I failed to define "weird" well. By "weird", I meant, "unusual in ways that are separate-from-functional and persistent". The reason that I emphasize persistent is because fashions actually reach for the edgy and "weird", but fashion has a mean-reverting tendency over time.
For example, wearing a spacesuit in one's living room (unless the living room were in space) would be weird. That shit can't be comfortable.
America elected a black president in 2008
I don't find this to be "weird". Don't get me wrong: I'm very glad that it happened, and it came about decades before I believed it would.
What's "weird" to me is that, for four hundred years in this society, and millennia in many others, people were mistreated because of something as ridiculous and meaningless as skin color. It's almost astonishing to me that it took the world so long to collectively learn that this racist bullshit that dominated nearly every national culture for centuries was, in addition to being immoral, logically indefensible to the point of being insanity. Until World War 2 established racism to be a Very Bad Thing That Kills Millions, there were highly respected intellectuals in the US and UK who firmly believed white, Nordic people to be inherently superior.
Racism I would lump in with changing fashions, in that racial preferences evolve over time. Being Irish is now a prestigious heritage on the U.S. East Coast, and northeastern politicians have been known to "convert" to Irish Catholic culture. This was not the case for Irish people 175 years ago: we were reviled and seen as subhuman.
What I hope to see in the future is a world that is largely free of racism, and I don't find that weird. It seems to me that, if the world becomes more prosperous, the mindless and competitive impulses that allow racism to exist will dissipate. Nationalistic racism (which was far from limited to Germany, Italy, and Japan; just read "White Man's Burden") grew up in a time when the world was believed to be fundamentally zero-sum, and people had to invent pseudoscience to justify colonial robbery, and to galvanize their troops with an inflated sense of both their mission and their prospects.
A black president is not weird. Obama is also a great president, and would be an extremely strong contender for the job with any skin color. What's weird is the idea that a president being black even could be considered "weird", although you'd be absolutely right to point out that it has been considered such by most of America. I even remember hearing intelligent and not especially racist people saying ca. 2007 that this country "wasn't ready for a black president". Well, it was and is.
The internet gives ubiquitous access to unprecedented amounts of information.
I don't find that to be "weird", under the restricted definition of the word that I've been using, so much as a case of extreme prosperity. You're right that it's "surprising and non-superficial". If you think of technology in linear terms, you will always be shocked by what actually comes forth.
The huge decades-long rise in crime in the US peaked around 1992 or so, and has been mysteriously plummeting ever since.
I think that I could give a plausible explanation for that, although it would make this reply a lot longer. Actually, I would argue that there are several explanations. It's just hard to know which is the right one, hence the "mysterious" nature of it. It is a "small data" problem that you get any time you have a time series (because so many different kinds of events occur in time and are, sometimes accidentally, intercorrelated through time). When you're a historian, there are too many explanations that are plausible to tease out "the one".
As for the general weirdness, technological progress will accelerate, and post-scarcity society will be surprising, welcome, and (as you correctly pointed out) non-superficial. One might call that "weird". It just wouldn't match the much more limited definition of "weird" that I had in mind.
> The internet gives ubiquitous access to unprecedented amounts of information.
I believe that this, even if technically correct, is a huge understatement. The Internet short-circuited the feedback loop humanity as a whole had in creating and processing knowledge. Both the "sharing speed" and number of people involved in any topic had risen by several orders of magnitude. For the first time in history, humanity can solve problems as a whole, like a one big brain. I expect many more amazing things to come out of this just because the speed of information transfer risen so dramatically.
>> The huge decades-long rise in crime in the US peaked around 1992 or so, and has been mysteriously plummeting ever since.
> I think that I could give a plausible explanation for that, although it would make this reply a lot longer. Actually, I would argue that there are several explanations.
Just to underline that this is a really interesting topic: Freakonomics[0] guys believe that one of the main causes is the legalization of abortion in the United States[1]. They made some convincing arguments for that, and it's one of the most reasonable (if controversial) theory I have heard so far.
I personally like the lead paint correlation more, because it appeals to me to think that the only reason things were so bad for so long was because everyone was brain-damaged.
For example, wearing a spacesuit in one's living room (unless the living room were in space) would be weird. That shit can't be comfortable.
America elected a black president in 2008
I don't find this to be "weird". Don't get me wrong: I'm very glad that it happened, and it came about decades before I believed it would.
What's "weird" to me is that, for four hundred years in this society, and millennia in many others, people were mistreated because of something as ridiculous and meaningless as skin color. It's almost astonishing to me that it took the world so long to collectively learn that this racist bullshit that dominated nearly every national culture for centuries was, in addition to being immoral, logically indefensible to the point of being insanity. Until World War 2 established racism to be a Very Bad Thing That Kills Millions, there were highly respected intellectuals in the US and UK who firmly believed white, Nordic people to be inherently superior.
Racism I would lump in with changing fashions, in that racial preferences evolve over time. Being Irish is now a prestigious heritage on the U.S. East Coast, and northeastern politicians have been known to "convert" to Irish Catholic culture. This was not the case for Irish people 175 years ago: we were reviled and seen as subhuman.
What I hope to see in the future is a world that is largely free of racism, and I don't find that weird. It seems to me that, if the world becomes more prosperous, the mindless and competitive impulses that allow racism to exist will dissipate. Nationalistic racism (which was far from limited to Germany, Italy, and Japan; just read "White Man's Burden") grew up in a time when the world was believed to be fundamentally zero-sum, and people had to invent pseudoscience to justify colonial robbery, and to galvanize their troops with an inflated sense of both their mission and their prospects.
A black president is not weird. Obama is also a great president, and would be an extremely strong contender for the job with any skin color. What's weird is the idea that a president being black even could be considered "weird", although you'd be absolutely right to point out that it has been considered such by most of America. I even remember hearing intelligent and not especially racist people saying ca. 2007 that this country "wasn't ready for a black president". Well, it was and is.
The internet gives ubiquitous access to unprecedented amounts of information.
I don't find that to be "weird", under the restricted definition of the word that I've been using, so much as a case of extreme prosperity. You're right that it's "surprising and non-superficial". If you think of technology in linear terms, you will always be shocked by what actually comes forth.
The huge decades-long rise in crime in the US peaked around 1992 or so, and has been mysteriously plummeting ever since.
I think that I could give a plausible explanation for that, although it would make this reply a lot longer. Actually, I would argue that there are several explanations. It's just hard to know which is the right one, hence the "mysterious" nature of it. It is a "small data" problem that you get any time you have a time series (because so many different kinds of events occur in time and are, sometimes accidentally, intercorrelated through time). When you're a historian, there are too many explanations that are plausible to tease out "the one".
As for the general weirdness, technological progress will accelerate, and post-scarcity society will be surprising, welcome, and (as you correctly pointed out) non-superficial. One might call that "weird". It just wouldn't match the much more limited definition of "weird" that I had in mind.