“7. The cumulative escalation in pollution causes a dramatic increase in cancer, which overwhelms the ill-prepared health system.”
That’s the one that stands out as an unambiguous miss. The rest of the predictions were either spot-on (Russia), or predicted too large of a change or effect (COVID, by about an order of magnitude).
I don't think this was specified as happening by 2022?
(1) seems pretty close to cold though - if Russia hadn't acted up it might be.
(3) sure, but it does seem to me that every now and then new things to siphon off get found.
(4) there have been a few issues that have been dangerous, remember these are potential scenario spoilers, so not supposed to happen but could happen and thus stop the scenario of ongoing progress.
I give them credit for 3 and 9. I also think 1, 5, and 8 are possibly on the horizon but it could go either way. So I don't think it's far off at all, although not on the money either.
I agree 3 was in place in 1997 but the extent or permanence wasn't known. I think "that threatens Europe" is key. In 1997 I'd say it wasn't clear how long the corruption would last, and I don't think most people saw it as threatening Europe (or the US really).
9 is debatable but I think it's clear that we had a worldwide pandemic with significant economic, public health, and political implications. I think they were basically correct in this, even if the details aren't right.
1 hasn't occurred but I think there has been a sharp turn in Chinese-Western political relations in the last couple of years, accompanied by a change in Chinese internal politics. Where it goes is uncertain I think; I think they could end up being right.
5 will always be ambiguous because of "attribution to climate change", so even if it did happen there would be controversy about it. However, we are having inflation, and people are predicting a major food crisis this year; part of this is due to geopolitics and war, but some of it (my understanding) is lack of yield due to climate issues. I wouldn't say 5 is "yes" but it's somewhat debatable and clearly still a possibility.
8 isn't so far off. We have had energy crises in some places, and in many ways, are having one. You're right that alternative energy is in a strong place right now but it's not actually enough to nullify petrocrises at the moment. Given that people are predicting grid failures in the US, and most of the Western world still relies heavily on petrol, I think this is still very possible.
But a world that struggles to acknowledge the death toll from covid or climate change unsurprisingly may also simply ignore the death toll from pollution as well, until the system collapses due to failing to address any issues at all.
While I'm worried about PFAS and microplastics in general, I'm not sure that the "ill-prepared" part will happen as a) it was stressed-tested by COVID and b) there are now research that tracks what's happening now and c) bacteria and fungi has evolved to break down plastics (whether this is a good or bad thing is up to debate). I'm more worried with anti-microbial resistance, considering the still-unfettered access to powerful antibiotics in developing countries (usually for veterinary and agricultural use but some as OTC) to be honest.
Cancer statistics may be pretty flat, but go spend a week breathing the air pollution in new delhi, lahore, dhaka, Beijing, etc and tell me that a huge number of people aren't suffering from it.
The prediction was "a dramatic increase in cancer, which overwhelms the ill-prepared health system". The fact that pollution hasn't gone away is obviously bad for those impacted by it, but doesn't make the prediction any more accurate.
Reading that today, at the moment when Ukraine is at war with Russia, when post-Brexit EU internally struggles to present a unified front and when global food supply seems to have become a subject to a gamble, it may seem that parts of those predictions look accurate.
But, on the other hand isn’t it “just more of the same” of what was going on in 1997, be it turned up a notch? I’m too young to remember, but I feel the world hasn’t changed fundamentally after 1997 (though the local perception may have been different due to events like 9/11 etc.). See what’s trending now, extrapolate, amplify?
> isn’t it “just more of the same” of what was going on in 1997
Yes. That's what I thought when I read it.
And not so turned up, actually. Bird flu was '97. Russia was "embracing capitalism" in the form of a kleptocracy. There was impending climate catastrophe. China was clearly an economic juggernaut and there would be future tensions with the US because of that. We'd been proclaiming peak oil for years by then. New tech never lives up to its hype.
The crime/terrorism one seems like a near miss to me. On terror, they couldn't have guessed the response to 9/11, though domestic terrorism was already on the rise by then. On crime more generally, rates over all are lower now.
And I have no idea what stopping progress, "dead in its tracks" or not, even means. But it sounds very Wired.
