Things have gotten better and progress has been made from times past, it just seems worse now because we have more access to information. We’ve come far, and have further to go!

  • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    While “technically” true. We all know the average lifespan was brought down by a high infant mortality. So comparingbthat to when peopke retired is meaningless. That said, it dies seem worse because with more information we realize how much better it could be. 100 years ago, the average american had no idea how common slums were outside the US. And those that knew considered those slum people less than human. So what we have really done is expanded who is considered human, and who matters. That certainly does make it look worse.

    • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, mean lifespan is meaningless if the distribution is bimodal. Median would be a more useful average.

    • CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      100 years ago, the average american had no idea how common slums were outside the US.

      This was and still is very true. The level of the poverty in places like that is astounding and beyond the experience of most anyone in a 1st world country. I grew up in America, in poverty of the level that my single mother was only eating what she could scrounge at work some years so she’d have enough to feed us kids. Yet when I deployed to Panama in the mid 90’s for a 2 month military operation, and had to operate in many of the rural areas of Panama during those missions, I had my eyes opened to what real 3rd world poverty looks like. The way I grew up would have been a huge improvement for many of the people I saw there. You can’t really understand it until you’ve seen it with your own eyes.

    • Godric@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      Also, significantly less dead babies increasing average lifespan is a very happy way to boost that number

        • Womble@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          The less/fewer distinction is arbitrary Victorian bullshit flying directly in the face of how English is used. The only point of it was to try and make English more like Latin and allow aristocrats who spoke Latin to look down on those without expensive private education.

          Please dont perpetuate it.

            • Womble@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I do beg your pardon, it was Georgian not Victorian era when this nonsense was dreamed up for no reason other than preference for trying to cram Latin-esque cases into english.

              https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/no-genuine-rule-dictates-the-use-of-less-or-fewer-cs25kv8s5

              The very notion of a neat distinction between fewer and less according to whether the noun is countable or not is a myth. It was invented out of whole cloth by an ill- informed 18th-century pedant called Robert Baker in his book Reflections on the English Language (1770). He proposed this distinction not as a hard-and-fast rule of grammar, moreover, but as a tentative suggestion with caveats (“I should think . . . it appears to me . . . ”) that you won’t find in modern style guides.

              The wiki article on it notes that

              The Cambridge Guide to English Usage notes that the “pressure to substitute fewer for less seems to have developed out of all proportion to the ambiguity it may provide in noun phrases like less promising results”. It describes conformance with this pressure as a shibboleth and the choice “between the more formal fewer and the more spontaneous less” as a stylistic choice.

              i.e. it is a shibboleth for saying “I am educated unlike you uncultured lot who use natural sounding language”

                • Womble@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  You cant say “the worst” when talking about an uncountable group, you have to say “the least good” because I prefer that and it makes me sound smart by correcting you. Apparently that is sufficient for it to be understanding language and for you to be wrong.

                  • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    Most people thank me for the little correction and just go about their day without being a total asshole.