See also: music. I often hear people express how much better music in the past was than the music of today usually to compare Led Zeppelin to Ice Spice[0] or whatever. They don't take into account the survivorship bias that the music we collectively remember (often through the aid of curators/arbiters) is going to be the stuff that was at the right intersection of good enough (or at least relevant enough to modern tastes) and popular enough to persist in the cultural record: if you want to understand what the vast majority of popular music was like "back when music was good," go to any crusty old record store and look at the shelf underneath the main shelf with all the $0.25 records: total garbage, typically bland and completely stultifying to any passion. Much like the worthless print matter that never survived, this is the stuff that never even made it onto any digital record anywhere and probably even had the master tapes wiped once it was on wax.
[0]Typically the "contemporary" example used is going to be something already a little aged like Nicki Minaj or even Britney Spears or any of the Pearlman-era boy bands who all peaked 25 years ago. Here I use someone actually recent to evade accusations that I am as out-of-touch as the target of criticism here.
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See also: music. I often hear people express how much better music in the past was than the music of today usually to compare Led Zeppelin to Ice Spice[0] or whatever. They don't take into account the survivorship bias that the music we collectively remember (often through the aid of curators/arbiters) is going to be the stuff that was at the right intersection of good enough (or at least relevant enough to modern tastes) and popular enough to persist in the cultural record: if you want to understand what the vast majority of popular music was like "back when music was good," go to any crusty old record store and look at the shelf underneath the main shelf with all the $0.25 records: total garbage, typically bland and completely stultifying to any passion. Much like the worthless print matter that never survived, this is the stuff that never even made it onto any digital record anywhere and probably even had the master tapes wiped once it was on wax.
[0]Typically the "contemporary" example used is going to be something already a little aged like Nicki Minaj or even Britney Spears or any of the Pearlman-era boy bands who all peaked 25 years ago. Here I use someone actually recent to evade accusations that I am as out-of-touch as the target of criticism here.