method for resolving this dilemma?

Comments

[tylik.livejournal.com]

Huh. There is also a natural cognitive bias towards being more optimistic as one gets older. And happier. (IIRC, the general happiness nadir is around 46. This doesn't actually match with my experience, which has been of greater happiness over the last decade or so...* But that makes me personally very optimistic for that very limited sphere. Which is awesome, because, ah, challenges, they are aplenty.)

I think one thing that might be useful is to read up on some of the traditional measures of social well being, and see how they are going, both in the US, worldwide, and then in other developed countries that might serve as a reasonable baseline for expectations for the US. At the same time, formalize what kind of social trends you find worrying, and start compiling some kind of list of metrics (or proxy metrics) by which to measure them - likely from more than one source. A lot of data is freely available online.

Then you should make pretty graphs and publish them online so I, um, so everyone can see them. I mean, it would be cool to see how everything actually stacks up - I'm always a little afraid of falling into one of those traps where everyone knows that violent crime is on the rise! (I try to fall back on real numbers, but I'm not always rigorous enough to make sure I'm getting the right ones when I'm only following something casually.

Tee-hee. I just thought of a horrible metaphor based in worm locomotion of cultural advancement via peristalsis, wherein there periods where there's great polarization are almost a given and part of the process. (It's really pretty dreadful, and I put no faith in it at all.)

Ahem. Where that came from is that there's been so much going on that seems so useful, if mostly in the urban oases. I think about how quickly transgender issues have moved forward. I think about the move towards anti-harassment policies at conventions.** Hell, it's a little hard to say it since we seem to be on the verge of losing it, but I think about my sister having health insurance for the first time in her adult life.

And I think about all the horrible stuff that has been going on, and continues to go on but at least is getting talked about, even if it upsets the hell out of a lot of people that it's getting talked about. Some of the crazy racist sexist neo-Nazi stuff is because people are feeling empowered to say this shit in public - but I think a lot of it is the opposite, and is because they're feeling threatened. (I don't think this is optimism. I mean, some of it is stuff like knowing my baby brother. And some of it is looking the economics of a "real America" that is supposed to be built on white people in small towns and rural areas - as if only white people live in these areas - and not the people in the cities who actually make all the money. At the same time as I really wonder if some of the forces holding the urban concentrations together are starting to fray.)

* And here we shall all not discuss how well that maps to me, oh, moving to the house barge...
** Okay, electing a serial harasser as a president is a pretty major backlash.