Only people that didn’t live the old days think those were the “good” ones.
Anyone with a baseline education in history knows “good old days” is proponganda used by almost every bad actor that ever existed
Historians don’t talk about “good” or “bad” unless there’s some unambiguous metric within the historical context.
Santa should publish previous years’ nice and naughty lists for historical reference
Nah—see Goodhart’s law (“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”).
As soon as Santa published his lists, people would start figuring out ways to game it.
Management (mis)using kpi is a classic example.
This is so true.
When I worked at a cell phone store, we had an accessory take rate (ATR) target. The goal was to sell 3-5 accessories for every phone sold. (The accessories had much more profit. Compared to the phones that were sold at a loss with a contract) We would sling cheap screen protectors and clearance items that were only a few bucks to crank that number up without actually getting the customers to spend more money.
They caught on and changed it to Accessory revenue per phone, and suddenly the cheap junk quit moving and we’d only have to get one person per day to buy a Bluetooth speaker to hit target.
What gets rewarded gets done
Doesn’t this apply to most religions?
There isn’t one single concrete list of good/bad deeds and how many points each one is tbf.
Maybe not, it’s a thing within global governance. You whip out the HDI or Gini coefficient and suddenly countries scramble to increase in its rankings
I don’t know anyone who talks about the good old days.
My great grandparents didn’t. My 90 year old parents don’t.
They’ve all seen some shit us “youngin’s” simply can’t fathom.
I had to read Studs Terkel’s “Hard Times” before I had a clue how shockingly hard life was before the mid-20th century, and how easy us born after that have it.
Broadly speaking this is probably true. In a smaller context, though, there are tons of counter examples. The internet for example, from just 10 years ago, was unquestionably better. AI slop, bots, enshitification, social media and browser monoculture…
The anti science trend of MAGA over the last few years…
Etc. Regression does happen, and we should not take things for granted.
Internet was different, not better. Don’t you remember the browsers with 30 “search bars”? The viruses infecting computers by just connecting to internet? The slow speeds?
“10 years ago” would mean the year is 2015. By then, there were no 30 search bars, generally no viruses just by connecting to the internet and speeds were also acceptable or more than acceptable. And 2015 was unquestionably a better time for the internet.
Bizarre reading comments on lemmy every day that our times are so miserable and this is “the end”. I get it if you’re young and lack perspective, totally natural, but did no one have a good history teacher?
Until you hear them talk about golden eras.
But it’s always about something specific, they know too much to ever say an “era” was objectively good.
I’m Dutch, so we are tough about the Dutch golden age, which spans about the seventeenth century. Trade science and art were at a high point back then, but looking deeper it turns out the life expectancy for common people was lower than in the surrounding countries. The wealth was all concentrated in the Holland province(s), which explains why the Netherlands is commonly referred as Holland in other countries. Another thing was the schism between catholics and Calvinists, which meant Catholic cities didn’t benefit at all from the golden age. It also wasn’t benificial to the 1.7 million people who were enslaved by the Dutch.
So all in all, the Dutch golden age was very much golden for the merchants and aristocrats of cities like Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Leiden or Haarlem, and for the protestant ministers. For the rest, of you didn’t live near these cities you probably were dirt poor.
yeah “golden age” is similar to “great empire” - “great” maybe for the emperor but for basically nobody else.
It’s because they’re way more aware of the drawbacks of certain eras.
Slavery, racism, inequality, lack of resources, lack of education, lack of clean water, how many of your children will make it to adulthood, famine, floods, lack of roads…
Every “good old day” was worse in some aspects.Because they are scientists
Well, no, they’re historians. You don’t need to be a scientist to prize evidence based thinking but you do need to be investigating natural phenomena through a system based on scientific methodology to be a scientist.
You could stretch that out and point out that everything is natural but then you’re dealing with anthropology which is different than being a historian because they use different means of determining fact.
This may be a language barrier. In my native language a historian is a scientist researching history. But maybe I just don’t understand what you want to say.
It’s somewhat complicated. “Scientist” can have a very specific definition where only “hard science” (Physics, Chemistry, etc.) qualifies. Personally, I think that definition is too narrow, is usually used to disparage fields where it’s impossible to apply strict experimental techniques, and often privileges areas of study that just happen to be male-dominated.
How do you even run an experiment in history? Since you basically can’t, is that a reason to invalidate everything the field does? The way a lot of people talk, it almost seems like it, but it’s completely absurd.
Just wanted to tell you it even differs in different languages. I know where you are going though. However regarding this post, at least where I come from you can get a university degree in History. If you want to call that science or not, “good” is no legitimate assessment in any discipline.
