The general mechanism for dating 200 yers ago was arranged marriage. It not always was forced, you could refuse in really uncomfortable cases, but social pressure was immensive and if you was, like, peasant, you considered your comfortable survival much before your personal feelings. Yep, it probably didn’t feel like optimization number-crunching, but this was because all optimization was from outside—people who didn’t follow the custom simply died.
And I don’t even talk about nice family optimization task “You are peasant in Russia in 19th century, and it’s famine outside, you should choose what child you are going to stop feeding, because it’s less condemnable practice than abortion”. Or “You are peasant in Russia in 19th century, and it’s famine outside, so you need to choose which child to kick out of the house for them to become factory workers (if they are lucky) or beggars or thieves or prostitutes (child prostitution in Russian Empire was not uncommon)”.
Same with kings and warlords of the past, I expect that they had more freedom of choice
You enemies could be less tactically skilled, but your mistakes killed you in the same amount.
Were people forced to go to war (as an obvious optimal strategy), or did nationalism and concepts like honor and bravery motivate people
If you were medieval peasant, you basically didn’t have money to have weapon and armor and you mostly didn’t have any choice other than suffer the consequences of war. If you were somewhat richer and lived somewhat later, you could go to be mercenary, because war was rare profitable enterprise before capitalism. And if you lived in era of nation states, you usually was drafted in army and had choice between prison/katorga/execution on spot and going to war because your government told you so.
I picture here too dark image of the past, and I need to say that even in this conditions people could find multiple cracks in social order and widen them if they were lucky and creative, and modern times have much more space for such cracks.
Yes, I agree that we lost some freedoms—we have closed borders between nation states and inscrutable bureaucracy and electronic surveillance and schools are like prisons (but less so than in times when corporeal punishment was widespread) and our status games are absolutely fucked up and heterodoxy in academia is somewhat strained and there are authoritarian states but this seems to be so much more of skill issue than soul-crushing indifference of the universe in the past.
Am I correct that you consider the past worse because people suffered more in the past? That’s not the metric I focus on. I’m not speaking against either suffering nor your dislike of it, both of these are human things. My problem with mathematical optimization is that it seems to overwrite what’s human with something inhuman. The modern world primarily seems moral because it’s profitable to pretend to be moral. A charity is more likely to donate 10% of its profits and re-invest 90% into marketing itself than it is to donate 90% of its profits to those who need it.
The past certainly was harsher, but it felt more… Human. If the king pressured you in the past, the kings personal values and quirks would have had an influence. The modern society seems far more soulless. If people treat you poorly now it’s mainly because doing so seems profitable to them, and not because they hate you. Considered aesthetically, human suffering still has meaning, whereas determinism forced by mathematical optimization does not. I do not wish to minimize suffering, not even my own. It’s part of life. But I cannot accept a reduction in life, even though a reduction of suffering follows. Life is more important. Whoever disagrees with this is not healthy (as their own existence isn’t the priority)
From my observation, most people, yourself included, believe something like this: The world was awful 200 years ago compared to now, and the more modern a country is, the better the standards of living. Thus, the world is better now and those who idolize the past have something seriously wrong with them. But hear me out, this kind of thinking doesn’t seem to be based on facts, but by naive preferences that we consider good, but which may actually harm us. The reduction of suffering is a poor optimization target. I’d suggest “health” if I still had some faith that society knew what this word meant (they seem to think that zoo animals are healthier than those in the wild)
How does the rate of mental illness correlate with modernity? Does Africa have terrible mental health whereas the modern society has the best mental health humanity has achieved so far? Doesn’t seem like it to me. Here’s a graph on anxiety, it seems to suggest that lower-middle-income countries have better mental health than high-income countries: https://assets.ourworldindata.org/grapher/exports/anxiety-disorders-prevalence-males-vs-females.svg
I don’t think we have statistics for the mental health for the 1800s and 1900s, but I think the numbers were better than you’d expect them to be. I can’t prove that we have less freedom of choice today, but they basically had no surveillance, no log files, no CCTVs, no modern tech, etc. Even if other people ruled over you, monitoring you closely wasn’t worth the resources. I think there has been a strong decrease in meaning and human agency, and that this has had profound negative effects. The death of god can still be overcome as long as valence (hedonic tone) and human experience isn’t dominated by objective metrics in the evaluation of future actions/paths. Being rather intelligent (and autistic to boot), I inadvertently disillusion myself, but the problem is getting bad enough that more people are noticing it. People want to be deceived, but even career-actors like salesmen and politicians are repulsively fake. Other intoxicants (like video games) are popular, but with the recent injection of real-life politics into various artforms, they’re no longer an escape.
Let me try to summarize the conclusion: Subjective metrics and human choice is being killed by ‘objective’ metrics, and the world is increasingly disillusioned. This is partly due to science particially replacing religion as the highest, and because the world is so transparent information-wise that optimal choices become visible, which puts great pressure on people to adopt meta-strategies. The negative psychological effects are many, including nihilism and the feeling of “not living fully” (since agency appears to be a core psychological need). The world is increasingly moloch-ian and due to the “objectivity” of metrices like profits, and society teaching us that subjectivity is bad, humans even replace their own preferences with what’s hostile to their own humanity. (and overcoming nihilism requires believing in what’s subjective rather than seeking external validation)
By the way, have you ever read about the rat utopia experiments? (keyword ‘behavioral sink’)
You have really weird beliefs about the past.