I disagree. As someone born in the early seventies I was already an adult in 1997. The problems did exist back then but the scale of them was different and hence was the focus and so the mood of the population not just in America but in places like Eastern Europe, Asia and hell, even the Middle East was that of unbridled optimism.
Sure, Africa was a mess and South America wasn't a lot of fun but the mood after the end of the cold War was jubilant to the level I don't recall before or since. It culminated in the dotcom mania of 1999. But somehow it all made sense. We all read Kurzweil and believed it.
I bemoan young people who never got to experience this brief and obviously misguided period of euphoria but it was so much fun while it lasted :)
“Alternative energy sources fail to materialize.” I wonder how likely this seemed back then? Today generation seems like it could be covered by renewables and even further grown/expanded without much debate. The questions shifted to storage and generally “the will to do”.
I wonder whether to complain about those colors or be thankful. Looking at that combination seems to make me so much more appreciative of everything else after looking at it.
History has shown that nuclear is politically brittle. It has to come from the top, with government support. And with left-leaning parties opposed on environmental boogeymen grounds, and right-leaning parties uninterested because it competes with their god-given oil money, you’re left with a very tough political knife’s edge to walk on.
And so solar, wind, and hydroelectric need to bring the future.
Oh hey have you seen that environmental groups financed by oil money are against power lines to connect the eastern seaboard with the Quebec grid composed of 98% hydroelectric power?
Eh. That kind of highlights for me how “odd” it is that converting things to electric feels very new, but could probably have been developed out much more much earlier.
Why? Multiple studies have concluded that renewables can power 100% of grids, and they seem to be scaling from a manufacturing and installation basis much faster than nuclear.
What? The nuclear buildout in the US that started in the 1960s collapsed in the 1970s. The oil shock and energy crisis led to changes, like reduction in growth in electricity demand and widespread introduction of cogeneration (due to PURPA) that ruined the market for nuclear power plants here. It didn't help that the costs in that first buildout had been way over what was promised.
Just outright cancelling their breeder program sure sounds like wavering to me. What that action implies is that France doesn't consider it likely that nuclear will grow enough soon to require breeder reactors to be built, which means they think that nuclear is not going to be what solves the CO2 problem (which would globally require so many reactors that burner reactors alone would exhaust economically available uranium in less than a decade.)
Not if you discount hydro electric. We have to store the wind and solar and then be able to use it. We have the water pump idea where they pump the energy into water that is released at night in Virginia. We hear of melted salts as a means to create steam after dark.
Nuclear is really our only viable solution to get rid of carbon based energy, but that ship has sailed in most of Europe and no one is ready to finance a new plant in NA.
> some things, like terrorism, loomed much larger then than they do today
I'm not sure about that. The article is from 1997, after the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, but before the bombing of the USS Cole (2000) or, especially, the destruction of the World Trade Center and the partial destruction of the U.S. Pentagon (2001).
Seeing 200M as an upper bound and that the current excess deaths are around 21M from COVID, the prediction is "only" off by 1 order of magnitude. At most.
Having read Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague in the 1990s, a pandemic was the most obvious prediction possible. Only timing is the hard part. We got rather lucky that our research on SARS-CoV-1 was available in advance, along with the new development of lipids for mRNA vaccines. Without that, 1% death rate was certainly possible with COVID, if not the 2.5% predicted in the article. Which is still much better than historical pandemics like plague and smallpox in the New World.
Though, uh, maybe all that research made pandemic possible in the first place. Anyway a miss by one order of magnitude on a virus that does exponential growth is really good but obvious prediction. Public policy should definitely plan to deal with outbreaks on this scale of death.
I don’t know why we’re all saying “a miss by (just) one order of magnitude” makes it a good or close prediction. After all, a guess of 200 million deaths is just as close to “excess Covid deaths” (one order of magnitude, but in the other direction) as it is to complete human extinction
The "catch on like wildfire" part was true though. One moment you hear about it on the news, the next (the next weeks) half your family gets it - talking about Omicron in this case. Thankfully very low lethality.
