Because I'm a Geek

[omorka]

So quantumduck and I have been having an extended debate about How Much Trouble We're In. I think we as a culture are in serious trouble, and he seems to think that the current difficulties are little more than the normal growing pains. I have been deeply offended by how lightly he has taken the political swing to the right, and I suspect he in turn has been shocked by how little faith I have in the public as a whole. This, along with an extended riff on the Myth of Progress that has cropped up in several places recently, has led me to the following terribly geeky question:


[Poll #1113121]

Yes, I understand that for the majority of my readers the correct answer is probably a complex fractal version of one of these. I understand that all of these options are too smooth; that's true for me, too. However, that complex fractal curve has some sort of overall trend; please pick from the list the one that best matches that trend, or, if you must say "none of the above," give me some idea of the general shape of your curve.

Yes, we're about to do the algebraic portion of Precal; why do you ask? ;-)

Comments

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

I think the major difference between the current regressive swing and previous ones is that this one is being deliberately engineered by people who know exactly what they're doing and intend NOT to let the natural recovery ever occur. There is a natural cycle, but it's being very professionally interfered with.

[moontyger.livejournal.com]

Agreed. And I won't deny that it scares the crap out of me.

[quantumduck.livejournal.com]

Agreed, and it does my heart good to think that it takes a major coup to get roughly 60% of the power in this country for a few years. The take-over was also somewhat easy to spot. I think this points to the actual average public opinion being much more like the 'centrist' Clinton era. I'm not a big fan of Clinton in some respects, but I'm deeply horrified by him either.

[bassfingers.livejournal.com]

Made my choice from the above, but could make an argument for y=arctan(x)

[omorka.livejournal.com]

Ooo, good thought. Or possibly a logistical function, which I really should have put in the list if I included the Gaussian function.

[kansas-dave.livejournal.com]

What's the y-axis supposed to represent? How optimistic humanity is? How optimistic it ought to be? How much trouble it's in? Social progress?

If the y-axis represents 'good stuff for humanity' then I'd describe it as a random walk plus a linear, positive slope (or a positive biased random walk).

[omorka.livejournal.com]

y = human "progress", however you choose to define that.

[brezhnev.livejournal.com]

I'm really not seeing a big swing to the right -- aside from a bit of discussion and public rhetoric, there have been little incremental changes here and there, but not much that you could call a sweeping rollback. As for the measures that I'd consider "scary", I have little doubt that the Democrats would have done anything differently. All told, a time traveler from 25 years ago would be in for a bit of culture shock.

Now as far as to what curve humanity's progress will take, if by "progress" we mean something like prosperity and health for the commom people, so far we've been going up on an exponential curve that's been driven by technology, to some degree because new technology steadily builds on earlier technology. Where it goes from there depends on whether or not we learn to live in harmony with nature, or if we waste our resources and overpopulate every corner of the earth. I'm hoping for the former.