5 ms·

> That's more impact than the Greeks had. Our careers would not be possible if it was not for the mathematical and scientific contributions of the ancient Gree

> That's more impact than the Greeks had. Our careers would not be possible if it was not for the mathematical and scientific contributions of the ancient Greeks. Not only did they greatly contribute to the foundations of math, but the way they formalized logical thinking enabled further discoveries.

brnaftr361 4y ago
None of this shit comes out of a magic hat, we're all ostensibly observing the same phenomena - that is to say there's hardly any reason whatsoever to attribute the gleaning of some fact derivative of the shared reality to a people. And I think this can be duly evidenced by the fact many people come to nearly simultaneous independent conclusions. This can be reduced to something like Newton didn't discover gravity, Newton formally described it in mathematics, and anyone dedicated enough to pursue the formal description could have done much the same. Much in the same way, the Eurocentric view is wrong to attribute things and with the way cultural interaction spheres tend to work it's even more difficult to attribute developments to a given culture or individual. E.g. not only are we "standing on the shoulders of giants" but the scientific domain is pruning viable explanatory paths with each passing moment, narrowing the scope of positive knowledge and increasing the sharpness of the borders of negative knowledge. For instance China had what was effectively fiat currency well before it became widespread in European nations; they also managed to invent moveable type which was ineffectual and thus discarded - but Gutenberg gets the attribution?
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  But why did China discard movable type, while it was transformative to Western culture? One reason is that Greece invented proto-empiricism. Other cultures invented math, but because of Plato only Greece elevated research and abstraction into a process of formal discovery rather than just a set of neat tricks for a limited set of problems. China was a bureaucratic empire and didn't see the need. Rome was a fascist militarist slave owning culture which soon turned into a dictatorship. Both developed philosophies which were more oriented towards ethics and morality than empiricism. So there was no formal culture of curiosity and invention. Inventions appeared and then they disappeared again. There was no momentum driving the process forward. The West did develop an empirical culture. This was partly because it inherited the principle of formal abstraction from the Greeks, and partly because a tradition of physical exploration, with accompanying developments in ship technology and weapons. China and Japan both turned back in on themselves. Rome was more interested in conquest than exploration. The West explored - physically in search of gold and trade, but also philosophically and practically. So IMO the real reason the industrial revolution happened is because the West had a culture that incubated technology and invention in a way that other cultures didn't. Not only were there associations for the advancement of knowledge like the Royal Society, and informal networks of researchers and mathematicians, there was also a practical tradition of engineering in wood, iron, stone, glass, fire, and water, on land and on the sea. And also an economic reward system - abstracted from imperialism - which made practical engineering individually profitable.
  - dd36 4y ago
    And, as stated elsewhere, a middle class that could consume it.
  - majormajor 4y ago
    The West "explored" but also in a fairly aggressive way and only after a history of violent conflict post-Rome. I read Metropolis by Ben Wilson, which focused on histories of cities, and the Middle East was experience a trade-driven era of prosperity before being "discovered" by religious explorers/conquerors from Portugal. The Portuguese didn't initially have much valuable to those societies to trade - but they did have much better weapons to use against them from that history of conflict instead of a history of trade, and an aggressive religious mindset. I think it's a very open question if the warring, violent nature of those Western cultures actually led to overall faster/better technological advancement than if they'd interacted with the other cultures they came across in a peaceful, trade-oriented way.
