7 ms·

"Simply shouldn't exist" Pyramids were wonders of the ancient world long before the Python web framework. The condescencion of the modern age toward those who

"Simply shouldn't exist" Pyramids were wonders of the ancient world long before the Python web framework. The condescencion of the modern age toward those who came before use never ceases to amuse.

digbybk 5y ago
If a web framework in the Pyramids was discovered, it would defy our understanding of the history of technology and "simply shouldn't exist". It's a dramatic way of putting it, but it's really just saying that our understanding was wrong. It shouldn't exist given our model of the world, so our model is wrong.
luma 5y ago
All they're saying is that the technology represented in this device has no equivalent in the historical record anywhere near that time and that place. It's not to say that it literally cannot exist, rather, our historical understanding of these peoples is clearly incomplete. These are the sorts of findings that change our understanding of history which makes it pretty exciting to me. The Clickspring series on this mechanism was mentioned elsewhere and is some of the finest content on YouTube, I'd strongly recommend checking it out.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  I think that's gp's point: rather than saying "An ancient computer that we don't understand is making us realise how little we know about the ancient world and challenging our assumptions about ancient technology" the headline is "An ancient computer that shouldn't exist".
- rozab 5y ago
  There are actually several descriptions of similar devices in the literature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism#Similar_devices_in_ancient_literature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism#Similar_...
  - luma 5y ago
    Oh for sure and I think that's an important point: this device didn't pop out of nowhere. Something of this complexity strongly suggests an existing school/guild/etc which developed the knowledge and crafts around designing and building "clockwork" devices like this. China had discovered the geared wheel centuries previous so gears were known. It's the integration of the basic underlying technologies that is surprising, and I don't think it's a huge leap to presume that there must be more of these devices out there waiting to be discovered!
  - rsynnott 5y ago
    And the Antikythera mechanism gave a lot of credibility to those descriptions. Without it, they might well be dismissed as fantasy; Roman and Greek writers, even historians, were generally pretty credulous by modern standards and the literature contains references to all sorts of things which couldn't possibly have been true.
- Joker_vD 5y ago
  I've seen people claimed that, e.g. the polished granite columns common across European palaces and even some cathedrals, could not have been a) polished so well without laser technology, b) could not be moved and then erected without modern engine-powered equipment. So all of it was the work of ancient aliens or something, and the history as we're taught it is completely falsified, for some reason. Because obviously, if you can't imagine how to do something then it must be impossible.
  - luma 5y ago
    I've often wondered if the people making these claims ("you need lasers to make something that flat") are people working in archeology or are actual civil engineers or machinists etc. Talk to a master machinist about how to make a large stone flat with access to ancient technology and I suspect you'll get a handful of plausible answers.
    - Joker_vD 5y ago
      I've seen exactly blue-collars workers arguing for impossibility: it's hard enough to do with modern technology ("I know it first-hand!"), how would you even do it without it?
      - beowulfey 5y ago
        That’s perhaps a testament to our dependence on modern machinery, if the skills did exist once.
        svachalek 5y ago
        It's fairly simple to construct a way to see your own face. All you need is a high-grade color LCD or OLED display, a high-resolution digital camera, a power source, a few controls and a logic board. Too bad none of this was available before 2010, those poor ancients must have always wondered what they looked like.
        5y ago
- chiefalchemist 5y ago
  > our historical understanding of these peoples is clearly incomplete That's the point being made.The conventional wisdom lens frames them as inferior, instead of us being the ones who are flawed. There's a difference between "They couldn't have done that..." and "We didn't realize they could have done it."
JKCalhoun 5y ago
Taken another way, we're condemning our own current lack of imagination, understanding.
bserge 5y ago
Seems like the ancients were much better at making tools than they were at marketing them. Granted, their market was much smaller to begin with, who needs a calculator when their whole existence consists of farming and having kids. A small group today could prototype a very advanced set of AR glasses, but if they don't try to sell it, it would never be "discovered" by society. Future archeologists would say "this shouldn't exist". On that note, there are so many people these days and so much information that the chance of someone else creating the same thing and successfully popularizing it is much higher.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
yarky 5y ago
They shouldn't exist if the null hypothesis hold true, so this is evidence against the null hypothesis, aka the official history. This shouldn't surprise you neither, but that depends on your null hypothesis ;)
rsynnott 5y ago
There's nothing _particularly_ surprising about the Pyramids, though; they were fairly obviously possible at the time and made sense in context. The Antikythera device was more surprising; if nothing else, it's the oldest known example of clockwork in that part of the world, by _centuries_. There's no magic here; it clearly did exist. But it's surprising that it did; it feels out of time in a way that most artifacts don't.
fsloth 5y ago
"The condescencion of the modern age toward those who came before use never ceases to amuse." Well, it's also a bit sad testament to the fact that in general people have very little experience of how far they could go from starting from first principles, instead of just reading a single plausible answer from textbook. A single human can be quite inventive and achieve quite a lot if they focus their energies. The bayesian interpretation could be also that "it's pretty easy to progress this far in mechanical computation if you guess the correct route to take".
dang 5y ago
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article and rush to the thread to complain about it. Find something interesting to comment about instead." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Simply shouldn't exist" Pyramids were wonders of the ancient world long before the Python web framework. The condescencion of the modern age toward those who came before use never ceases to amuse.

