15 ms·

Magic doesn't work that way

reissbaker 4y ago
Talking to a religious believer today will dispel this kind of thinking quickly. People really do believe in gods! Literally! And they'll die for those beliefs. It was even more true back when we didn't understand what the sun was or why it rose every morning and set every night.
- Leo_Germond 4y ago
  Yes sure, putting all believers in a single bag really shows how complex and informed your point on the matter is.
  - kiba 4y ago
    It is difficult for me to have any faith or belief in any of the Gods or God they worship. That's pretty much only my beef with it.
    - Leo_Germond 4y ago
      It is hard to put yourself in other's people state of mind, and to reason that it's because they must be idiots is not really the proper way to go. I don't have any advice to give on religion, if it's not your thing fine, but painting people with too broad a brush may lead to misuderstandings, conflicting exchanges, and ultimately animosity for no good reason. So my only point is: you probably have something that you hold dear to your heart and you would not liked to be judged or criticized for that, in some ways it's not even anyone's business but yours. Religion, spirituality, or weird new age practices are the same for a lot of people, and it doesn't presuppose that any of this is good or bad, it just is, and mounting a file against all of that at once is bound to be fruitless, and hurtful for the people involved.
      - TomSwirly 4y ago
        > in some ways it's not even anyone's business but yours If religionists ever, ever, ever behaved that way then there would be no problem, but the fact is that for thousands of years they have imposed their beliefs on the rest of us with violence.
      - kiba 4y ago
        It is hard to put yourself in other's people state of mind, and to reason that it's because they must be idiots is not really the proper way to go. I don't have any advice to give on religion, if it's not your thing fine, but painting people with too broad a brush may lead to misuderstandings, conflicting exchanges, and ultimately animosity for no good reason I can't believe something that isn't true. It's not about them being idiots, it's about the sheer lack of evidence.
    - Cthulhu_ 4y ago
      And that's fair, nobody's telling you you should. I think. I don't believe myself, but I can recognize the comfort that people get from faith, either faith in a higher power or a belief in what happens after death. My GF is pagan, she says she can see spirits leaving the body; for her, it makes dealing with death a lot easier. Like when our dog died, she just got on with dealing with the body because it was just an empty meatsack to her. Likewise, she said she doesn't care what happens with her body after death, because empty meatsack. If that gives her comfort, who am I to tell her she's wrong? I don't know either. Personally I'm more of a nihilist and think there's nothing after death, so there's no reason to fear it or care much about it, I won't be around. I've always theorised that life-after-death religions are at least in part based on fear - fear of nothingness, or fear of being judged and punished for things done (or not done) in life. I don't want to live in fear like that myself, but if others are more fearful and find comfort in faith that's good for them.
      - TomSwirly 4y ago
        I get that, but just because a belief makes you happier, doesn't make it true. I know a lot of people who chose to believe that COVID was a hoax, and that vaccination was a conspiracy, because these beliefs made them happier. But the consequences of these false beliefs was an incredibly large amount of death and suffering, all avoidable. > she says she can see spirits leaving the body But we both know this is a false belief. If she tested this scientifically, you know she would be unable to do better than chance.
  - JellyBeanThief 4y ago
    Can we please stop putting up with useless sarcasm on this site? Someone's point on a matter is simplistic and uninformed. Fine. But a fancy "you're stupid" as a response is even more devoid of content. Like, I could've just said "Wow, that really deepened the discussion there, good job". But how about this instead: Try actually specifying some of the complexities that have been missed. Try plainly demanding evidence and reasoning. Choose some goal posts and plant them firmly where they can be hit. Because if I wanted to read useless sniping I'd be on reddit.
    - Leo_Germond 4y ago
      I did not use ad hominem, I clearly and unequivocaly reflected on the post's brievity and unearned assertivity as being of little value in the context of a discussion. Maybe I'm doing a bit of sniping, but so are you, and I have the same feeling that if I wanted to read "religious is bad end of discussion" post I'd go on reddit.
