Scandinavia and the World
Scandinavia and the World

Comments #9811198:


A whole new world 7 3, 12:24am

@yoisi That saying is stupid and springs from survivorship bias. Hard times have a sort of selection effect by which at the very least strong people become more notable for posterity, whereas weaker people are sidelined if not culled outright (depending on just how hard the times in question are). The fact is that progress is overwhelmingly driven by innovators and scientists who have had access to educational institutions and other first world luxuries, not by a hard-working but strong person in cotton fields. The idea that hardship is what leads to betterment is mindless idealism springing from an affection for that kind of narrative which leads us to frame developments in that manner. There are also indeed some real cases of hardship leading to betterment, which is on the macroscopic scale attributable to regression to the mean, and on the individual scale given disproportionate attention due to the exact same narrative favoritization I just mentioned.

The memes you're spreading are inherently regressive and the support for Tarmaque's proposition (though you're lying about it now, apparently) to make human rights conditional is exactly the kind of attitude that leads to what you call hard times. Yours are not the words of a hopeful looking forward, nor yet the words of a wizened cynic. They're literally just the words of an edgelord who needs education.