I don't think so. Monkeypox can get pretty nasty/dirty and you can be left with scars for life. In don't think people will definitely get it. Especially because it's actually possible to avoid it unlike covid which we'll all get sooner or later (and more than once in most cases)
Not trolling, genuine question: I saw something that said that they had found the first case of human-to-human infection of monkeypox. If it doesn't normally spread that way, how is it spreading? Or was that just the first confirmed case of what everybody knew was going on?
Most human cases of monkeypox are acquired from an infected animal, though the route of transmission remains unknown. The virus is thought to enter the body through broken skin, the respiratory tract, or the mucous membranes of the eyes, nose, or mouth. Once a human is infected, transmission to other humans is common, with family members and hospital staff at particularly high risk of infection.
No. 3 on Russia and its threat is almost accurate down to the word. If you replace “quasicommunist” with “authoritarian dictatorship” (not a stretch) it represents the world as we know it.
I'm pretty amazed they called Russia. It wasn't clear to me at that time that Russia would become an out and out gangster state, even if the economy had turned into an oligarchy by then. It wasn't until some years after Putin came to power, when it became clear he really was a gangster running a country.
Number 10 to me is one that hasn't quite come true but is looking on the horizon. Automation and global trade are the golden goose that has brought us enormous prosperity. We've failed to distribute the spoils in a way that makes even feel the progress. Especially in the developed countries the lower and middle class haven't been taken part in the more recent growth that's mostly been benefitting the mega wealthy and the extremely poor globally who've been lifted out of abject poverty. I think average people on developed countries would soon benefit again as a global equilibrium will be reached. However, I'm concerned that the backslash is growing to the point where we'll end up killing the golden goose. Nationalist, authoritarian movements seem to be rising and so are insane conspiracy theories.
1. While there is tension, the consequences of a hot conflict between such economically intertwined behemoths will make Russia/Ukraine conflict seem like knocking over wood blocks in the playground. Neither country is willing to gut their standard of living (at the moment).
2. If you interpret this as a dig at blockchain tech, it makes some sense. But there have absolutely been leaps and bounds made elsewhere. Renewables and medical treatments just to name a couple.
3. Pretty much unchanged since the Cold War, except much more openly hostile and desperate to keep its dwindling sphere of influence now.
5. Well, there is still 75+ years to go, so this may very well happen in a few decades.
6. Crime and terrorism? No. Corporate grift and hostility towards customers who can't defend themselves. Squeezing both workers and customers towards unrealistic short term goals. General diminishment of trust.
7. Fairly wrong, but the effects of microplastics could be just as negative
8. Fairly wrong again, shift to renewables is humming along.
9. COVID was controlled fairly well, despite massive media outcries about forced lockdowns and masks and whatever else.
How has progress been stopped dead in its tracks by wokeism? The social/cultural backlash clearly refers to a backlash against technological progress. If anything one could make an argument that the current anti-vax/anti-science elements pervading society would fit the description should their views gain more traction.
> How has progress been stopped dead in its tracks by wokeism?
I think its hard to make the argument that technical progress has stopped, but to some extent the woke ideologues do introduce friction to technical progress.
Here’s one simple example: before wokeism took root in corporations, the ideal that most wanted to strive towards was something like a color-blind meritocracy. Today, the prevailing idea in hiring/promoting in many corporations isn’t “is this person the absolute best scientist/engineer/inventor that we can get” it’s “does this person have the right identity?”. It’s not hard to imagine that some technical progress is being left on the table by the focus on identity and not on merit.
> If anything one could make an argument that the current anti-vax/anti-science elements pervading society would fit the description should their views gain more traction.
Deciding whether to take a medication is not the domain of science: that’s a risk-management decision. The well of discourse has been poisoned by the repeated false claim that not finding enough benefit in a particular medication is anti-science. Science can’t and doesn’t command anybody to take any medication, it just gives you tools to understand the possible risks and benefits. People can reasonably disagree that the risks aren’t worth the benefits, even if you personally disagree.
That's very subjective. Some would say wokeism threatens progress, others say anti-wokeism ghreatens progress because wokeism IS progress. Anti-science is just saying that the other side disagreees with some science that is incovnvenient to them (both sides). I would say they didn't get that one right. They didn't predict today's divisiveness.
> How has progress been stopped dead in its tracks by wokeism?
