4 ms·

The absence of fear from a sky god is not a maths problem, that's intellectual progress.

aleksei 8y ago
There is an abundance of fear from a sky god around the world. And to think that everyone in the past was a true believer in the supernatural is to miss GP's point entirely.
- aalleavitch 8y ago
  There’s almost no comparison in how willing people were to violate human rights in the past versus now. To say there has been little measurable progress is to ignore how truly horrible of a place the past was.
  - aleksei 8y ago
    I'll give you that I'm glad a large portion of the world is living the best life of basically anyone that came before us, but then I didn't say there hasn't been progress. I meant (perceived) religious inclination is a poor metric for progress. As for willingness to violate human rights, I was first going to agree but I'm not actually sure that's the case, at least if you take into account the social environment. That is, I don't think the historical average Joe really wanted to violate human rights more, but he may have been forced to, as would we if put in the same circumstances. But that's probably what you mean by the progress we enjoy.
setr 8y ago
It's more likely a different belief system; I doubt most people believe in mathematics because they can derive from sound foundations arbitrary formulas, but rather that an authority (public education) told them this is the way things are and can be done, and doing it this way has worked out so far, and trusting the mathematician (or more likely for the common person, the engineer implementing it) usually works out (sometimes it won't, and they'll tell you they made a mistake in their predictions and come back with a correction). We advanced like an organism, improving in culture and knowledge as a group, but not on the individual scale. There's a reason the educated are just as susceptible to cargo-culting, trend-chasing and bandwagonning as anyone else; the primary difference is that the number of people capable of operating as authoritative figures for the educated is more limited. At best their education protects them in their own field, in the fashion of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. As a group we might have improved, but individually we still follow false gods and idols. We pretend they're not, and while ours might be somehow better than our predecessors (more predictive power, for one), they certainly don't come from a better basis.

There is an abundance of fear from a sky god around the world. And to think that everyone in the past was a true believer in the supernatural is to miss GP's point entirely.

aalleavitch 8y ago
There’s almost no comparison in how willing people were to violate human rights in the past versus now. To say there has been little measurable progress is to ignore how truly horrible of a place the past was.
- aleksei 8y ago
  I'll give you that I'm glad a large portion of the world is living the best life of basically anyone that came before us, but then I didn't say there hasn't been progress. I meant (perceived) religious inclination is a poor metric for progress. As for willingness to violate human rights, I was first going to agree but I'm not actually sure that's the case, at least if you take into account the social environment. That is, I don't think the historical average Joe really wanted to violate human rights more, but he may have been forced to, as would we if put in the same circumstances. But that's probably what you mean by the progress we enjoy.

setr 8y ago

It's more likely a different belief system; I doubt most people believe in mathematics because they can derive from sound foundations arbitrary formulas, but rather that an authority (public education) told them this is the way things are and can be done, and doing it this way has worked out so far, and trusting the mathematician (or more likely for the common person, the engineer implementing it) usually works out (sometimes it won't, and they'll tell you they made a mistake in their predictions and come back with a correction). We advanced like an organism, improving in culture and knowledge as a group, but not on the individual scale. There's a reason the educated are just as susceptible to cargo-culting, trend-chasing and bandwagonning as anyone else; the primary difference is that the number of people capable of operating as authoritative figures for the educated is more limited. At best their education protects them in their own field, in the fashion of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. As a group we might have improved, but individually we still follow false gods and idols. We pretend they're not, and while ours might be somehow better than our predecessors (more predictive power, for one), they certainly don't come from a better basis.