Daniel Wigton on Nostr: "Everything is getting worse!" I keep meaning to write about this, but another post ...

"Everything is getting worse!"

I keep meaning to write about this, but another post on X, largely decrying inflation, reminded me. Nostr gets to hear about it though, because I am not paying Elon for extra characters and 280 may not be enough.

Everything getting worse gets worse on small scales and gets better on long scales. Which one you see depends on how far you zoom out.

It is trivial to state that everything is always getting worse. My house is getting older, my joints creakier, and there is something like a 90% chance that all my kids will be dumber and less athletic than I am.

It is simply entropy and regression to the mean at work. Time is in some sense a measure of change. The more time that passes the more change there is. Absent a directing intelligence, the changes will be random. The chance that a random change will be beneficial is miniscule. This is why when when my roof changed from "not leaking" to "leaking" I was not surprised and had very little expectation that further random changes to the structure of my eaves would return it to a not leaking state.

The moment my house was completed, it began to get worse. The same is true of society at large and my DNA. (Sorry kids!)

Luckily there are other forces at work. Entropy means that things decay to a point that they die and all that is left is the things that didn't. When I was a kid, I marveled that Europe built buildings that last, but quickly realized that it has simply been around longer and is full of the buildings that did last. Everything that didn't is built over.

The same will be true if my house. One day, not long after my kids complain about how the neighborhood has gone to pot, my house will be torn down and a better house built. Thus if you look at any one moment the house on this lot is decaying but if you look at my house when it is built and the next house when it is built, the improvement will be obvious.

Of course there is no guarantee that the next house will be better, but on average, across all houses, they will be. Same with DNA. Most of my descendants over the short term will have inferior mutations, but they will eventually be out competed by the few that end up with positive mutations. Over the long run my descendants will be superior to me.

This also occurs in civil society. People are continually wrecking it with self-centered behavior and idiotic "progress". I don't blame them.... much, understanding how to improve society is larger than any one mind can contain. Anyone who thinks they can with novel ideas, is a pompous moron, however smart they are. (And near as I can tell Karl Marx wasn't that smart.)

Over the long run bad ideas will kill the societies and individuals they infest, leading to the eventual triumph of the truth. Over long time horizons, even the most degenerate society improves. I am certainly happy to be born now over any time in the past.

One final note, pure natural selection only gets you so far. That house and that society do need to be built intentionally but good actors. This is something the accel people miss. Things don't automatically get better. Better people make a better world. One that will immediately start falling into ruin.

But one great thing for my kids, even though everything is getting worse short term and the are likely to be dumber than myself, regression to the mean implies that they will almost certainly be better looking.