So if an 1863 traveller spends three months at sea, 0.5% of an expected 50-year lifespan, and a 2006 traveller spends six hours in the air, 0.0008% of an expected 80-year lifespan, it’s all just a mild inconvenience, relatively speaking?
I’d say the range of inaccessable luxuries has shrunk immensely, and often accessable substitutes exist. Relatively few people can afford a Ferarri, but virtually every member of the middle-class can afford a personal car of some sort that will preform the same basic function. Many of the relatively poor can afford a clunker that’ll get them around. Private airplanes are the toys of the wealthy, but commercial air travel is casually available to the middle class, and long-distance bus travel to the poor. Can you suggest a modern luxury that is as unaccessable as, say, clean water to an urban dweller of the ninteenth century?
I think there is, but I’ll settle for “selective anecdotal evidence gathering” aka cherrypicking, in which the brighter points of the past are embraced and the surrounding murk is largely ignored.
I don’t yet see a working definition of “happiness”, so I’m comfortable saying that a decrease in overall misery will allow overall happiness to remain the same or increase.
I only said “Shouldn’t it be our goal to maximize happiness?”
Goal and “purpose” are very different things.
A lot of what you describe has nothing to do with technology or lack thereof, but has to do with a crappy political system.
It is possible to have high technology along with a crappy political system that does not care or protect the weak/young/old.
As I said above, getting raped regularly has nothing to do with technology, so that point is irrelevant.
People to this day get disfigured by disease, and not in small numbers.
As far as starving to death, do you have any figures about how prevalent it was to starve to death in previous times?
Finally, I don’t think this “contentment” concept you are proposing is what people are really after. People are after hapinness (It is “Pursuit of hapinness” after all, not “Persuit of contentment”)
Assume someone is living in conditions with not many material goods, not much food, no air conditioning in the summer, etc, but has friends and is overall feeling happy. Also assume that this person moves to another part of the world where he has a lot of material goods, a lot of food, air conditioning in the summer, etc, but no friends. I think this person would prefer the former setting where he was happier, than the latter setting where he is more “content” with what technology has to offer him.
The OP did not ignore the issue of more suffering in the old days.
I am not focusing on the brighter points, I am just saying that a lot of the darker points might not have seemed so dark to those people.
And nothing I posted shows a “wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition.” (m-w.com), so there is no nostalgia.
You have some good arguments, so why do you cheapen your post by adding this insulting tripe?
One thing that I’d like to point out that is flawed in the argument about travelling from New York to San Francisco is that it’s being treated as though life stops while travelling. Travelling that far on a ship is far less mundane than flying is for many of us. Both are an adventure and an experience, and travelling is always exciting. It’s all part of the experience of one’s life. Perhaps one is happy while out to sea for three months, I am generally happy when I fly. I like travelling and I wouldn’t necessarily mind a life where I was moving all the time, at least for a while.
Contentment or happiness is a state of mind. Possessions do/can NOT bring that with them. They can be, if used properly, and in moderation useful and helpful.
I’ll let the moderators decide if I’ve crossed any lines. You’ve asked several times if people are happier than in the past (while expressing doubts that they are) but you still haven’t defined “happiness”, not even to drag out another dictionary definition. It’s all moot, since technology doesn’t directly affect happiness, but can alleviate misery. If “alleviation of misery” doesn’t allow “increasing of happiness” by your definition, I’d like to know how happiness increases by any means in your world.
Despite claims that you’re not being selective, your question is akin to asking if people are getting smarter, and holding up notable historical geniuses as proof we aren’t. It’s a safe bet that a happy/smart person of 2006 is comparable to a happy/smart person of 1906. We haven’t gotten happier/smarter, but we’re getting better at eliminating the things that were making large segments of our population sad/dumb.
Why not directly compare a person who access to technology and friends with someone who has access to technology and no friends? Why is technology being implied as a causative or correlative factor? You may well compare a right-handed happy person and a left-handed unhappy person and debate the relationship of handedness to happiness.
