At every age, the incidence of dementia is down. As a society, people are no longer suffering dementia nearly as often!
The world over, child mortality is way down. It's unusual for parents to experience the death of a child these days, where even a century ago, it was the global norm.
Each year, novel gene therapies are approved.
The number of gene therapies in the pipeline is also rapidly increasing. There is tons of progress to be made here, and the main issue is regulatory.
We have lots of low-hanging fruit in curing disease!
Global tree cover has increased in recent years with the greening and reforestation of the globe.
This trend holds on almost every continent!
Globally, fewer and fewer people are dying from natural disasters.
The rates of natural disaster death nowadays are a small fraction of what they used to be.
Moore's Law has accurately described the evolution of the number of transistors per microprocessor, and even after this animation ends, it seems to have continued holding.
Though America's homicide recently skyrocketed in the days after George Floyd's death, the rate has since returned to normal and is back on track to keep falling.
Mandatory enrichment of cereal grain products with folic acid led to a decline in the number of babies born with neural tube defects in the U.S.
America's cancer death rates are up if you fail to acknowledge that the country has gotten older.
Once you acknowledge that people have gotten older, it becomes apparent that America's cancer death rates have substantially declined!
When countries run campaigns to teach parents how to position their babies when they sleep, the result is typically a considerable reduction in SIDS death rates in just a few years.
It's true that people are getting fatter and fatter, but our medical system has kept up.
Despite rising obesity, cardiovascular disease is claiming fewer and fewer lives at each age.
There's more good news out there.
Every day, diseases are cured and prevented, people are losing weight, babies are born healthier than they've ever been, people get richer and their lives become more manageable, and more.
Day-to-day, things may seem hard, but progress is real!
Sources below.
Dementia:
Source: alzforum.org/news/research-… (Possible non-exciting explanation: More people are surviving to old age now, so maybe people who wouldn't have survived previously are disposed to lower dementia rates.)
This research directly militates against modern blood libel.
If people knew, for example, that Black and White men earned the same amounts on average at the same IQs, they would likely be a lot less convinced by basically-false discrimination narratives blaming Whites.
Add in that the intelligence differences cannot be explained by discrimination—because there *is* measurement invariance—and these sorts of findings are incredibly damning for discrimination-based narratives of racial inequality.
So, said findings must be condemned, proscribed.
The above chart is from the NLSY '79, but it replicates in plenty of other datasets, because it is broadly true.
For example, here are three independent replications:
A lot of the major pieces of civil rights legislation were passed by White elites who were upset at the violence generated by the Great Migration and the riots.
Because of his association with this violence, most people at the time came to dislike MLK.
It's only *after* his death, and with his public beatification that he's come to enjoy a good reputation.
This comic from 1967 is a much better summation of how the public viewed him than what people are generally taught today.
And yes, he was viewed better by Blacks than by Whites.
But remember, at the time, Whites were almost nine-tenths of the population.
Near his death, Whites were maybe one-quarter favorable to MLK, and most of that favorability was weak.
The researcher who put together these numbers was investigated and almost charged with a crime for bringing these numbers to light when she hadn't received permission.
Greater Male Variability rarely makes for an adequate explanation of sex differences in performance.
One exception may be the number of papers published by academics.
If you remove the top 7.5% of men, there's no longer a gap!
The disciplines covered here were ones with relatively equal sex ratios: Education, Nursing & Caring Science, Psychology, Public Health, Sociology, and Social Work.
Because these are stats on professors, this means that if there's greater male variability, it's mostly right-tail
Despite this, the very highest-performing women actually outperformed the very highest-performing men on average, albeit slightly.
The percentiles in this image are for the combined group, so these findings coexist for composition reasons.