You wrote: 'That’s why this “hazy” idea of decline is so dangerous.'
But if, as you show, this idea has been pervasive throughout history, how dangerous can it really be?
Or do you think we might actually be in decline *now* because the hazy idea of decline is more pervasive and more consequential than it was in the past? I.e., have you been caught up in the same tendency for which your article should be a remedy, only at more of a meta level?
No matter how you answer, it was an enjoyable and insightful read, as usual.
In the paper we found pretty good evidence that the perception of moral decline has been stable for the past ~70 years, so I don't think we're in a unique moment on that front anyway. I think of this more as providing consistently fertile ground for the authoritarian and terrorist types who use "things are getting worse fast, something drastic must be done!" as a rallying cry, and that's why it's dangerous.
Not to catastophisize on the 'Do Not Catastrophisize' post but yeah, the sense of doom is more pervasive thanks to 24 hour news cycles and social media algorithms that reward outrage.
If you think Taylor Swift was expensive, wait til you see what Ticketmaster is asking for tickets to see the Celestial Apocalyptic Ska Band. Nobody can afford them. The apocalypse is canceled.
But seriously this was a great essay. I remember reading a Steven Pinker book that was mostly underwhelming except for the first part where he itemized the many ways things are getting better, not worse. The fact that so many refuse to see it has real implications, as we've seen.
This is a good point. The fact that people refuse to believe it when things are objectively getting better makes it all the more likely that they will want to overthrow the current world and make it worse.
As always, a great read! Just a thought—given our natural tendency to focus on the negative, wouldn’t it make sense to cultivate a strong bias toward optimism instead?
People love Black Mirror because it taps into our instinct to dwell on the negative. But I often think we need to balance that perspective with a White Mirror lens.
There’s plenty of data showing that, despite the negative narratives we encounter daily, the world is actually improving in many ways: https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth
this is very resonant to me: "I love humans because, God bless us, if you find one of us believing something, you can find someone else who believes the exact opposite of that thing, and with equal fierceness."
and this paragraph is particularly delightful: "“Happiness is all gone,” says the Prophecy of Neferty, an Egyptian papyrus from roughly 4000 years ago. “Kindness has vanished and rudeness has descended upon everyone,” agrees Dialogue of a Man with His Spirit, written at around the same time. “It is not like last year […] There is no person free from wrong, and everyone alike is doing it,” says the appropriately-named Complaints of Khakheperraseneb from several hundred years later. And some unknown amount of time after that, the Admonitions of Ipuwer reports that actually things just started going to hell. “All is ruin! Indeed, laughter is perished and no longer made.”"
Man, that good/bad cup analogy is impressive! It makes me think of memory as a sieve bowl that lets bad experiences escape in and out easily but fails to function as such over time.
> This was exactly what it was like to study people’s perception of moral decline. I was basically asking people, “Hey, I’ve spent the past three years working on this question, but could you answer it in .4 seconds?” And their answer was “Sure can.”
Same thing happens in my studies of perceptions of privacy: I'm talking to people about it, and so many of them, who openly admit they hadn't given the idea more than a skerrick of thought, had extremely strongly held views which failed to account for even the slightest or most obvious complexity. Makes it really hard to study.
Excellent piece. Is there any way to stem the human impulse to think that everything is always declining without turning into "coffee was fine!" morons?
I think you can do this by adjusting your priors the same way you would when you approach the scientific literature. The literature on "things are getting worse" has a lot of publication bias, p-hacking, and most often doesn't have any data at all. You should therefore be pretty skeptical of any claim you see––it might be right, but it's coming from a genre with a pretty bad track record, so it has a lot of debt to pay off.
The literature on "things are getting better!" is more often tainted by a conflict of interest––sometimes they're saying that because they want you to buy something.
I am frustrated whenever I read an essay or article (old or new), and it says "especially now". One of my problems of course, what were people scared of in 18$7? I don't know!
I suspect what you're describing is just an innate survival reaction that humans haven't fully grown out of.
After all it makes sense to think humans hardwired for doom and gloom when early humans were particularly vulnerable to any number of threatening weather events and dangerous predators.
Thus when people today panic it seems to harken back to our original response to natural environment.
I think your conclusion is mostly wrong. Let's take something we all agree is negative: infants being murdered. Is this natural? Well, maybe - infanticide is something that occurs to widely varying extents in almost every human and animal culture across history.
But it's also horrific and awful and we should work hard to stop it, and people who are fixated on it (provided that leads to them doing actually useful things in that direction) are good people.
Now, if someone is relentlessly pessimistic to the point it makes them less productive in improving the world, they're probably pretty psychologically unhealthy. If nothing else, nobody wanting to talk to you means they're much less likely to want to work with you to fix the problem, and that is entirely natural and normal. But "negativity bias is natural because I came up with a superficially plausible evolutionary argument as to why it has some advantage, therefore people who are negative are correct, actually" is a really flawed position.