I perceive dishonesty in your question, unless you’d be just as comfortable contrasting a person with tech and friends (and such people do exist) with a person who has neither (and such people do exist).
As for long sea voyages being an adventure and an experience, I’d say travelling steerage in 1863 is considerably different than a vacation on a Carnival Cruise, in that (among other factors) the latter offers a significantly better chance of surviving the trip.
I agree, and noted that there are new issues that come along with the tech. On average I still think tech makes things easier and saves time. Take your password example. If I lost the password to my bank it would take roughly an hour to get it reset, at least it did the last time I had it reset. If you compare that going to the bank twice a month at a half hour a pop to deposit pay checks it seems clear to me that I end up saving huge amounts of time in the end.
There are other things involved as well. Take the resume example. If someone had it laid out for them in the past it cost some amount of money. I never had one made so I don’t really know the cost but I’ll call it $50 (I googled and found resume services at ~ 295.00, so my guess is probably low). That is two hours work for someone making $50,000 a year. A person reasonably knowledgable with Word could probably pump one out in a half hour or so.
I think that with a lot of tech there is an initial learning curve that eats up some time before you start saving. If you don’t go through the learning you will probably end up losing time.
I know that when I get a new piece of technology my overall happiness doesn’t really go up all that much. If it does, it doesn’t take long for it to reach pre-new toy levels. However I’m not sure I was happier as a child then my neices and nephews. How does one go about measuring relative happiness? Are my ideas of childhood happiness clouded by nostalgia?
In this instance I fail to se the difference. Perhaps you could enlighten us?
Wrong. You cannot separate out the two. It’s all well and good to say that people could have such apolitical system without access to such technology, but my response is simply to ask you to give an example. As the technology available to people increases so do their options, and as a result so do their standards. And conversely those nations that do permit rape, don’t protect the old and so forth are invariably those nations with the lowest technology levels. That is not to say that advanced nations can not go on witch hunts, but such things are transient and aimed at minorities. They have little impact ion the happiness of the population as a whole.
So it’s quite simple, if you believe that it is possible to have a high technology level available to the general population and political system that induces misery, or vice versa, then provide some examples of this. In reality there is a near perfect correlation between level of technology and the tolerance and social conscience of the political system.
Cite!
Seriously, I want a reference that people today get disfigured by disease at anything like the rates that occurred in classical Greece. Remember in those days smallpox was a normal disease, and those who survived were almost always disfigured. And of course if the figures are several orders of magnitude lower as I believe them to be then they are indeed small numbers in the only way that ‘small’ can be judged in this debate.
You are joking right? On the off chance that you aren’t, you can start with this article by Jared Diamond.
Seeing as you have admitted what everybody else here also recognises; that happiness is a state change and ephemeral by its very nature; how exactly do you propose that anyone even achieve lasting happiness, much less support your contention that this is what people are after?
It is indeed the pursuit of happiness, but the point you overlook is that it is the pursuit, not the capture. People need to be free to pursue all sorts of things in a working democracy, even rainbows and happiness.
Then let’s assume I had wings, then I’d be a budgerigar. In this one paragraph you have managed to beg the question and pose a false dilemma. Quite a trick.
It’s obviously begging the question because you posit a situation where someone without technology is happy in reference to an argument seeking to establish that technology makes people happy. IOW you’ve actually used the conclusion as the basis of the argument.
Instead lets assume that a person is happy with no technology, and then his child gets leukaemia. Now how happy will that person be as their child gradually sickens and dies over the next few years? That is fair point for discussion because we know that in this case technology will indeed eliminate unhappiness since prior to requiring technology the person was happy, and if they have access to technology they will return to that state.
It is a false dilemma because you posit a person who is unhappy with technology who becomes unhappy with it. But what about the other 2 possibilities?
· A person who is happy without technology who is happy with it?