    - Rexxar 4y ago
      The west was not a more violent culture than others. There was as much war everywhere. And the idea that Middle-East people were peaceful trader and European aggressive warriors is not bases on reality : Just one example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_slave_trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_slave_trade
      - brnaftr361 4y ago
        I'd actually be interested to see you quantify that, but I'm reviewing the timelines of Wars on Wikipedia at the moment, and from what I'm seeing, the "West", kind of a nebulous term - depending on where you draw the lines, was culprit to more wars. I'm a little lazy so I'm just keeping mental account. I expect you're speaking in terms of qualitative violence?
        Fennder 4y ago
        You are reading a list that is eurocentric. Anyone with an interest in non-European history knows how sparse Wikipedia can be for their subject. A great example is the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. According to your list only a single war took place for nearly 80 years in china, until the Song dynasty, which formed and unified (most of) china without a single war, attacks Vietnan, whereas in China it's known as a period of endemic warfare until the Song reunified china through conquest. Compare that to a Viking raid on Lisbon that does get its own place on the list.
- jcranmer 4y ago
  > they also managed to invent moveable type which was ineffectual and thus discarded - but Gutenberg gets the attribution? Gutenberg gets the attribution because, not only does he appear to be the first person to use a press for printing, but also he developed a new way of producing metal type for printing and invented a new alloy for type. This is a rather dramatic leap forward in the history of printing in much the same way as HMS Dreadnought was for naval warships or especially Stephenson's Rocket was for locomotives.
- djmips 4y ago
  > we're all ostensibly observing the same phenomena Then why was there no Industrial Revolution when many other civilizations for thousands of years observed these same phenomena? I don't know the answer but it is curious. I do believe when you look back you can see connections - it might be trite at times but James Burke's series 'Connections' tries to tease out the road to a current day technology going back through the past and all the seemingly unrelated things that needed to happen to finally arrive at the solution. Solutions always seem obvious in the present but usually they aren't quite so obvious in the past.
  - brnaftr361 4y ago
    I'd like to think it's about cultural priorities. While in the perspective of the Western frame it would seem "irrational" to eschew modern advancements - it's just that, a perspective of the Western Frame and not objective. Even elements within the WF such as Marx and cohort identified generally negative elements like alienation. As an aside, there are people like the Sentinelese - a people contemporaneous with us still living in the stone age evidence that we don't need modernity, industry, and so on in order to continue as a species. Toynbee on the Genesis of Civilization via Wikipedia [0]: He argues that for civilizations to be born, the challenge must be a golden mean; that excessive challenge will crush the civilization, and too little challenge will cause it to stagnate. One of the big history book authors has an oft-repeated joke, one permutation of it: https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/bsnud/is_this_a_joke_or_a_moral_story/ https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/bsnud/is_this_a_joke... Why do all that work when you could just sit your ass on a beach or in a nice Mediterranean-esque corner of the world? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Study_of_History#Genesis_and_Growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Study_of_History#Genesis_and...

