7 ms·

'Millennium' is full of gratitude for the staggering advances of 1,000 years

57 points by howrude 10y ago

paganel 10y ago
> The four core changes he identifies in his book, the “four primary sources underlying change over the last millennium,” are a) the weather in terms of how it affected food supply, the need for security, the fear of sickness, and the “desire for personal enrichment." I read a book this summer called "The Bourgeois", written by an early 20th century German sociologist called Sombart, where, among other things, he explains how one of the decisive factors behind people starting to accumulate wealth during the Italian Renaissance (when modern capitalism was actually born) was the simple fact that the head of (business) families from that time started to track down their money inputs and outputs, always trying to make sure that the inputs would be bigger than the outputs. It sounds quite trivial when you call simple additions and subtractions as the cause of one of the most interesting things to happen to us as a species in the last 1,000 years (the accumulation of wealth, that is), but I for myself think that it makes a lot of sense.
- tpeo 10y ago
  I don't think it does. For one, people have an intuitive understanding of basic arithmetic regardless of whether they're educated or not and this can be improved through practice. On the other hand, it supposes that humans are somewhat innately helpless and just stood by while mathematics was being developed, without making practical use of it. But humans, as animals in general, are rather restless and will try until they succeed. Is is how, for example, people eventually discovered how to make boats despite having very little knowledge of how they actually worked. Furthermore, tracking expenses isn't that new. Accounting is much older than the Renaissance [1]. What the Italians did invent was double-entry bookeeping [2], and this IMO had less to do with household management than with the development of finance in 14th and 15th century Italy. I say this because, on one hand, double-entry bookeeping makes it much easier to track who owes what to whom; on the other, Italian city-states were the first to issue public debt, to have moden banks [3] (after the banca) and had money-lenders weaseling themselves into power (the Medicis). [1] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_accounting#Early_development_of_accounting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_accounting#Early_de... [2] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_accounting#Double-entry_bookkeeping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_accounting#Double-e... [3] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank
lisper 10y ago
Forget the millennium, just in my lifetime I have seen: 1. Computers go from room-sized devices that only major institutions could afford to being disposable commodities. Today I can buy a machine that can run Linux for less than the cost of one hour of labor at the minimum wage. That in and of itself is staggering. 2. The internet. When I was a kid, to get information you had to go to the library, or have an encyclopedia in your house, or wait for the daily newspaper (which was actually made of paper) to be delivered. Today I have direct real-time access to most significant world events (with video!) and Wikipedia wherever I have a cell connection. And it's all free! 3. ATM machines. When I was a kid, my parents had to go to the bank and wait in line to withdraw cash to get through the weekend. When I was in college, if you wanted to travel abroad, you carried cash or traveller's checks. If you ran out, you were hosed. 4. Genome sequencing, self-driving cars, and chess-playing computers that can beat human grand masters go from a pipe dream to a consumer product. 5. GPS. Well into my adulthood, if you wanted to figure out where you were, you had to cross-reference your surroundings to a paper map. It was actually possible to get lost. Today my cell phone tells me my location accurately enough that I can tell which room of my house I am in. I could probably go on. (Not all the changes have been good. When I was a kid, my friends and I regularly walked to school and otherwise roamed the neighborhood without adult supervision. Nowadays, parents get arrested for letting their kids do that. :-(
- unclenoriega 10y ago
  The truly sad part about your last thing is that the change isn't based on reality. If anything, it's probably much safer to roam the streets alone, partially due to all those technologies you mentioned (and others).
  - lisper 10y ago
    Very little of people's assessment of the state of the world is based on reality. Almost everything is better today than it has ever been (at least for humans, not so much for other species), but many (most?) people are still convinced that we're on the wrong track. To be sure, we have significant challenges ahead of us, and things could easily take a turn for the worse. But right now things are pretty awesome. We're in the middle of the longest stretch of world peace in history. There is less poverty (in terms of percentage of the population) than ever. People are healthier and living longer than ever. And we have Pokemon! It's a golden era.
graycat 10y ago
Yup. Now, to think for just a few seconds, the 1000 years is just 100 decades. So, list the 100 biggest changes you can think of from wooden ships for open ocean sailing, Newton's law of gravity, the explanation for how the stars shine, coal, iron, steel, steam, electricity, radio, the electric light, ..., you get the idea. Then, that means that on average over the past 1000 years we had one such biggie development each 10 years. And in some of those 10 year periods, maybe we didn't have a biggie, and that means that in some other 10 year period we had more than one biggie. Net, the 100 big changes came along at a rate of one each 10 years, which is fast! Do the same, that is, the 100 biggest changes, over the past, say, 200 years -- still have lots of biggies in those years. Now get a biggie on average each 2 years. We've been screaming ahead! But, right, we need to go faster!
- internaut 10y ago
  Name me the important technological innovations in the last 40 years that are not based on (or directly linked to, like shotgun genome sequencing) computation.
  - unlikelymordant 10y ago
    Tell you all the major advances we've had, not including the major advances? What do you have against computation? Also, crispr will be huge. The way you define advancement also seems to ignore incremental improvements, and the incremental improvements weve made in all fields in the last 40 years is vast.
    - internaut 10y ago
      The Internet is of revolutionary importance. However even with the most sophisticated data per second flows, virtual and augmented reality, we still need progress in the physical realm or our infrastructure will fall around our ears while we're constructing the New World. > crispr will be huge. What do you think they said about? 1. The discovery of DNA. 1.1 The Human Genome Project. 1.1.1 CRISPR 1.1.1.1 ???? The ability to cut and paste DNA is a great advance but people expected revolutionary steps forward in the past too and were disappointed with actual results. Anytime you hear 'biotech this' or 'biotech that', recall to mind only about 16 new biotech drugs are allowed onto the market, and I bet you cannot name any off the top of your head. That tells you something. It is worth knowing what our grandparents really thought about the future. I strongly recommend you watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RRxqg4G-G4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RRxqg4G-G4 > The way you define advancement also seems to ignore incremental improvements, and the incremental improvements weve made in all fields in the last 40 years is vast Far from it! I am concerned that people are being chronocentric e.g. They have forgotten that energy prices used to be much, much cheaper. Exponentially cheaper! I have two proposals for you. 1. Technology means doing more, with less. Less input, more output. 2. The basic metric for economic progress is that prices go downwards. These are straight forward claims. They are not outrageous. In areas where we have clear progress, like computation, finding downward trending prices is easy. In other areas the answer is far less clear and I find people become prone to rationalization instead of imagining a better possible present and future. I'm not a pessimist. I just think we could be doing a whole lot more. It took me considerable time to realize that not everything was progressing and there were giant gaping holes in that reasoning.
anabis 10y ago
A book celebrating the advance of civilization is only sold in a physical format :( ? Or maybe it's coming later, or I am being punished for living in Japan.