That was my interpretation of where you said that the expectation that we should not be negative is unreasonable. If I misinterpreted I apologise and would appreciate a clarification
My takeaway is that it's not reasonable to think that people who are predisposed to thinking that life is getting worse can magically have their disposition changed just merely by being “optimistic.”
That doesn't mean people shouldn't change if they frequently experience damaging emotions, but it does mean that the folk remedy of merely pledging to be more upbeat and encouraging is likely inadequate for deeper seated reasons than what I initially thought.
Yes. In the original moral decline paper, we found this perception in every single country that had ever been surveyed about it, nearly 60 countries in all. Ethnographers have also noted "golden age" myths across many different cultures, in which there's some idea that humankind used to exist in some better state, but exist in a worse state now. Here are all of the ones I've found: Barundi, Azande, Luo, Sherpa, Kerala, Ifugao, Karen, Southern Toraja, Nuxalk, Hidatsa, Hopi, Aranda, Trobriands, Samoans, Shipibo
Um, no. Talk about attention bias, the entire slant of this article is one gigantic pro-Western attention bias.
You won't find any talk about "the end is nigh" or "the Apocalypse is coming" in Asia or in Africa amongst non-monotheists. Nor did a single one of those people that Columbus met ascribe to anything like that way back in 1492 (before he raped and enslaved them, of course).
Why not? Because the REAL cause of "the end is nigh" beliefs stem from two causes: 1) a world-view where you get just one life (i.e. no reincarnation) and/or 2) living in densely crowded, static population centers (aka "cities") where, um, yeah life really always IS getting worse.
Sumerians bitched about life sucking, too, and for good reason (hence stories like the lost "Garden of Eden" which others coopted).
That metric about being "lifted out of poverty" is a total scam because it assumes that adopting a modern lifestyle of a non-nomadic existence of being crammed into an urban environment along with a greater focus on material objects (aka getting wealthier) is a net "good."
Ask those newly lifted-out-of-poverty folks in 20 years how they like it, and they'll be full of laments about how they used to have it good but didn't realize/appreciate it until it was gone. But hey, they got the internet now, so WINNER.
But if you belong to a community, can go where you want, and believe that this lifetime is just one of many and that you'll always be part of the greater environment in some kind of way, um, not so much gloom and doom, the end is nigh kinda thinking.
Um, no. African, Native American and Eastern and Pacific Mythologies are perpetuating the cyclic end of the world. So, the version there is more like "The world (as we know it) is ending right now and there's a new governance to come that will last several tens of thousands of years when everything will end... again...".
The main stance however has the same connotations: "All the signs show that the good guy [put here good spirit or deity of your chosing] is being replaced by a titanic asshole [chose a demon or bad spirit], who is going to fuck up everything for us, but no worries it will all end again after some 50 000 years or so." 🤷🏽
> In memory, the negativity of bad stuff fades faster than the positivity of good stuff. There’s a good reason for this: when bad things happen, we try to rationalize them, reframe, distance, explain them away, etc., all things that sap the badness.
The just world fallacy you described is something we have to combat to make progress.
Fun read. I sat here with my window open and nursed on some tea while reading along. Imagining the smell of a newspaper and it's paper crinkling softly under my fingers.
Optimism is all we have that is certain. History will always be the product of our upbringing and cultures. With the joining of the worlds views (internet) we find ourselves overwhelmed and either closing ourselves off or opening ourselves up to new ideas. We are in a massive land rush of inspiration and knowing.
We also exist in a world where the swords and shields became LLM bots and corporate growth of the very few. All tools for potential good but as we learned from history. There will always be the one child to find terror in the promise of a peaceful future and they will fight it until they control it.
We are growing as a species at an alarming rate and our planet is suffocating... until we can push an idea that doesn't poison the water. We have nothing to show of ourselves other than greed and a concerning lack of empathy. The apocalypse and it's children will always tout their sins as the fairest to reach the corners of their perceived land ownership. Does that make them correct? Let's ask again in two-hundred years when we are all still around and are still balancing culture with nature.
Lord willing. If it ends, it ends. Build for a brighter finish, not a dimmer collapse. Cheers.
You wrote: 'That’s why this “hazy” idea of decline is so dangerous.'
But if, as you show, this idea has been pervasive throughout history, how dangerous can it really be?
Or do you think we might actually be in decline *now* because the hazy idea of decline is more pervasive and more consequential than it was in the past? I.e., have you been caught up in the same tendency for which your article should be a remedy, only at more of a meta level?
No matter how you answer, it was an enjoyable and insightful read, as usual.