It hasn’t taken full effect yet but it has definitely bent the arc of progress toward a lower angle. The extremely harsh imposition of woke views has impacted my own enjoyment of the tech industry, my ability to raise money (I stopped attending a popular Bay Area seed capital meet up because several people repeatedly commented about my white skin color and other details of my background, and due to the terms and conditions of another I never bothered to attend.). I had to leave one company because of its extreme discriminatory positions, and I’ve repeatedly heard moderate amounts of discrimination at several other companies.
There are plenty of doctors and scientists who have given up on or reduced their activity in their field due to similar issues, unfortunately I don’t have time to link all this at the moment.
Also all the ideological statements people need to make to become professors etc I suspect are influencing people away from academia and so academia becomes more about advocacy than research.
It’s a miracle that we’re continuing to progress, but it would’ve been even better I suspect if we hadn’t had all these hindrances.
Also think about all the men who are crushed in biased divorce outcomes, which is tangentially related to the woke issue, and influences their productive activities. It’s all sort of related to the oppressor oppressed narrative.
There's a fundamental problem, that we're all having a tough time navigating. That is-- various subgroups have a much lower rate of participation in advanced sectors of the economy. Some of this is almost certainly related to discrimination and lingering aftereffects of past discrimination.
* Naively picking who appears most capable, especially based on metrics that are strongly influenced by class, may instead just be perpetuating these biases. Further, people who have had fewer resources dedicated to their development may have more opportunity for growth.
* Conversely, trying to spread things out for equality-of-outcome and completely ignoring many measurements of ability is likely to be problematic, too, by not getting the strongest people in seats.
In the end, allowing the entire pool of the population meaningful economic and cultural participation can be expected to bend up the arc of progress, but it is hard to figure out how to get there.
> Some of this is almost certainly related to discrimination and lingering aftereffects of past discrimination.
Certainly possible. I think the divide between right and left on this issue is in their perception of how much this is the case. I’d be in favor of rigorous research on this topic.
My own experience in the tech industry at many companies leads me to believe that if there is discrimination, it must be either historical or occurring earlier in the pipeline than tech company hiring. It’s been fairly consistent in my experience for thumbs to be put on the scales rather heavily to hire from historically disadvantaged groups, and clear bold statements have been made to exclude majority populations from interview pipelines that would be recognized as howling racism and sexism if applied to any other group.
> Naively picking who appears most capable, especially based on metrics that are strongly influenced by class, may instead just be perpetuating these biases.
It seems to me that we’re currently getting the worst of all possible worlds. The way we’re influencing the interview pipeline excludes low income people from the majority demographics and assists high income people from non majority demographics, with the overall effect of selecting for class above all else.
I say all this as a kind person who wishes well for everyone and wants everyone to have the opportunity to self actualize to the best of their ability.
> I’d be in favor of rigorous research on this topic.
There's a lot of pretty high quality research. Unfortunately, it can only tell you about things that are correlated, but it can't establish causation. You can only run observational trials of various kinds-- case control studies, looking at time series data, etc.
> My own experience in the tech industry at many companies leads me to believe that if there is discrimination, it must be either historical or occurring earlier in the pipeline than tech company hiring.
OK-- and if there's some 25 year old who has faced discrimination "earlier in the pipeline"-- what is the proper redress? If candidate A measures 90% as good as candidate B, but candidate B had a much easier road to get to this point, which candidate has more potential?
I'm a teacher and I see it "earlier in the pipeline". By middle school, a whole bunch of kids have figured out that typical engineers don't look like them, and they should maybe consider doing something else-- irrespective of class. Some of my highest performers have been in these groups.
> with the overall effect of selecting for class above all else.
I don't think this is very true of most interventions. But it's true that it's true to some extent for some.
These last few years have been the easiest times to get a job, or get funding, in the tech industry, in 20 years.
And white and Asian males remain significantly advantaged over any other group, although the other groups don't seem to be as disadvantaged as they were 20 years ago.
If that is not your experience, we must live in different worlds. Mine is SF/SV, with offices in other large cities in the US.
If you submit identical software engineer resumes, one with a typically white male name and one with a typically white female name, do you think one will get more interview opportunities?
That seems like something that could be experimentally tested.