57 points by howrude 10y ago

> The four core changes he identifies in his book, the “four primary sources underlying change over the last millennium,” are a) the weather in terms of how it affected food supply, the need for security, the fear of sickness, and the “desire for personal enrichment." I read a book this summer called "The Bourgeois", written by an early 20th century German sociologist called Sombart, where, among other things, he explains how one of the decisive factors behind people starting to accumulate wealth during the Italian Renaissance (when modern capitalism was actually born) was the simple fact that the head of (business) families from that time started to track down their money inputs and outputs, always trying to make sure that the inputs would be bigger than the outputs. It sounds quite trivial when you call simple additions and subtractions as the cause of one of the most interesting things to happen to us as a species in the last 1,000 years (the accumulation of wealth, that is), but I for myself think that it makes a lot of sense.

tpeo 10y ago
I don't think it does. For one, people have an intuitive understanding of basic arithmetic regardless of whether they're educated or not and this can be improved through practice. On the other hand, it supposes that humans are somewhat innately helpless and just stood by while mathematics was being developed, without making practical use of it. But humans, as animals in general, are rather restless and will try until they succeed. Is is how, for example, people eventually discovered how to make boats despite having very little knowledge of how they actually worked. Furthermore, tracking expenses isn't that new. Accounting is much older than the Renaissance [1]. What the Italians did invent was double-entry bookeeping [2], and this IMO had less to do with household management than with the development of finance in 14th and 15th century Italy. I say this because, on one hand, double-entry bookeeping makes it much easier to track who owes what to whom; on the other, Italian city-states were the first to issue public debt, to have moden banks [3] (after the banca) and had money-lenders weaseling themselves into power (the Medicis). [1] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_accounting#Early_development_of_accounting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_accounting#Early_de... [2] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_accounting#Double-entry_bookkeeping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_accounting#Double-e... [3] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank

lisper 10y ago

Forget the millennium, just in my lifetime I have seen: 1. Computers go from room-sized devices that only major institutions could afford to being disposable commodities. Today I can buy a machine that can run Linux for less than the cost of one hour of labor at the minimum wage. That in and of itself is staggering. 2. The internet. When I was a kid, to get information you had to go to the library, or have an encyclopedia in your house, or wait for the daily newspaper (which was actually made of paper) to be delivered. Today I have direct real-time access to most significant world events (with video!) and Wikipedia wherever I have a cell connection. And it's all free! 3. ATM machines. When I was a kid, my parents had to go to the bank and wait in line to withdraw cash to get through the weekend. When I was in college, if you wanted to travel abroad, you carried cash or traveller's checks. If you ran out, you were hosed. 4. Genome sequencing, self-driving cars, and chess-playing computers that can beat human grand masters go from a pipe dream to a consumer product. 5. GPS. Well into my adulthood, if you wanted to figure out where you were, you had to cross-reference your surroundings to a paper map. It was actually possible to get lost. Today my cell phone tells me my location accurately enough that I can tell which room of my house I am in. I could probably go on. (Not all the changes have been good. When I was a kid, my friends and I regularly walked to school and otherwise roamed the neighborhood without adult supervision. Nowadays, parents get arrested for letting their kids do that. :-(

unclenoriega 10y ago
The truly sad part about your last thing is that the change isn't based on reality. If anything, it's probably much safer to roam the streets alone, partially due to all those technologies you mentioned (and others).
- lisper 10y ago
  Very little of people's assessment of the state of the world is based on reality. Almost everything is better today than it has ever been (at least for humans, not so much for other species), but many (most?) people are still convinced that we're on the wrong track. To be sure, we have significant challenges ahead of us, and things could easily take a turn for the worse. But right now things are pretty awesome. We're in the middle of the longest stretch of world peace in history. There is less poverty (in terms of percentage of the population) than ever. People are healthier and living longer than ever. And we have Pokemon! It's a golden era.

graycat 10y ago

Yup. Now, to think for just a few seconds, the 1000 years is just 100 decades. So, list the 100 biggest changes you can think of from wooden ships for open ocean sailing, Newton's law of gravity, the explanation for how the stars shine, coal, iron, steel, steam, electricity, radio, the electric light, ..., you get the idea. Then, that means that on average over the past 1000 years we had one such biggie development each 10 years. And in some of those 10 year periods, maybe we didn't have a biggie, and that means that in some other 10 year period we had more than one biggie. Net, the 100 big changes came along at a rate of one each 10 years, which is fast! Do the same, that is, the 100 biggest changes, over the past, say, 200 years -- still have lots of biggies in those years. Now get a biggie on average each 2 years. We've been screaming ahead! But, right, we need to go faster!

internaut 10y ago
Name me the important technological innovations in the last 40 years that are not based on (or directly linked to, like shotgun genome sequencing) computation.
- unlikelymordant 10y ago
  Tell you all the major advances we've had, not including the major advances? What do you have against computation? Also, crispr will be huge. The way you define advancement also seems to ignore incremental improvements, and the incremental improvements weve made in all fields in the last 40 years is vast.
  - internaut 10y ago
    The Internet is of revolutionary importance. However even with the most sophisticated data per second flows, virtual and augmented reality, we still need progress in the physical realm or our infrastructure will fall around our ears while we're constructing the New World. > crispr will be huge. What do you think they said about? 1. The discovery of DNA. 1.1 The Human Genome Project. 1.1.1 CRISPR 1.1.1.1 ???? The ability to cut and paste DNA is a great advance but people expected revolutionary steps forward in the past too and were disappointed with actual results. Anytime you hear 'biotech this' or 'biotech that', recall to mind only about 16 new biotech drugs are allowed onto the market, and I bet you cannot name any off the top of your head. That tells you something. It is worth knowing what our grandparents really thought about the future. I strongly recommend you watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RRxqg4G-G4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RRxqg4G-G4 > The way you define advancement also seems to ignore incremental improvements, and the incremental improvements weve made in all fields in the last 40 years is vast Far from it! I am concerned that people are being chronocentric e.g. They have forgotten that energy prices used to be much, much cheaper. Exponentially cheaper! I have two proposals for you. 1. Technology means doing more, with less. Less input, more output. 2. The basic metric for economic progress is that prices go downwards. These are straight forward claims. They are not outrageous. In areas where we have clear progress, like computation, finding downward trending prices is easy. In other areas the answer is far less clear and I find people become prone to rationalization instead of imagining a better possible present and future. I'm not a pessimist. I just think we could be doing a whole lot more. It took me considerable time to realize that not everything was progressing and there were giant gaping holes in that reasoning.

anabis 10y ago

A book celebrating the advance of civilization is only sold in a physical format :( ? Or maybe it's coming later, or I am being punished for living in Japan.