      - orwin 4y ago
        I know plenty of those religious people who don't care if people have sex outside of marriage or practice sodomy, wore mismatched textiles and probably offend their god in multiple ways. You can be religious and not a believer, and the original comment only talk about believers.
    - Cthulhu_ 4y ago
      We're not "putting up" with it, we're downvoting it and ignoring it. That's how you get it to stop or at least be filtered out. It's better to shun and ignore an unwanted post than to try to berate, punish and ban or delete it, IMO. Let people shout into the void if they choose to. You gave them the validation - there is no such thing as bad attention.
- blowski 4y ago
  There’s quite a variety of views when you’re talking about 5 billion people. Though I’m sure it’s true for a lot of them, there are also vast numbers of people who find that style or religion rather distasteful.
- ulizzle 4y ago
  Ppl believe in silly stuff like gender ideology today, even tho we have an almost complete understanding of human biology, so let’s not throw stones at history
  - stouset 4y ago
    > we have an almost complete understanding of human biology Frankly I can’t believe someone would state such a thing with a straight face. Also, gender is a psychological construct more than a biological one. Are you confusing gender and sex?
    - ulizzle 4y ago
      We do have an almost complete understanding, and I actually think I was being too generous; but at least for the purpose of this convo, we certainly do know about X & Y chromosomes. I don’t believe that gender is a psychological construct. I believe that gender & sex are synonymous & it’s a politically correct construct to differentiate them in any way.
      - stouset 4y ago
        Sure, why have two words to describe two separate but related concepts when we could just decide to pretend that one of those concepts doesn’t even exist? “Someone’s physical reproductive bits” and “someone’s own internal perception of their sexual identity” are two separate concepts even if you believe they ought to be in sync with one another. And then when you acknowledge that there do exist people who seem quite certain that those values differ for themselves—even if you think they oughtn’t—isn’t it nice to have a word that allows us to describe this exact scenario? Also, I’d encourage you to ask more or less any biologist whether or not they think we’re just about done wrapping up their field of expertise.
      - adrianN 4y ago
        Some people of the same sex feel differently about their bodies and their sexuality. It seems useful to me to have words to describe that difference. I don't really see an "ideology" in that any more than I see "ideology" in other cultural phenomena, e.g. "surfer dudes", "skaters", or "weed aficionados". It's only made into an ideology by people who seek divisional talking points for political discourse.
- hoseja 4y ago
  That's because gods evolved to more comprehensively capture their hosts, early gods might not have been so efficient.
- m_mueller 4y ago
  I'd roughly put individual 'religion' of a person into one of two bags: cultural and faith (what you're talking about). The faith part by far not every member of a religion actually shares if they can talk openly (and the differences between the religion on this matter is quite vast). Some examples: East Asian state religions are almost entirely a cultural thing outside of monk communities. Judaism I'd also expect to be majority cultural only. Christianity in Europe, again, mostly cultural. I think the US has a bit of a different viewpoint since the boundaries between Christians that have faith with those that don't, are much more extreme and seem to regularly cause interpersonal conflict.
  - reissbaker 4y ago
    Sure -- that's why I specified religious believer (i.e. someone with faith in their deity/religion, not a religiously-cultural agnostic/atheist). I myself am culturally Jewish, but don't believe in the religion or in any particular deity. But I grew up Orthodox, and for the most part they nearly all actually do believe in a God. It's not fake! And they're not stupid; plenty of them are extremely smart, hold advanced degrees, etc. The OP's belief that since ancient people were smart, they must not have actually believed in gods, just doesn't hold. It's a myopic viewpoint that can be dispelled simply by talking to people today who believe in gods and are perfectly smart too.
    - m_mueller 4y ago
      I suspect again that it comes from this religious-vs-atheist trench warfare that has developed along mostly political boundaries in the US. On the other side of the Atlantic, I'd claim religion is mostly just a private thing that people don't bother each other about much.