· A person who is miserable in both circumstances?
We can achieve nothing by talking about one hypothetical example without some reference to the other 2.
In the real world this line of argument can be debunked quite simply. People in the developed world with access to technology are free to go and live in any number of developing nations any time they wish. Almost any US citizen with a high school can leave right now and go live somewhere with almost no access to technology, and various charity groups will fly them their free of charge. Yet nobody every leaves, and very few even visit. In contrast billions of people from low technology areas would move to the developed world if they could. And almost none of them ever return home due to unhappiness in their new high technology setting.
That’s really all that needs to be said to resolve this issue. People are happier in high technology parts of thew world, to the extent that none who are born their want to leave, and most who aren’t born there want to move there. And you are one of them. Despite your claims that technology doesn’t make you happy you will not move to any nation where technology is not at current US levels. Quite clearly you don’t actually believe that you would be happier with less technology.
I don’t have a definition of “happiness” and I don’t have a theory of how it increases.
I would argue that defining happiness, and then having a quantitative test to determine the level of happiness in society is impossible.
Yes, this is possible.
I did not mean to imply that technology results in a loss of friends (that would be a whole other debate in itself).
Maybe my example was bad, but all I was trying to show was that people do not merely strive to be “content” in life (have their material and physical needs met). People want to be happy, and that is a different state than being “content”.
Not sure how much technology they have, but how about North Korea?
As you know, correlation does not imply causation. These things could have merely evolved side-by-side over the centuries.
In any case, let’s say that it is possible that more technology results in better political systems.
If this is so, then this would definitely be one of the answers to the question in the OP, i.e. “what is the point of inventing more and more stuff?”
I’m not sure what you are trying to show with your cite
So, it seems that going back in time, or having no technology (like the Kalahari bushmen), does not mean that people live brutal, unhappy lives, where they are beaten and raped daily.
Yes, there are times in the past where people had shitty lives, but they were shittier than people in their past with less technology, so we cannot say that less technology automatically implies more misery.
As I said, you need to also live in a not-crappy political system. You claim that more technology causes better political systems, but the link you provided contradicts that. It says that one of the most important inventions/discoveries (i.e. agriculture), resulted in political systems that were very bad for the majority of the people.
I don’t know how one may achieve lasting happiness. As I said in the OP, it would be good if a lot of the brainpower and resources dedicated to making new inventions, is redirected into studying the human animal and finding out what makes us happy. I’m not saying this should be done by law, I’m just saying that it would be good if it happenned.
Did I claim anywhere that people are not free to pursue whatever they wish?
Second, I think that it is possible that some people are in a semi-permanent state of “happy”. That is, they wake up every morning and feel that they are happy. I know such people. This is different than people who feel temporary happiness after buying a new car or getting over a disease, and then go back to their baseline not-happy-not-unhappy state.
So, how can we put more people in that semi-permanent state of happiness?
And this is what is called a ‘strawman’.
I never said I, or anyone else, would be happier if they reduced the level of techology they have access to.
Yes, I am happier. Sorry to burst your bubble but I love technology. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t the end all be all of happiness. However, it does provide its own unique happiness. Combine that with all the other activities that produce happiness for me and what do you get? More happiness.
I love technology too. In fact I’m an engineer in a high-tech company and the more gadgets people buy the better. I just started this thread after comparing myself as a kid to today’s kids and seeing not much difference, even though today’s kids have so much more.
Polerius I think at this point that you need to come straight out and state your position clearly, rather than making vague statements and allusions without actually committing yourself to any poistion at all. All you are doingis tying yourself in knots.
As a perfect example let’s follow through your argument about the time period your are discussing. You started out discussing the last 3 generations in the US and the effect of happiness on technology. When I showed that happiness has been sustained for the last 3 generations because of technology you sought to change the focus to the last 3000 years and encompassing all of Europe and the US. In doing so you made the claim that most Classical Greeks and Romans were fairly happy. When I and others pointed out that these people were under constant threat of starvation and disease you asked for evidence that starvation was the norm. Upon presenting evidence that starvation was the norm for the last 5000 years you now want to extend the discussion back 10, 000 years and encompassing 4 continents to pre-agricultural times.