My guess is the women's resume will get more interviews because tech companies really want to hire women software engineers.
The study you're mentioning has been done many times. The studies do tend to find that females do slightly better, but trivially so compared to the difference between typically white and black names.
The thing that this study found was that not only do blacks receive many fewer callbacks at baseline... they found that blacks' prospects improved less than whites' do when additional qualifications are added. That is, if you're black, you start as a disadvantage and you benefit less from efforts to improve your employability.
> Or, that the best thing to improve your employability is adopting a typically white female name?
- I don't think that would actually work that well.
- Suggesting people should reasonably pretend to be white to get employment basically concedes that the game is broken, and it's kind of offensive to boot.
- While women may get (barely) more callbacks, I think we have filters earlier in life that make them less likely to end up with tech work; and we have filters later in life that tend to lower their economic compensation.
Duh? Why do you think immigrants to Anglo countries named Giovanni or Juan or Janek, have, since forever, changed their names to John?
> While women may get (barely) more callbacks, I think we have filters earlier in life that make them less likely to end up with tech work
Which suggests the optimal strategy is to either be a girl with a very enthusiastic tech parent who helps you overpower those toxic feminine norms. Or to be raised as a boy and then transition to a woman when you start working?
I want an egalitarian society. Because it opens opportunity to everyone, it should be the way to make the most value for the world. But it is hard for everyone to simultaneously agree not to profit and exploit based on superficial genetic and life histories that are clearly outside of individual control.
Can we wake up enough to see each other as equals?
I know what you are saying. Can it be expressed in an inclusive way? I mean that whatever woke you're talking about is still sleepwalking. And you want to explain this to others without sounding like you also are asleep or fixated on your own immutable personal situation. Perhaps I'm not making sense, but it's a try.
What happens when party A wants this, and plays the game accordingly, while parties B, C, D, E, and F say they want it but don’t follow the same rules?
To be honest, it takes a lot of effort. It’s a daily struggle. I have people who depend on me so I do my best to keep going, but I would rather do something else. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be able to keep working in this industry under these conditions.
I know you’re being sarcastic, but I’m a real person too, with my own wish to live a happy life.
I have a hard time understanding how some people care so deeply for certain groups but then seem to have no empathy at all for others. I would’ve thought kindness would apply universally, but I suppose there are plenty of examples in history that show that isn’t necessarily the case.
I don't know your situation. I personally feel I've been given a lot of advantages that other people didn't get. And yet, I'm not a billionaire. It's easy for me to set unreachable standards for myself, and feel ashamed about not meeting them. A book called "Daring Greatly" by Brene Brown helped me understand some of this. I was pretty pissed off and generally drinking too much. Anyway, It sounds like you're having a hard time continuing. I'd encourage you to give the book a read if my situation feels anything like your own.
You can earn a lot of respect by accepting people on their terms. People get defensive when you start attacking the words they use and disputing the life they’re telling you that they lived. It cuts both ways at that point and people quickly retreat to their corners.
You don’t have to treat them as anything other than fellow human beings and ends unto themselves. Every person out there has always used language a little differently from you, has grown up in a different place and circumstance, and generally arrived at the shared present a different way than you. The trick is to agree to treat people like people and that you’re there to be an additive good and not a detractor.
I am a white male in the tech industry and this is ridiculous. We have every advantage. And you're out here complaining about the tiny advantage we are giving to the disadvantaged, like you should also take that from them to get that advantage for yourself on top of everything else.
People of other races often are not believed to be competent. I have personally been in situations where I got contracts because the employer did not believe the other person could do it based on race.
This is not even talking about the generational stolen wealth gap. Right now there are many, many racist people in positions of power that make investing and hiring decisions based on race. You have to bury your head in the sand to not see how many racists have come out of the shadows in the last 6 years. They were there the whole time, making decisions based on race.
Update: This seems limited to the idea that some female founders are sexually harassed when fundraising. That’s terrible, but I don’t think this article alone is sufficient to justify saying that “we have all the advantages”. That’s one issue out of potentially many factors of advantage and disadvantage that might each lean in the direction of a different group on average.
> You have to bury your head in the sand to not see how many racists have come out of the shadows in the last 6 years. They were there the whole time, making decisions based on race.