      - Jensson 4y ago
        When a large part of the population vote based on their religion then separation of church and state doesn't really work. For example if a part of the population votes that all stores needs to be closed on Sundays because Sundays are holy days then it affects non-believers. That isn't a joke, that is what some countries in Europe looks like, how do you argue against that without arguing that their beliefs are nonsense?
- fsckboy 4y ago
  why would understanding the sun's energy or orbits change your ideas about the Creator? The foundations of science come from studying nature to learn more about the truth of creation.
  - reissbaker 4y ago
    If you previously believed that the sun rose every morning because it was attached to Helios's chariot and he flew it across the sky, and then you discovered that actually the sun didn't rise at all and it only seemed to "rise" and "set" because the Earth was rotating on its axis, and also the sun was a giant perpetually-exploding hydrogen bomb that the Earth orbits and definitely can't be attached to someone's chariot and dragged around the Earth, you might stop believing that the people who told you it was because of Helios and his flying chariot had any idea what they were talking about.
    - generalizations 4y ago
      I don't think the Greeks of Socrates/Plato/Aristotle's time were atheists, though they had some decently mechanistic views of astronomy, IIRC. Not totally sure your example holds up.
      - panick21_ 4y ago
        Actually, in Ancient Greeks some people took that knowledge and actually became atheists. Some of the 'cool' young intellectual would walk into temples and say 'stick me down if you exist' and then were smug when it didn't happen. It also became a common believe that all gods are just historical figures and stories. However the norm for most of history is to find some way to ratify the two believes even if they contradict. Ancient Jewish writers like Philo simply wrote a whole bunch of stuff about how every part of the bible is to be interpreted as some Platonic way. He was very influential on Christianity. Ironically he had basically no influence on what became modern Judaism and his interpretation were all rejected. And this is not just between science and religion. Even within religion this is a problem, because they are simply contradictory. Its literally possible to believe in all of the bible, because it contradicts itself. And trying to reason your way around all that nonsense requires tons of scholars coming up with elaborate explanations on why everything is actually not nonsense. Usually you have some elite set of priests who guard the interpretation. Today, there are whole field of Christian fundamentalists apologists who have whole universities field with smart people who do nothing then trying to 'read' the bible in ways that is not contradicting even if it very clearly is. The simply fact is, unless you view the bible purely allegorically and massively change the interpretation totally from what anybody who actually wrote the bible might have believed you can't have a modern scientific worldview and be a Christian. But at that point you can just base your worldview on Lord of the Rings or whatever you want because its your morals driving the interpretation, not the other way around. So its easy and reasonably consistent to believe in a Prime Originator who started the universe and then just let laws of physics work, but that is very different basically all religion.
- sammalloy 4y ago
  I think there was likely always a small percentage of the ruling class or philosopher kings who knew it was bogus but needed a "noble lie" to make their society work. Not much has changed.
  - Tostino 4y ago
    I think hierarchy of needs comes into play here. You may not spend all that much time thinking about philosophy if you're foraging or farming, and busy with physical labor. Also, messages get lost, and misinterpreted. Quickly. I do believe that most [non explicit cult] religious texts shouldn't be interpreted literally, but instead take them the lessons they teach, or are interpreted to be.
    - sammalloy 4y ago
      It’s an interesting discussion, really. A lot of wisdom literature outside of academic discourse emphasizes the philosophy of the common man. This gets lost at higher levels of study. Zen Buddhism emphasizes the mundane ("chop wood, carry water"), while some Christian sects embody their philosophy through work and service to others. I agree with what you say about not interpreting texts literally, but we have a real problem in the US with angry, vocal, and frankly violent religious people who defend inerrant scriptural readings of the text. Outside of the US, I think it would be difficult to have a discussion in, let’s say, a predominantly Muslim county, where I held a debate about how the Quran should not be interpreted literally. So while I agree completely with the spirit of what you say, the practical reality is very different.
readthenotes1 4y ago
Tldr: teenager reads Macbeth and realizes that people are the same then as now. We just put our pants on differently.