For the love a’ Mike, just state what your position is, clearly. Having a debate with you is like wrestling with a greased pig. I no longer have any idea what your position is or what you are trying to resolve. If your only position is that some people somewhere on the planet have in the last 10, 000 years have failed to see any increase in happiness as a result of technological change then you are correct. Such a statement so banal and trivial as to be asinine.
I assume you have something more to contribute than this point, but for the life of me I have totally lost track of what it might be.
North Koreans have one of the lowest standards of living in the world. The average person has access to a TV set, IOW 70 year old technology is the cutting edge. There are less technologically advanced place son Erath, mainly in the remote parts of central and northern Africa, but they are also generally worse of than North Korea so the correlation remains.
In short despite your claims that social conscience and life opportunities can be just as high without the otions provided by technology you can’t actually provide any examples to support your claim.
Once more, you have twisted and squirmed so much to avoid being nailed down that I have no idea what point you are now trying to make. You seem to want to look at technology in a vacuum, Your position now seems to depends entirely on a belief that technology is totally isolated from politics, employment, medicine, education, travel, environment and information dissemination. That rathe than being the linked processes that all those things clearly are you want to be able to examine technology as though it is a discrete entity.
You simply an not do that. You might as well be arguing that healthcare hasn’t caused a decrease in sickness and then when someone points out the correlation between healthcare and number of hours/year spent ill saying that those things could have simply evolved side by side and not have been caused by each other. It’s a nonsense position that make sit obviously impossible to resolve anything.
The fact is that societies without technology have invariably been brutal with limited environmental responsibility or sustainablity and heavily restricted social freedoms for the majority. The higher the technology levels the less misery inducement form those forms are found within a society. You can argue all you like that the printing press, travel, education, healthcare and increased living standards have no effect whatsoever on political systems but you will be fighting an uphill battle. Quite obviously technology of that sort does have a heavy influence on political systems. To suggest that they simply happened to evolve alongside major political reforms is so ridiculous that it hardly bears comment.
In any case, let’s say that it is possible that more technology results in better political systems.
If this is so, then this would definitely be one of the answers to the question in the OP, i.e. “what is the point of inventing more and more stuff?”
WTF? You specifically asked for a reference which showed that malnutrition was the norm for agricultural people in Greece. That reference says exactly that. What the hell do you mean you odn;t know what I was trying to show? I was trying to answer your question. Are you now disputing that it says that “. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5’ 9" for men, 5’ 5" for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5’ 3" for men, 5’ for women.”
Seriously, you really need to some out and say exactly what you mean. Do you really want to consider all technology for the last 10, 000 years and then state the banal triviality that some of it has not increased happiness? If that is your only point then of course you are right. That’s true of anything. We could say that having sex doesn’t cause population increase, that antibiotics don’t decrease infection, that wars don’t increase the level of violence or that eating more doesn’t cause weight gain if we are allowed to scour 4 continents and 10, 000 years of history to find counter examples.
Is your only point that sometime somewhere in human history an exception can be found to any virtually universal rule? What a yawn. If that’s your sole point then I can’t see any point in even having this debate.
But if we are allowed to scour 10, 00 years and 4 continents we will be able to find counter examples which prove that this won’t increase happiness either. By such an extreme perfectionist standard nothing will increase happiness, and as such nothing will be a good thing.
I’m no longer sure what you are claiming or have claimed. You are not making yourself at all clear.
I disagree. Can wee some evidence for such a claim please.
I’m sorry, but I no longer no what it is that you are saying. You certainly seemed to be implying that someone would be happier if they reduced the level of technology with that example about someone moving away form their friends. The implication being that if they moved back, and thus reduced the level of technology, they would be happier.