In the paper we found pretty good evidence that the perception of moral decline has been stable for the past ~70 years, so I don't think we're in a unique moment on that front anyway. I think of this more as providing consistently fertile ground for the authoritarian and terrorist types who use "things are getting worse fast, something drastic must be done!" as a rallying cry, and that's why it's dangerous.
Not to catastophisize on the 'Do Not Catastrophisize' post but yeah, the sense of doom is more pervasive thanks to 24 hour news cycles and social media algorithms that reward outrage.
If you think Taylor Swift was expensive, wait til you see what Ticketmaster is asking for tickets to see the Celestial Apocalyptic Ska Band. Nobody can afford them. The apocalypse is canceled.
But seriously this was a great essay. I remember reading a Steven Pinker book that was mostly underwhelming except for the first part where he itemized the many ways things are getting better, not worse. The fact that so many refuse to see it has real implications, as we've seen.
This is a good point. The fact that people refuse to believe it when things are objectively getting better makes it all the more likely that they will want to overthrow the current world and make it worse.
Brilliant! That candles be brought indeed!
You had me at “well-nosed soul”
As always, a great read! Just a thought—given our natural tendency to focus on the negative, wouldn’t it make sense to cultivate a strong bias toward optimism instead?
People love Black Mirror because it taps into our instinct to dwell on the negative. But I often think we need to balance that perspective with a White Mirror lens.
There’s plenty of data showing that, despite the negative narratives we encounter daily, the world is actually improving in many ways: https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth
I like the way Max Roser puts it: "The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better." https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better
I’m all for this right now. I’m currently thinking of it as hope hunting and holding.
Love the idea of ‘White Mirror’ too
dear adam,
fantastic piece as always!
this is very resonant to me: "I love humans because, God bless us, if you find one of us believing something, you can find someone else who believes the exact opposite of that thing, and with equal fierceness."
and this paragraph is particularly delightful: "“Happiness is all gone,” says the Prophecy of Neferty, an Egyptian papyrus from roughly 4000 years ago. “Kindness has vanished and rudeness has descended upon everyone,” agrees Dialogue of a Man with His Spirit, written at around the same time. “It is not like last year […] There is no person free from wrong, and everyone alike is doing it,” says the appropriately-named Complaints of Khakheperraseneb from several hundred years later. And some unknown amount of time after that, the Admonitions of Ipuwer reports that actually things just started going to hell. “All is ruin! Indeed, laughter is perished and no longer made.”"
thank you for sharing as always!
love
myq
Man, that good/bad cup analogy is impressive! It makes me think of memory as a sieve bowl that lets bad experiences escape in and out easily but fails to function as such over time.
This is the content I needed this morning, as well as being well-written and funny. Thanks. Candles it is, then. Let's goooo.
> This was exactly what it was like to study people’s perception of moral decline. I was basically asking people, “Hey, I’ve spent the past three years working on this question, but could you answer it in .4 seconds?” And their answer was “Sure can.”
Same thing happens in my studies of perceptions of privacy: I'm talking to people about it, and so many of them, who openly admit they hadn't given the idea more than a skerrick of thought, had extremely strongly held views which failed to account for even the slightest or most obvious complexity. Makes it really hard to study.
Excellent piece. Is there any way to stem the human impulse to think that everything is always declining without turning into "coffee was fine!" morons?
I think you can do this by adjusting your priors the same way you would when you approach the scientific literature. The literature on "things are getting worse" has a lot of publication bias, p-hacking, and most often doesn't have any data at all. You should therefore be pretty skeptical of any claim you see––it might be right, but it's coming from a genre with a pretty bad track record, so it has a lot of debt to pay off.
The literature on "things are getting better!" is more often tainted by a conflict of interest––sometimes they're saying that because they want you to buy something.
I am frustrated whenever I read an essay or article (old or new), and it says "especially now". One of my problems of course, what were people scared of in 18$7? I don't know!
Now more than ever, especially right now, when things are more than ever!
I suspect what you're describing is just an innate survival reaction that humans haven't fully grown out of.
After all it makes sense to think humans hardwired for doom and gloom when early humans were particularly vulnerable to any number of threatening weather events and dangerous predators.
Thus when people today panic it seems to harken back to our original response to natural environment.
I agree, I think the negativity bias has an evolutionary basis
Your short response has actually lead me to a solid insight — namely that what is now considered negative is innate and natural.
The expectation, then, that we should just choose to “not be negative” is unreasonable for the aforementioned reason
I think your conclusion is mostly wrong. Let's take something we all agree is negative: infants being murdered. Is this natural? Well, maybe - infanticide is something that occurs to widely varying extents in almost every human and animal culture across history.
But it's also horrific and awful and we should work hard to stop it, and people who are fixated on it (provided that leads to them doing actually useful things in that direction) are good people.