The general mechanism for dating 200 yers ago was arranged marriage. It not always was forced, you could refuse in really uncomfortable cases, but social pressure was immensive and if you was, like, peasant, you considered your comfortable survival much before your personal feelings. Yep, it probably didn’t feel like optimization number-crunching, but this was because all optimization was from outside—people who didn’t follow the custom simply died.
And I don’t even talk about nice family optimization task “You are peasant in Russia in 19th century, and it’s famine outside, you should choose what child you are going to stop feeding, because it’s less condemnable practice than abortion”. Or “You are peasant in Russia in 19th century, and it’s famine outside, so you need to choose which child to kick out of the house for them to become factory workers (if they are lucky) or beggars or thieves or prostitutes (child prostitution in Russian Empire was not uncommon)”.
You enemies could be less tactically skilled, but your mistakes killed you in the same amount.
If you were medieval peasant, you basically didn’t have money to have weapon and armor and you mostly didn’t have any choice other than suffer the consequences of war. If you were somewhat richer and lived somewhat later, you could go to be mercenary, because war was rare profitable enterprise before capitalism. And if you lived in era of nation states, you usually was drafted in army and had choice between prison/katorga/execution on spot and going to war because your government told you so.
I picture here too dark image of the past, and I need to say that even in this conditions people could find multiple cracks in social order and widen them if they were lucky and creative, and modern times have much more space for such cracks.
Yes, I agree that we lost some freedoms—we have closed borders between nation states and inscrutable bureaucracy and electronic surveillance and schools are like prisons (but less so than in times when corporeal punishment was widespread) and our status games are absolutely fucked up and heterodoxy in academia is somewhat strained and there are authoritarian states but this seems to be so much more of skill issue than soul-crushing indifference of the universe in the past.
Am I correct that you consider the past worse because people suffered more in the past? That’s not the metric I focus on. I’m not speaking against either suffering nor your dislike of it, both of these are human things. My problem with mathematical optimization is that it seems to overwrite what’s human with something inhuman. The modern world primarily seems moral because it’s profitable to pretend to be moral. A charity is more likely to donate 10% of its profits and re-invest 90% into marketing itself than it is to donate 90% of its profits to those who need it.
The past certainly was harsher, but it felt more… Human. If the king pressured you in the past, the kings personal values and quirks would have had an influence. The modern society seems far more soulless. If people treat you poorly now it’s mainly because doing so seems profitable to them, and not because they hate you. Considered aesthetically, human suffering still has meaning, whereas determinism forced by mathematical optimization does not. I do not wish to minimize suffering, not even my own. It’s part of life. But I cannot accept a reduction in life, even though a reduction of suffering follows. Life is more important. Whoever disagrees with this is not healthy (as their own existence isn’t the priority)
From my observation, most people, yourself included, believe something like this:
The world was awful 200 years ago compared to now, and the more modern a country is, the better the standards of living. Thus, the world is better now and those who idolize the past have something seriously wrong with them. But hear me out, this kind of thinking doesn’t seem to be based on facts, but by naive preferences that we consider good, but which may actually harm us. The reduction of suffering is a poor optimization target. I’d suggest “health” if I still had some faith that society knew what this word meant (they seem to think that zoo animals are healthier than those in the wild)
How does the rate of mental illness correlate with modernity? Does Africa have terrible mental health whereas the modern society has the best mental health humanity has achieved so far? Doesn’t seem like it to me.
Here’s a graph on anxiety, it seems to suggest that lower-middle-income countries have better mental health than high-income countries:
https://assets.ourworldindata.org/grapher/exports/anxiety-disorders-prevalence-males-vs-females.svg
I don’t think we have statistics for the mental health for the 1800s and 1900s, but I think the numbers were better than you’d expect them to be.
I can’t prove that we have less freedom of choice today, but they basically had no surveillance, no log files, no CCTVs, no modern tech, etc. Even if other people ruled over you, monitoring you closely wasn’t worth the resources. I think there has been a strong decrease in meaning and human agency, and that this has had profound negative effects. The death of god can still be overcome as long as valence (hedonic tone) and human experience isn’t dominated by objective metrics in the evaluation of future actions/paths. Being rather intelligent (and autistic to boot), I inadvertently disillusion myself, but the problem is getting bad enough that more people are noticing it. People want to be deceived, but even career-actors like salesmen and politicians are repulsively fake. Other intoxicants (like video games) are popular, but with the recent injection of real-life politics into various artforms, they’re no longer an escape.
Let me try to summarize the conclusion: Subjective metrics and human choice is being killed by ‘objective’ metrics, and the world is increasingly disillusioned. This is partly due to science particially replacing religion as the highest, and because the world is so transparent information-wise that optimal choices become visible, which puts great pressure on people to adopt meta-strategies. The negative psychological effects are many, including nihilism and the feeling of “not living fully” (since agency appears to be a core psychological need). The world is increasingly moloch-ian and due to the “objectivity” of metrices like profits, and society teaching us that subjectivity is bad, humans even replace their own preferences with what’s hostile to their own humanity. (and overcoming nihilism requires believing in what’s subjective rather than seeking external validation)
By the way, have you ever read about the rat utopia experiments? (keyword ‘behavioral sink’)