I and others have attacked virtually everything you have said, to the degree that you have said anything that isn’t a bland triviality. You however simply squirm away from every position that is attacked. For example your conclusion that most people in Classical Greece were pretty happy was demolished by at least 2 of us, and you never even acknowledged the point.
Similarly you totally disregarded the point that billions of people want to move to higher technology areas because they believe it will make them happier, and few if any ever find out they were wrong and go back home. And nobody wants to move from a high technology area to a low technology one on the grounds that the cost of living is lower and the lack of technology won’t make them less happy.
This isn’t a trivial point. Quite clearly the vast majority of people on the planet find that technology does indeed make them happy. That seems to resolve th eissue all by itself, unless you wish to contend that those billions of people just believe they are happier with more technology.
Medicine doesn’t count because disease still exists.
Another flaw in Polerius’ premise (in addition to lacking a working definition for “happiness”) is the lack of distinction between personal happiness and general happiness. If I may propose a happiness scale, with 0 being suicidal depression, 50 being contentment and 100 being orgasmic joy; the person scoring 100 in 2006 isn’t any happier than someone scoring 100 in 1906, or 6 BCE. Technology certainly decreases the number of people who score in the 0-25 range, what with curing their ailments, alleviating starvation, keeping half their children from dying, etc. The society’s level of happiness is increasing, even if no individual is setting new happiness records.
And if Polerius is trying to make some other point, it’s completely escaped me.
Yes, and education doesn’t count because ignorance still exists, and travel doesn’t count because agoraphobia still exists and… :rolleyes:
This is where Polerius’ apparent position becomes ludicrous. It seems like he is arguing that if we can find one counterexample anywhere at any time then we can say that education doens’t decrease ignorance, medicine doesn’t decrease disease and so forth.
Of course we all accept that some individuals will be unhappy, ignorant etc. at any given time no matter what steps we take to reduce those things. And similarly some groups somewhere at some time will have seen no reduction in ignorance or disease as a result of healthcare or eductaion. Yet by pointing out a group 10, 000 yeras ago that saw a decrease in one measure of happiness as a result of technological increase Polenius seems to be arguing from exactly this type of perfectionist position.
This is indeed becomiong a major problem, along with lacking any clear position that he is tryiong to support. It makes it impossible to actually resolve anything or apply concrete examples.
I agree entirely. A Calssical Grecian nobleman may well have been deleriously happy much of the time, often because he had the opportunity to hurt others to make himself happy. But Polerius’ claim that the general population wa shappy with disease, malnutrition, infanticide and so forth doesn’t seem to make much sense, unless he is claiming that the peak happiness of the few happiest individuals is al that needs to be considered.
I have to admit that if Polerius is making any point at all, beyond the trivial observation that nothing benefits everybody everywhere all the time, it has completely escaped me. The entire debate seems to have gone form a contention that technology hasn’t incraesed happiness generally to the effect of technology on the happiness of specific individual populations or even specific individuals.
You guys are making this more complex than it really is. In the OP I simply made an observation, and asked the following question
Are people (adults and kids) today happier than they were before?
If not, what is the point of inventing more and more stuff?
Your answer (correct me if I’m wrong) seems to be
More people are happier today than they were in the past, i.e., as Bryan states “The society’s level of happiness is increasing, even if no individual is setting new happiness records”
Moreover, the increase in society’s level of happiness is due to technological advances.
The point of inventing more and more stuff is to increase in society’s level of happiness, even though it most probably won’t make the upper classes any happier.
I think that’s all there is to it. I’m not saying I agree or disagree with you. I have read some very good arguments in this thread and I’m trying to digest it all and form a coherent position on this subject. When I do I’ll come back to this thread and state it.
Now that we have covered the main point, let me nitpick your post a bit
I don’t think you “showed” any such thing.
Your cite privides no “evidence” that starvation was the norm for the last 5000 years.