Now, if someone is relentlessly pessimistic to the point it makes them less productive in improving the world, they're probably pretty psychologically unhealthy. If nothing else, nobody wanting to talk to you means they're much less likely to want to work with you to fix the problem, and that is entirely natural and normal. But "negativity bias is natural because I came up with a superficially plausible evolutionary argument as to why it has some advantage, therefore people who are negative are correct, actually" is a really flawed position.
Where did the text you've quoted come from?
I didn't say anything was correct.
That was my interpretation of where you said that the expectation that we should not be negative is unreasonable. If I misinterpreted I apologise and would appreciate a clarification
My takeaway is that it's not reasonable to think that people who are predisposed to thinking that life is getting worse can magically have their disposition changed just merely by being “optimistic.”
That doesn't mean people shouldn't change if they frequently experience damaging emotions, but it does mean that the folk remedy of merely pledging to be more upbeat and encouraging is likely inadequate for deeper seated reasons than what I initially thought.
Question: do we find this tendency in non western or pre colonial societies too? Eg indigenous traditions.
Um, she has a whole section on Ancient Egypt.
True, although Egypt was also a big empire. I wonder if this is true for civilizations that were not hierarchical.
Yes. In the original moral decline paper, we found this perception in every single country that had ever been surveyed about it, nearly 60 countries in all. Ethnographers have also noted "golden age" myths across many different cultures, in which there's some idea that humankind used to exist in some better state, but exist in a worse state now. Here are all of the ones I've found: Barundi, Azande, Luo, Sherpa, Kerala, Ifugao, Karen, Southern Toraja, Nuxalk, Hidatsa, Hopi, Aranda, Trobriands, Samoans, Shipibo
Thank you very much for the thorough reply!
Um, no. Talk about attention bias, the entire slant of this article is one gigantic pro-Western attention bias.
You won't find any talk about "the end is nigh" or "the Apocalypse is coming" in Asia or in Africa amongst non-monotheists. Nor did a single one of those people that Columbus met ascribe to anything like that way back in 1492 (before he raped and enslaved them, of course).
Why not? Because the REAL cause of "the end is nigh" beliefs stem from two causes: 1) a world-view where you get just one life (i.e. no reincarnation) and/or 2) living in densely crowded, static population centers (aka "cities") where, um, yeah life really always IS getting worse.
Sumerians bitched about life sucking, too, and for good reason (hence stories like the lost "Garden of Eden" which others coopted).
That metric about being "lifted out of poverty" is a total scam because it assumes that adopting a modern lifestyle of a non-nomadic existence of being crammed into an urban environment along with a greater focus on material objects (aka getting wealthier) is a net "good."
Ask those newly lifted-out-of-poverty folks in 20 years how they like it, and they'll be full of laments about how they used to have it good but didn't realize/appreciate it until it was gone. But hey, they got the internet now, so WINNER.
But if you belong to a community, can go where you want, and believe that this lifetime is just one of many and that you'll always be part of the greater environment in some kind of way, um, not so much gloom and doom, the end is nigh kinda thinking.
Um, no. African, Native American and Eastern and Pacific Mythologies are perpetuating the cyclic end of the world. So, the version there is more like "The world (as we know it) is ending right now and there's a new governance to come that will last several tens of thousands of years when everything will end... again...".
The main stance however has the same connotations: "All the signs show that the good guy [put here good spirit or deity of your chosing] is being replaced by a titanic asshole [chose a demon or bad spirit], who is going to fuck up everything for us, but no worries it will all end again after some 50 000 years or so." 🤷🏽
> In memory, the negativity of bad stuff fades faster than the positivity of good stuff. There’s a good reason for this: when bad things happen, we try to rationalize them, reframe, distance, explain them away, etc., all things that sap the badness.
The just world fallacy you described is something we have to combat to make progress.
Fun read. I sat here with my window open and nursed on some tea while reading along. Imagining the smell of a newspaper and it's paper crinkling softly under my fingers.
Optimism is all we have that is certain. History will always be the product of our upbringing and cultures. With the joining of the worlds views (internet) we find ourselves overwhelmed and either closing ourselves off or opening ourselves up to new ideas. We are in a massive land rush of inspiration and knowing.
We also exist in a world where the swords and shields became LLM bots and corporate growth of the very few. All tools for potential good but as we learned from history. There will always be the one child to find terror in the promise of a peaceful future and they will fight it until they control it.
We are growing as a species at an alarming rate and our planet is suffocating... until we can push an idea that doesn't poison the water. We have nothing to show of ourselves other than greed and a concerning lack of empathy. The apocalypse and it's children will always tout their sins as the fairest to reach the corners of their perceived land ownership. Does that make them correct? Let's ask again in two-hundred years when we are all still around and are still balancing culture with nature.
Lord willing. If it ends, it ends. Build for a brighter finish, not a dimmer collapse. Cheers.