I realize this is a bit of an odd question, with a bit of an odd array of answers. I'm trying to get a feel for several things and may not yet be able to articulate them in a poll like this.
Basically we evolved in highly different circumstances, say hunter-gatherer circumstances. We found fire, language at some point and have been accelerating ever since (bronze, iron, sailing, industry, HUGE leap with digital and electricity, contraception, nuclear, AI) . . . . now we function in incredibly synthetic environments, abstract interfaces, we are inredibly interconnectedness, twitterverse phenomenon, blah blah blah. Especially in WEIRD countries we seem to see new dilemmas emerge (anxiety and depression), though we also debatably don't have much data on them in the past. Certainly multiculturalism on such a grand and FAST scale is a new experiment.
The point is: many people (evolutionary biology types) feel we are no longer equipped to find any sort of sustaining meaning/fulfillment in our current circumstances. We are just too far removed from nature, from physical effort, from close-knit kin-group empathy, from the sorts of activities and face-to-face interactions for which our neurochemistry developed. It's regularly recognized that we need an 'aim' or 'endeavor' to give us a sense of satisfaction in life; but maybe everything is so abstract and unnatural now, the aims no longer suffice. This might be the view of technological pessimists, people who believe religion still retains much unrecognized value, and people who believe change is simply happening too fast.
Then you have the others who insist history was a nightmare dominated by bigotry, ignorance, brutality, and dogma. It was a miserable scrabbling for 99.9 percent of sentient creatures (even just humans), for 99.9 percent of time.
I suspect the manifold crowd is a bit more technologically optimistic, free-thinking, and less likely to desire the constraint of dogma/religion/tradition. I'm just curious how most of us begin thinking about questions like this, and if we have a general sense of either meaning or suffering diminishing in the modern day––and if so, what that means for the correlate (meaning or suffering on the other side).
The primary questions were probably the first two or three––but as this is a poll, I thought I might as well add more as they came
@NicoDelon what can you only vote for one? oh wow my bad. I was trying to get a multiple option thing going. I am very new here so don't know how it all works
@JesseTate Nico is right - expanding the poll options is an ongoing campaign amongst a few of us but for now, it's a single immutable choice.
Thanks for such a thoughtful poll/write up!
@shankypanky and @NicoDelon Bummer, I'll have to learn the ropes a bit better and tailor my questions more carefully. Next time I suppose I'll do a multiple choice. I still haven't gotten a feel for how many people game the system just to max mana, vs how many answer honestly. I suppose there are other more standard polling sites I should check out.
@JesseTate hm - what do you mean about gaming the system to max mana? was this poll attached to a market?
@shankypanky no no no, not at all––and my intended point could be ignorant as well. But it seems like if I'm curious about a certain thing (demographic spread, general consensus, whatever) and I frame it as a multiple choice (ie with a market) then people could answer dishonestly to get mana? Right?
An example would be Nico's (very well designed) over/underrated intellectuals one. My impression is it's fairly easy to vote in a way that earns one mana, if one just sees the trends and follows them. Does that make sense or am I missing something?
I posted some early multiple choices and some commenters were suggesting I make them polls instead
@JesseTate oh - no, polls in and of themselves don't reward mana. some markets "resolve to poll" which is a different story entirely (and it's true that a market can influence poll selection, I'd say). when you make a poll as a standalone, it's just information gathering. no one pays or receives any mana, except for the person creating the poll (there's a small fee as a creation cost).
Nico's poll was attached/related to a Multiple Choice (MC) market and influenced the market resolution, so that's a different story entirely.
people don't stand to gain anything from these types of polls so they should be contributing honestly!
@shankypanky Oh I mean that's what I meant––if I have a question like this and I just want to get a feel for everyone's opinion (with multiple responses possible) I could make a multiple choice but I wonder if people would be nervous about losing mana. I suppose the best would just be to never resolve it, if possible?
@JesseTate technically you could do that and just tell everyone it will NA afterward (which returns all the Mana) but maybe we could talk it through and find the best approach, particularly as we're all waiting and hoping for more poll functionality! are you in the Discord server?
@shankypanky No I'm not! I'd be eager to check it out though. TBH I'm not too tech savvy yet and am just getting into this stuff, been a freelancer writer for about a decade but hoping to branch out a bit, do some statistics, journalism, demographics work, and start a youtube channel etc. So I've been seeing a bunch of political streamers I follow use discord, but I still don't really know what it is.
@shankypanky Ok sounds good. Also curious, do you know how many people are generally active here? And do you know any sites for estimating such things?
@shankypanky Cheers. I didn't realize there were so few active users. I must've stumbled across the site around its infancy and just not realized it.
[had misread the question]
@GazDownright Haha I wasn't thinking the most clearly when I made it. Apologies if it doesn't end up being the most useful. Basically trying to get a feel for how people view the modern age as opposed to history. You know what . . . . I'll write a description. Probably best to clarify for everyone. Thanks for asking anyway! Check out the description if useful