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Why wouldn't they is already in my first post: play broken phone in school and see what I mean. 400 years = 20 generations. How accurate is the retelling of thi

Why wouldn't they is already in my first post: play broken phone in school and see what I mean. 400 years = 20 generations. How accurate is the retelling of things that happened just 5 or 10 years ago... and for which pictures, books and video exist for evidence? We are in the post modern era where we have to make distinctions like personal truth and objective truth. Amazement comes when reality exceeds expectations. If this isn't just the case of pareidolia or cherry picking data: It seems I see maintaining an oral history that retains any connection to reality over hundreds of years as amazing. That is because I see human communication as highly flawed, even in today's day where recording and reproduction are easy. Also, think of education; how much more standardized and advanced it is today and still people have a hard time passing things on accurately. Some people think of human communication as less flawed than I do. So I guess there would be no amazement for them.

SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
> Why wouldn't they is already in my first post: play broken phone in school and see what I mean. Broken phone is you listening to a message whispered once to you, and there's always a jerk in the middle who changes the story to something totally different. These stories would have been told to you over and over again until you know it by heart. They would naturally get embellished, and that's what we see - floods cover the earth men become gods, mountain peaks become heaven. It's also important to note that, while we don't know events from 5 to 10 years ago off by heart, we all remember where we were when 9/11 happened - those are the sorts of events that would have been passed down. And really, all we get out of these stories is the equivalent to "9/11 happened" - many of the stories lose all other details. For instance, there's a general consensus that Noah's Ark is based upon a flood myth shared by many different cultures is drawn from a Mesopotamian precursors, and seems to stem from ~2000 BCE. There are a bunch of retellings with a bunch of different details - there's heroes and gods, but the water varies from "killing everything on Earth" to "a river flooding", and was due to sin, or overpopulation, or just the caprices of the Gods. That does sound like what would happen if you were playing telephone.
- 4ntonius8lock 8y ago
  Again, reality - expectations = our reaction to what we see. You seem to feel your version of expectations are better tuned so that when we subtract them from reality it is what you expected. I see this as amazing. Again, that has to be because I see human communication more flawed than you do. And that is fine. Personally, I think you do a lot of hand waving when you say something like "there's always a jerk in the middle who changes the story to something totally different" and then just outright ignore that when talking about oral tradition maintenance. Especially when you consider wars, famine, mass migrations, etc. But alas, it's different expectations and and given that you aren't amazed, your expectations are apparently more accurate (as long as those expectations were truly held before the proof was shown)
  - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_tradition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_tradition There's plenty of research and precedent for it.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    >"there's always a jerk in the middle who changes the story to something totally different" and then just outright ignore that when talking about oral tradition // We actually have some confirmations where oral traditions weren't bawdlerised in Judaeo-Christian history -- if you look at how they adopted a system of rewarding verity (as Muslims do now, with learning their scripture by rote) then you can see how separated populations maintained the same stories, in the same form, without alteration of major factual points. https://www.sapiens.org/column/curiosities/dead-sea-scrolls-historical-accounts/ https://www.sapiens.org/column/curiosities/dead-sea-scrolls-... read from "When I entered graduate school".

SketchySeaBeast 8y ago

> Why wouldn't they is already in my first post: play broken phone in school and see what I mean. Broken phone is you listening to a message whispered once to you, and there's always a jerk in the middle who changes the story to something totally different. These stories would have been told to you over and over again until you know it by heart. They would naturally get embellished, and that's what we see - floods cover the earth men become gods, mountain peaks become heaven. It's also important to note that, while we don't know events from 5 to 10 years ago off by heart, we all remember where we were when 9/11 happened - those are the sorts of events that would have been passed down. And really, all we get out of these stories is the equivalent to "9/11 happened" - many of the stories lose all other details. For instance, there's a general consensus that Noah's Ark is based upon a flood myth shared by many different cultures is drawn from a Mesopotamian precursors, and seems to stem from ~2000 BCE. There are a bunch of retellings with a bunch of different details - there's heroes and gods, but the water varies from "killing everything on Earth" to "a river flooding", and was due to sin, or overpopulation, or just the caprices of the Gods. That does sound like what would happen if you were playing telephone.

4ntonius8lock 8y ago
Again, reality - expectations = our reaction to what we see. You seem to feel your version of expectations are better tuned so that when we subtract them from reality it is what you expected. I see this as amazing. Again, that has to be because I see human communication more flawed than you do. And that is fine. Personally, I think you do a lot of hand waving when you say something like "there's always a jerk in the middle who changes the story to something totally different" and then just outright ignore that when talking about oral tradition maintenance. Especially when you consider wars, famine, mass migrations, etc. But alas, it's different expectations and and given that you aren't amazed, your expectations are apparently more accurate (as long as those expectations were truly held before the proof was shown)
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_tradition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_tradition There's plenty of research and precedent for it.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  >"there's always a jerk in the middle who changes the story to something totally different" and then just outright ignore that when talking about oral tradition // We actually have some confirmations where oral traditions weren't bawdlerised in Judaeo-Christian history -- if you look at how they adopted a system of rewarding verity (as Muslims do now, with learning their scripture by rote) then you can see how separated populations maintained the same stories, in the same form, without alteration of major factual points. https://www.sapiens.org/column/curiosities/dead-sea-scrolls-historical-accounts/ https://www.sapiens.org/column/curiosities/dead-sea-scrolls-... read from "When I entered graduate school".