Intuitively this feels to me like an emergent property of interconnectedness. I suspect that if we operated more within the boundaries of smaller, localized communities, then deviance (from some communities' perspective) would be more observable by looking across those boundaries. Society has adopted a much more globalized consciousness where a lot of would-be-choices have already been distilled into a "best choice" based on the massive availability of data; knowing the "best choice" makes choosing easy, and people like easy choices, even if other people are making them on their behalf.

Not sure how these might be causally related to this:

https://www.freerangekids.com/short-sweet-how-we-got-to-heli...

I.e., decline of deviance might be causing helicopter parenting; or helicopter parenting might be causing the decline of deviance; or they may be reinforcing each other.

I feel like a lot of this is breaking up of culture into a million shards. People are being weird in much smaller domains so if you look at the old bigger chunks of culture it seems like it's solidifying. Just because TV is largely boring doesn't mean online video isn't weird. You just might not like it so you don't pay attention to it.

The world has become very expensive and everything is way more competitive than it was in the past.

To me, it feels like there is little room to make mistakes. If you get detailed it's hard to get back on track. That I think is the primary reason people are taking less risks (or being deviant).

I made a comment related to this recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45486391) and I got a lot of helpful responses that I think help explain some of these trends:

1. With the Internet, things "converge to an optimum" much faster than before where you had more regional variation. Dominant design, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_design, explains part of this trend.

2. This article from earlier this year, "The age of average", https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average, makes many of the same points but links to other good posts that help explain the change, particularly as it applies to business consolidation and risk aversion.

>8. SCIENCE IS STUCK Science requires deviant thinking.

>scientific papers used to have style. Now they all sound the same, and they’re all boring.

Sometimes that can be because there's more paper than findings.

Great post from Adam Mastroianni as usual, lots to chew on -- but to treat deviance and risk as equivalent seems a bit of a leap. The graphs line up, but just about any wide-reaching measure was put on its current trajectory sometime in the 70s-80s (see [0]).

The hypothesis that lower 'background risk' leads to lower voluntary risks (drugs, unprotected sex, etc.) makes sense. But as far as arts go, I think the cultural homogeneity we see is more of a direct effect of globalization than anything else. In other words, the default state of highly interconnected societies is one of convergence; the variety of the 20th century can be attributed to growth in communication and exposure to new concepts. Now that media technology has somewhat stabilized, we see a return to the cultural stability that has defined humanity for most of its existence.

[0] https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

I believe there is some merit in the fact that everything is overanalyzed now. Every new trend, fashion, or viral phenomenon is analyzed and commoditized so quickly that it kills its originality. Movies are generated, not directed (Netflix). Music lacks character — where are the crazy, drunken stars from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s?

I also agree that there may be some connection with the use of mobile phones, which has actually made personal contact more difficult. Previously, if you wanted to discuss something with your neighbor or an old acquaintance, you had to call them and talk. Now it’s often just a chat. People are less aggressive and less willing to take risks.

It reminds me of an excellent Stanisław Lem sci-fi novel, Return from the Stars, where an astronaut returning from a mission finds that people on Earth have neutralized themselves from all aggressive impulses, and he is perceived as a wild and dangerous “prehistoric” man.

Another factor could also be that populations are growing older, which means less risky behavior and fewer “youth” crimes.

On the other hand, perhaps the norm to which we should compare the 20th century is the Middle Ages, when for hundreds of years everyone lived in essentially the same way.

A couple of generations ago, the majority of people transacted entirely in cash, and the only government ID they carried was a drivers license (and the women and children didn't even have that).

I can't help the feeling that everything in our lives and finances being tied to our permanent government-sanctioned identity has a chilling effect on deviance. No longer can one skip across state lines with a crisp hundred in ones pocket if one's deviance becomes widely known...

> But wait, shouldn’t we be drowning in new, groundbreaking art?

We are.

I just watched a short Youtube clip of Corey Henry on organ accompanying a preacher's sermon. It's fucking insane-- he's doing two-handed Liszt-inspired cadenzas while the preacher is freely changing keys. I've never heard anything like it.

Also, some weirdo did what appears to be an accurate scrolling transcription that accompanies the clip.

Now Youtube is recommending a bunch more clips with scrolling transcriptions of out-of-this-world jazz performers doing deviant things.

Here's one now of Benny Benack scat-singing, showing an unbelievable vocal range. Now he's yelling the name "Phil Woods" as he quotes a fragment from Phil Woods' solo on Billy Joel's "Just the Way You Are."

Youtube will keep suggesting these things at me literally until I have to go eat food to survive. And that's just the scrolling transcriptions of deviant jazz solos.

In short, author is so wrong he thinks he's right.

Edit: clarification