If you’re willing to provide another link, I am unfortunately not aware of this either, not even rumors of it, so I don’t know where to begin to look. Unless you’re talking about anti-majority racism, in which case I’ve seen tons of it firsthand.
When sheriff arpaio outright refused to stop using his police department to racially profile, to the point he was convicted in court, Trump pardoned him. It goes all the way to the top.
No. 10 is: A social and cultural backlash stops progress dead in its tracks.
Projecting this forward 25 years, and knowing that WIRED is a progressive publication itself, I was seeing this as a prediction that wokeism itself would be stopped in its tracks by cultural backlash. So far as I can tell, that has not yet happened.
While I usually cringe over popular media wokeism, your point of View is very one sided.
You neglect to account the exploitative over representation for the most extreme views which is driven by cynical profit oriented mentality of media moguls. You forget the technooptimists that created this attention economy. And the politicians agressively leaning in the strife and societal tensions caused by the above.
Blaming critical theory without considering these is pretty shallow....
Nope, it isn't shallow but it is not the only reason for the societal upheaval of the last decade (nor did I state it was). Have you actually looked at what happens when critical theory-derived practice (or 'praxis' as it is usually called in the terminology around CT) is put in place in a field? Given that the intent is to deconstruct existing structures in preparation for 'a better future' it should no come as any surprise that that is just what it does. Polarised corporate media, 'Big Tech' with its poisonous algorithm-driven 'social' products and vacuous entertainment all play a role but the main difference between these and the CT-derived mayhem I described is that the latter is ideologically driven where the former are just in it for the money. If the media thought they could make more money by going full John Wayne and grandma and apple pie they would. Not so for those who are ideologically driven, here the destabilisation and deconstruction are actually the intended results.
Those are really broad conclusions. Do you have numbers/facts/studies to back them up? It's my gut feeling as well, but gut feelings and personal anecdotes have no place in rational debates.
There is plenty of proof to be found, from the lowering of standards in education which focuses on 'other ways of knowing' and 'lived experience', eschewing 'facts' for 'cultural knowledge', closing schools for high-performing students because these either have too many Asian and white students or not enough 'students of colour', the removal of standardised tests because these are supposedly 'racist', the implementation of race-based grading to create 'equity' through the Smithsonian claiming that 'rational thinking and hard work are White values'.
Here's a few articles to plough through for more information on the detrimental effects of critical theory praxis:
Most of these deal with education in one way or another since that is the main avenue for critical theory-derived ideologies to enter society. For more pointers towards the detrimental effects of other 'critical' theories like 'queer theory' [1] you'll find a good start in the New Discourses 'Translations from the Wokish' [2]
Those do indeed show that the whole woke/CRT movement is a bunch of racist nonsense, but not that race and sex relations have suffered because of it. Those are really really broad statements to make, and near impossible to prove or disprove. But if you're going to make them, I think you should prove them.
Your point about non-hyper-woke educators being hounded out of their jobs is true, and has been proven a number of times.
I mostly focused on education and related fields here, there is plenty of proof of the negative effects on relations between the sexes and race relations due to 'praxis'. Have a stroll through the statistics, have a look at the deterioration in race relations from 2000 onwards when 70% of black adults and 62% of white adults considered race relations to be 'Very/Somewhat good' versus 43% of white adults and 33% of black adults giving this answer in 2021 [1], the major downfall starting in 2013 from the start of Obama's second period (during which he campaigned as being the representative of a 'coalition of dispossessed') onwards.
To quote Christopher Rufo on what was and is happening in the federal government: The FBI was holding workshops on intersectionality theory. The Department of Homeland Security was telling white employees they were committing “microinequities” and had been “socialized into oppressor roles.” The Treasury Department held a training session telling staff members that “virtually all white people contribute to racism” and that they must convert “everyone in the federal government” to the ideology of “antiracism.” And the Sandia National Laboratories, which designs America’s nuclear arsenal, sent white male executives to a three-day reeducation camp, where they were told that “white male culture” was analogous to the “KKK,” “white supremacists,” and “mass killings.” The executives were then forced to renounce their “white male privilege” and write letters of apology to fictitious women and people of color. [2].
