I was browsing the internet today — as I do every day — and I came across this study in Nature about the past. Or, I guess I should say, our perception of the past. It’s about the pervasive belief in moral decline. From the abstract:
Anecdotal evidence indicates that people believe that morality is declining1,2. In a series of studies using both archival and original data (n = 12,492,983), we show that people in at least 60 nations around the world believe that morality is declining, that they have believed this for at least 70 years and that they attribute this decline both to the decreasing morality of individuals as they age and to the decreasing morality of successive generations.
The authors then go on to show how that belief is incorrect and misguided; that a widespread feeling of moral decline is, to quote the study’s title, an illusion. Adam Mastroianni, one of the paper’s authors, explains the whole thing over on his website Experimental History. I found it all fascinating. The main takeaways: while people across cultures and ages think morality has declined, it hasn’t; and that they might actually believe morality is declining when it’s not because of biased memory (the very human tendency to remember negative things less negatively over time) and biased exposure (the very human tendency of people to pay way more attention to negative information).
You should give the post a read. Things: sometimes not as bad as they seem. Sometimes.
ANYWAY. I spent all weekend in Hyrule, by which I mean I spent more than ~20 hours doing stuff in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I mention it because though I’ve been playing games in the Zelda franchise since A Link to the Past on the Super Nintendo, none of them has ever really grabbed me. (Not even Breath of the Wild.) But I finally get it: it’s extremely fun to play as a little guy1 who has a sword and likes to explore caves and stuff to save his princess, Zelda. It’s storybook Dark Souls, pastel Berserk (1997). Good stuff.
Also, in this one, you get to build doohickeys and contraptions. I’ve been building crude devices that fling Link across the map. There’s not much that’s more satisfying in video games than devising silly ways to fling a guy, I think.
Other things I’ve been playing: Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, which is a fun little noir originally for the Nintendo DS. I recently picked it up on my iPhone. Also, this clever little game.
I’ll see you next week.
Be good,
Bijan
The good folks over at r/HyruleEngineering figured out that Link only weighs as much as 10 apples.