brnaftr361 4y ago

None of this shit comes out of a magic hat, we're all ostensibly observing the same phenomena - that is to say there's hardly any reason whatsoever to attribute the gleaning of some fact derivative of the shared reality to a people. And I think this can be duly evidenced by the fact many people come to nearly simultaneous independent conclusions. This can be reduced to something like Newton didn't discover gravity, Newton formally described it in mathematics, and anyone dedicated enough to pursue the formal description could have done much the same. Much in the same way, the Eurocentric view is wrong to attribute things and with the way cultural interaction spheres tend to work it's even more difficult to attribute developments to a given culture or individual. E.g. not only are we "standing on the shoulders of giants" but the scientific domain is pruning viable explanatory paths with each passing moment, narrowing the scope of positive knowledge and increasing the sharpness of the borders of negative knowledge. For instance China had what was effectively fiat currency well before it became widespread in European nations; they also managed to invent moveable type which was ineffectual and thus discarded - but Gutenberg gets the attribution?

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
But why did China discard movable type, while it was transformative to Western culture? One reason is that Greece invented proto-empiricism. Other cultures invented math, but because of Plato only Greece elevated research and abstraction into a process of formal discovery rather than just a set of neat tricks for a limited set of problems. China was a bureaucratic empire and didn't see the need. Rome was a fascist militarist slave owning culture which soon turned into a dictatorship. Both developed philosophies which were more oriented towards ethics and morality than empiricism. So there was no formal culture of curiosity and invention. Inventions appeared and then they disappeared again. There was no momentum driving the process forward. The West did develop an empirical culture. This was partly because it inherited the principle of formal abstraction from the Greeks, and partly because a tradition of physical exploration, with accompanying developments in ship technology and weapons. China and Japan both turned back in on themselves. Rome was more interested in conquest than exploration. The West explored - physically in search of gold and trade, but also philosophically and practically. So IMO the real reason the industrial revolution happened is because the West had a culture that incubated technology and invention in a way that other cultures didn't. Not only were there associations for the advancement of knowledge like the Royal Society, and informal networks of researchers and mathematicians, there was also a practical tradition of engineering in wood, iron, stone, glass, fire, and water, on land and on the sea. And also an economic reward system - abstracted from imperialism - which made practical engineering individually profitable.
- dd36 4y ago
  And, as stated elsewhere, a middle class that could consume it.
- majormajor 4y ago
  The West "explored" but also in a fairly aggressive way and only after a history of violent conflict post-Rome. I read Metropolis by Ben Wilson, which focused on histories of cities, and the Middle East was experience a trade-driven era of prosperity before being "discovered" by religious explorers/conquerors from Portugal. The Portuguese didn't initially have much valuable to those societies to trade - but they did have much better weapons to use against them from that history of conflict instead of a history of trade, and an aggressive religious mindset. I think it's a very open question if the warring, violent nature of those Western cultures actually led to overall faster/better technological advancement than if they'd interacted with the other cultures they came across in a peaceful, trade-oriented way.
  - Rexxar 4y ago
    The west was not a more violent culture than others. There was as much war everywhere. And the idea that Middle-East people were peaceful trader and European aggressive warriors is not bases on reality : Just one example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_slave_trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_slave_trade
    - brnaftr361 4y ago
      I'd actually be interested to see you quantify that, but I'm reviewing the timelines of Wars on Wikipedia at the moment, and from what I'm seeing, the "West", kind of a nebulous term - depending on where you draw the lines, was culprit to more wars. I'm a little lazy so I'm just keeping mental account. I expect you're speaking in terms of qualitative violence?
      - Fennder 4y ago
        You are reading a list that is eurocentric. Anyone with an interest in non-European history knows how sparse Wikipedia can be for their subject. A great example is the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. According to your list only a single war took place for nearly 80 years in china, until the Song dynasty, which formed and unified (most of) china without a single war, attacks Vietnan, whereas in China it's known as a period of endemic warfare until the Song reunified china through conquest. Compare that to a Viking raid on Lisbon that does get its own place on the list.
jcranmer 4y ago
> they also managed to invent moveable type which was ineffectual and thus discarded - but Gutenberg gets the attribution? Gutenberg gets the attribution because, not only does he appear to be the first person to use a press for printing, but also he developed a new way of producing metal type for printing and invented a new alloy for type. This is a rather dramatic leap forward in the history of printing in much the same way as HMS Dreadnought was for naval warships or especially Stephenson's Rocket was for locomotives.
djmips 4y ago
> we're all ostensibly observing the same phenomena Then why was there no Industrial Revolution when many other civilizations for thousands of years observed these same phenomena? I don't know the answer but it is curious. I do believe when you look back you can see connections - it might be trite at times but James Burke's series 'Connections' tries to tease out the road to a current day technology going back through the past and all the seemingly unrelated things that needed to happen to finally arrive at the solution. Solutions always seem obvious in the present but usually they aren't quite so obvious in the past.
- brnaftr361 4y ago
  I'd like to think it's about cultural priorities. While in the perspective of the Western frame it would seem "irrational" to eschew modern advancements - it's just that, a perspective of the Western Frame and not objective. Even elements within the WF such as Marx and cohort identified generally negative elements like alienation. As an aside, there are people like the Sentinelese - a people contemporaneous with us still living in the stone age evidence that we don't need modernity, industry, and so on in order to continue as a species. Toynbee on the Genesis of Civilization via Wikipedia [0]: He argues that for civilizations to be born, the challenge must be a golden mean; that excessive challenge will crush the civilization, and too little challenge will cause it to stagnate. One of the big history book authors has an oft-repeated joke, one permutation of it: https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/bsnud/is_this_a_joke_or_a_moral_story/ https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/bsnud/is_this_a_joke... Why do all that work when you could just sit your ass on a beach or in a nice Mediterranean-esque corner of the world? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Study_of_History#Genesis_and_Growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Study_of_History#Genesis_and...