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Comment by garbagetime | Hacker News Reader

Good list IMO

>To keep young kids behaving on a car road trip, have a bag of their favorite candy and throw a piece out the window each time they misbehave

WTF

>You cant reason someone out of a notion that they didn’t reason themselves into.

You definitely can if they're the right kind of person.

>When someone tells you about the peak year of human history, the period of time when things were good before things went downhill, it will always be the years of when they were 10 years old — which is the peak of any human’s existence.

I believe he's showing his age with this one. I doubt many people born after 1999 believe that to be true.

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> I believe he's showing his age with this one. I doubt many people born after 1999 believe that to be true.

I think it's you that are showing your age :)

Presumably you were 10 in 1999.... and it's all downhill from there.

Hah! It's actually my 23rd birthday today. I've talked to a quite a few people about this and most seem to think we've been going downhill since at least the early 1990's. Some would point back as far as the 60's.

I picked 1999 since I don't think I've ever talked to someone who chose a later date than that.

Of course, people from 2nd world and 3rd world countries likely have different views.

Downhill in what sense? Downhill implies there’s some goal or ideal to strive for, but what exactly is that? Do you believe that this downhill is irreversible, or just another bump?

Lots of people take negative views on today, but it’s hard to reason about until you can nail down exactly what “good” is and why.

That question (i.e. exactly what ought we value) isn't difficult to answer. It is impossible to answer. So I don't let it get in my way.

I disagree with your second paragraph. Each person has some idea of what he values, and some idea of whether things have improved with respect to those values, a comprehensive survey of people on this matter would be somewhat accurate IMO.

I was 10 in 1998. Even though it coincides with exactly what he says, I’d claim those next few years were the end of some threshold of the “before times”. It’s not like I’ll make some vague social argument like “you used to know dinner was on the table”. Global politics changed intensely. Internet and smartphones just exploded, seriously changing the day-to-day lives of so many people. Think about a world where if 100 people knew what you did yesterday you were a celebrity.

> Think about a world where if 100 people knew what you did yesterday you were a celebrity

I think you’re off by some orders of magnitude, but I understand the sentiment. I was a lot older in 1998. I can tell you that people have not changed since then even if the technology has (enabling voices to be heard that previously weren’t)

Of course there are exceptions, like non-celebrities are in the news. I mean like if 10,000 people knew where you just had dinner, it’s cause you were in a tabloid.

Funnily I was only 8 but still see 1998 as "peak human history".

French people will obviously understand why.

After that the next bit thing happened in September three years later. And, yes, it went downward from there.

lol I have accepted this phenomenon, when people reminiscence about simpler times

I’m like “what year was that” and look up the headlines and geopolitical issues of that time

Turn off the news if you want it to seem like a simpler time

Any time I imagine that some past decade must have been simpler times, I think about it a little bit more and realize that it was the height of the cold war, or people were suffering from some disease that now has proper treatment, or it took months to travel to the other side of a continent.

or you are, do, or participate in something marginalized in that time

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