digbybk 5y ago

If a web framework in the Pyramids was discovered, it would defy our understanding of the history of technology and "simply shouldn't exist". It's a dramatic way of putting it, but it's really just saying that our understanding was wrong. It shouldn't exist given our model of the world, so our model is wrong.

luma 5y ago

All they're saying is that the technology represented in this device has no equivalent in the historical record anywhere near that time and that place. It's not to say that it literally cannot exist, rather, our historical understanding of these peoples is clearly incomplete. These are the sorts of findings that change our understanding of history which makes it pretty exciting to me. The Clickspring series on this mechanism was mentioned elsewhere and is some of the finest content on YouTube, I'd strongly recommend checking it out.

marcus_holmes 5y ago
I think that's gp's point: rather than saying "An ancient computer that we don't understand is making us realise how little we know about the ancient world and challenging our assumptions about ancient technology" the headline is "An ancient computer that shouldn't exist".
rozab 5y ago
There are actually several descriptions of similar devices in the literature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism#Similar_devices_in_ancient_literature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism#Similar_...
- luma 5y ago
  Oh for sure and I think that's an important point: this device didn't pop out of nowhere. Something of this complexity strongly suggests an existing school/guild/etc which developed the knowledge and crafts around designing and building "clockwork" devices like this. China had discovered the geared wheel centuries previous so gears were known. It's the integration of the basic underlying technologies that is surprising, and I don't think it's a huge leap to presume that there must be more of these devices out there waiting to be discovered!
- rsynnott 5y ago
  And the Antikythera mechanism gave a lot of credibility to those descriptions. Without it, they might well be dismissed as fantasy; Roman and Greek writers, even historians, were generally pretty credulous by modern standards and the literature contains references to all sorts of things which couldn't possibly have been true.
Joker_vD 5y ago
I've seen people claimed that, e.g. the polished granite columns common across European palaces and even some cathedrals, could not have been a) polished so well without laser technology, b) could not be moved and then erected without modern engine-powered equipment. So all of it was the work of ancient aliens or something, and the history as we're taught it is completely falsified, for some reason. Because obviously, if you can't imagine how to do something then it must be impossible.
- luma 5y ago
  I've often wondered if the people making these claims ("you need lasers to make something that flat") are people working in archeology or are actual civil engineers or machinists etc. Talk to a master machinist about how to make a large stone flat with access to ancient technology and I suspect you'll get a handful of plausible answers.
  - Joker_vD 5y ago
    I've seen exactly blue-collars workers arguing for impossibility: it's hard enough to do with modern technology ("I know it first-hand!"), how would you even do it without it?
    - beowulfey 5y ago
      That’s perhaps a testament to our dependence on modern machinery, if the skills did exist once.
      - svachalek 5y ago
        It's fairly simple to construct a way to see your own face. All you need is a high-grade color LCD or OLED display, a high-resolution digital camera, a power source, a few controls and a logic board. Too bad none of this was available before 2010, those poor ancients must have always wondered what they looked like.
        5y ago
chiefalchemist 5y ago
> our historical understanding of these peoples is clearly incomplete That's the point being made.The conventional wisdom lens frames them as inferior, instead of us being the ones who are flawed. There's a difference between "They couldn't have done that..." and "We didn't realize they could have done it."

JKCalhoun 5y ago

Taken another way, we're condemning our own current lack of imagination, understanding.

bserge 5y ago

Seems like the ancients were much better at making tools than they were at marketing them. Granted, their market was much smaller to begin with, who needs a calculator when their whole existence consists of farming and having kids. A small group today could prototype a very advanced set of AR glasses, but if they don't try to sell it, it would never be "discovered" by society. Future archeologists would say "this shouldn't exist". On that note, there are so many people these days and so much information that the chance of someone else creating the same thing and successfully popularizing it is much higher.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

yarky 5y ago

They shouldn't exist if the null hypothesis hold true, so this is evidence against the null hypothesis, aka the official history. This shouldn't surprise you neither, but that depends on your null hypothesis ;)

rsynnott 5y ago

There's nothing _particularly_ surprising about the Pyramids, though; they were fairly obviously possible at the time and made sense in context. The Antikythera device was more surprising; if nothing else, it's the oldest known example of clockwork in that part of the world, by _centuries_. There's no magic here; it clearly did exist. But it's surprising that it did; it feels out of time in a way that most artifacts don't.

fsloth 5y ago

"The condescencion of the modern age toward those who came before use never ceases to amuse." Well, it's also a bit sad testament to the fact that in general people have very little experience of how far they could go from starting from first principles, instead of just reading a single plausible answer from textbook. A single human can be quite inventive and achieve quite a lot if they focus their energies. The bayesian interpretation could be also that "it's pretty easy to progress this far in mechanical computation if you guess the correct route to take".

dang 5y ago

"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article and rush to the thread to complain about it. Find something interesting to comment about instead." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html