I can keep on but I invite those who are interested in this subject - and I expect most people to be so since it has the potential to derail whatever progress has been made in the last 60 years - to 'do the work' to 'educate themselves' (to use a phrase from 'their' own play book).
Every time there is a leap forward in any kind of progress, there is a backlash that occurs after.
I didn't expect the moral scolds to be on the side of progress - usually there on the side of the status quo. My only gripe with the woke-scolds is their concern seems to be about the appearance of progress rather than material measurable progress.
I agree with most of their stated aims, but not their methods, the way they communicate them, or their seeming lack of care about meaningful progress.
People who are very online, and generally left, they create the social pressures needed on people who are otherwise uninvolved to take interest in things they might not.
I've been caught in the crossfire and had various distant parts of my social network try to vote me off the island at some point for one reason or another, they usually come back when the moment moves on - but not always.
Particularly since "woke" is starting to become slippery, like "cancel culture" , "the left" and "political correctness," so that it no longer really has a definition (certainly not its original definition) beyond a general pejorative and fear trigger.
Well, indeed. I'm just old barely enough to remember the 90–2000s debate about "political correctness," and one of the things I find most fascinating about the discussion of "wokeism" is how completely indistinguishable it is from the discussion of "political correctness".
My impression (just an impression) is that the "woke" (or whatever label you want to put on in) stuff is much wider spread and much longer-lived than "political correctness" was.
Political correctness didn't get much traction outside of universities. "Woke" has.
Until they latched onto Woke, the talking heads on the Right were still using PC as a pejorative. That was only a few years ago. PC never went completely away but flowed in and out of fashion like the tide.
The problem with the term "woke", is that it's almost an entirely subjective term. Not everyone shares the same moral tenets, let alone opinions, and there are many kinds of injustices in the world. The more it gets used, the more confusing it is to identify what kind of "wokeism" people are talking about. It's as if it's used to express political outrage, without expressing what people are particularly outraged about...
I suspect that's just the nature of language though as there are plenty of other definitions that are in flux. Here's one that isn't controversial: "cringe". Cringe is whatever you cringe at according to your own subjective reaction. If people can't agree on general concepts though, good luck having any kind of a productive discourse.
It’s a word whose origins are in mid-20th century American Black culture, so it’s an instinctively effective boogeyman to a certain generation of white Americans who subconsciously want things to be back a certain way.
Right, because all white Americans are racist! Subconsciously! Gee, I wonder on which side of the woke debate you fall?
Has it ever occurred to you that the certainty with which you express your views actually comes across as very arrogant and plainly racist, and turns people against your way of thinking?
Try debating with rational arguments, not by calling those who disagree with you racists.
If you don’t want to sound like a racist, then don’t make an argument that revolves around the word “woke” without even defining what it means to you. Seems pretty easy, right?
It was clearly broad enough to me to always be true. When cars first started outpacing horses there were many concerns raised/rhetoric about how going that fast couldn’t ever be safe. And I’m reminded of the many “Twilight Zones” or Star Trek episodes with similar themes.
So probably to be meaningful this would look like all the technological advancements society could make but don’t. Like if the highway systems had been proposed and gone unfunded-as an easier hypothetical to illustrate the point.
I'd argue that a lot of highwat building in the US did a massive disservice to the population (maintenance debt, pollution, unsustainable city planning, neglect of public transportation) and listening to early objectors might have mitigated some of these.
But they were labled as crazy moralists whatever their opinion was. Arguing with the pace and direction of progress is not the same as being anti progress, but for some parties it pays that it's perceived as such....
It's to discourage particularly crappy comments from starting pointless discussions. You can't reply to flagged comments but in this case the repliers were faster than the flaggers. It's always better to flag flamemaking comments than to reply to them.
well I suppose you could say it's the idea that everyone's feelings matter, but some people's feelings matter more, because their feelings mattered less in the past
That’s the one that stands out as an unambiguous miss. The rest of the predictions were either spot-on (Russia), or predicted too large of a change or effect (COVID, by about an order of magnitude).
But cancer? Pretty flat.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-with-...
And the death rate has decreased.
https://ourworldindata.org/cancer#is-the-world-making-progre...