All it says about the issue is
“farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed”
“Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity”
“Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.”
Starvation may have been the norm for the last 5000 years, but your cite does not show proof of this, only talks about it as a given fact.
Wasn’t the U.S. in 1900 behind today’s North Korea in terms of technology?
And wasn’t the U.S. in 1900 ahead of today’s North Korea in terms of social conscience and life opportunities?
You better watch out, all that straw can be a fire hazard.
No, I did not ask for a cite that malnutrition was the norm. I asked
“As far as starving to death, do you have any figures about how prevalent it was to starve to death in previous times?”
And your cite fails to show how prevalent starving to death was.
The vast majority of people want more money and think it will make them happy. But I think we can agree that money, by itself, does not bring happiness.
So, the fact that the vast majority of people want more technology because they think it will make them happy is no proof that technology makes people happier.
Sorry Polerius but I still can’t see much worthwhile here. I’ll address your last post but your ideas seems so trivial and banal and your willingness to engage actual points is so lacking that I’m fast losing any interest.
To the extent that you never bothered to challenge it, it has been resolved. If you wish to challenge the mundane point that US and world environmental and economic sustainability has been established largely as the of technological progress then by all means do so. But you will be demonstrating such a gross ignorance of things like the progress of ecology the green revolution and so forth you will need to find someone else to debate the point with you. I will have lost all interest if you really don’t know about that stuff.
OH FFS this is now just wilful ignorance. If those people didn’t shrink 6 inches in as a result of malnutrition just as Diamond claims them WTF do you think did it? Were they washed and left out in the sun perhaps?
I don’t know, was it? How would you even seek to do such a comparison. Certainly far more people in the US in 1900 had access to telegraphs and steam trains than current NK citizens. And there is no social underclass in NK that is comparable to the atrocious way Blacks were treated in the US in 1900. And NK has full employment, no robber barons and do forth. If you wish to assert that technology is higher or social conscience lower higher then show us how you reached such a conclusion. Until then it’s a meaningless attempt to compare apples and wheelbarrows.
Sigh, it’s not a strawman because it wasn’t a parady of your position. What it was was a criticism that one of the things your thesis predicts doesn’t happen. As I said, your inability to engage crucial points is irritating and not worth it for the actual novelty value of your idea.
Sigh, once again this fantasy that we can separate technology from politics, economics and so forth. The vast majority find that living in technologically advanced societies makes them happier, to the point that they strive to bring their family and friends to live their as well. If that is in large part because of economic opportunities created by technology then that in itself is a result if technology.
And no, money by itself won’t make anyone happy. But we know damn well that living in grinding poverty makes people miserable. Once more this same old fatal flaw in your position, that you can ignore the abject misery of the majority caused by poverty and continue to argue that happiness as a whole doesn’t increase with increased money. This is absolute piffle.
The fact that people say they are happier, want to bring their friends and families to high technology areas because they believe they will be happier there is proof that it makes people happier. Except in triviality land where we separate out medicine, and politics, and economics and sustainability from ‘technology’ because quite clearly those things do increase happiness and our position would be provably nonsense if we incorporated them.
Anyway I suspect that’s it form me. To little substance, certainty or originality, to much twisting and squirming and vagueness and restatement of the bloody obvious.
I don’t get it. If this is not worthwhile, if it is trivial and banal, and you are losing interest, why do you bother posting and mentioning that it is not worthwhile, it is trivial and banal, and you are losing interest, instead of simply not posting? Do you get a satisfaction from pointing out that you are losing interest?
Talk about willful ignorance. As I stated above, and you chose to ignore it once again, I did not ask for a cite that malnutrition was the norm. I asked
“As far as starving to death, do you have any figures about how prevalent it was to starve to death in previous times?”
You did not provide this information. You can scream that people shrank 6 inches all you want but that does not answer the question your cite was in response to, namely “how prevalent it was to starve to death in previous times?”