- 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
  Is this guy a teenager? Or do you just mean metaphorically? It’s a weird article. There are Christians right now who are scientists and mathematicians. Are they dumb? Clearly not if they achieved certain levels of education. And if you made it past high school and did sciences, you quickly realise the ancient people figured out all sorts of nifty tricks to workout things like the diameter of the earth in 240BC. Modern people also believe all sorts of dumb things. That’s why we have conspiracy theorists.
  - cynicalsecurity 4y ago
    You can get an education and become smart, but not wise. Works for everyone, both believers and not.
mdmglr 4y ago
> For most of my life I had assumed that all the people that had lived before our modern times were dumb. Really dumb. Borderline braindead. What education institution is responsible for this?
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  Society at large. When you paint faithful people as morons, primitive people as stupid, old fashioned people as out of touch, etc., kids and even younger adults are going to come to the logical conclusion. We aren't even getting into the recent nonsense of declaring our histories as shameful pieces of shit to be revised and forgotten. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
- pbazarnik 4y ago
  Not teaching history of mathematics, science. Teaching STEM with total disconnect to the historical developments of these disciplines. Perfect theories out of the blue. (Not teaching the dead ends: phlogiston, ether etc)
  - Leo_Germond 4y ago
    I believe we are slowly but surely getting out of this. Positivism as a strict adherence to the dogma of "the scientific fact" (with a conveniently moving definition, backed-up by Sagan quotes for TV viewers, or Popper for book readers) is as nefarious as any totalitarian idea. Yes scientific papers are great, no I don't put too much weight on someone's take on hapiness, truth, or the fundamental nature of our universe just because they're wearing a lab coat, that would quite literally be thinking that the cowl makes the monk.
    - adrianN 4y ago
      >Yes scientific papers are great, no I don't put too much weight on someone's take on hapiness, truth, or the fundamental nature of our universe just because they're wearing a lab coat, that would quite literally be thinking that the cowl makes the monk Sounds a bit like a straw man to me. "Scientific fact" by definition is subject to change. The "scientific facts" we have right now are the best explanation for reality that we have. Nobody who isn't a researcher in a particular field has the required context to judge whether some fringe theories have the potential to displace the current consensus, so it's prudent to just accept the consensus as a layperson.
ulizzle 4y ago
How can anyone think that people before modern times did not know anything about science, practically “brain dead” as the article states (CRINGE) when Einstein died almost a century ago? The Dunning-Kruger makes my head hurt.
- kfrzcode 4y ago
  Take some pain reliever and chew on it... Also maybe modern times is most commonly known as like the last 2k years or so. Egyptians and Mayans and Olmec and so many other cultures have left fingerprints of their engineering prowess. Listen to Graham Hancock with earnest and you'll have a mystery on your hands.
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    Usually, modern history in this sense begins with the Rennaisance (~13th-15th cen). 2,000 years encompasses the Middle Ages, which are held up as nadir of history.
    - defrost 4y ago
      > 2,000 years encompasses the Middle Ages Err, ~ 850 years, maybe 1,000 years at most, from the fall of Rome ( ~470 CE ) to the beginning of the 14th Century (1301 CE) perhaps to 1501 CE depending on your historian of choice. > held up as nadir of history. Not so much a low point of human activity, but definitely a low point in the human activity of recording history.
    - unmole 4y ago
      > encompasses the Middle Ages, which are held up as nadir of history If you think only Europe matters, sure.
      - UncleMeat 4y ago
        It is still wrong even if you think only Europe matters!
    - 4y ago
sanat 4y ago
I've had similar revelations to culturally held beliefs which look like rituals. Some Hindu communities don't allow families to enter a temple if someone in your close family has passed away for 14 days. They couldn't explain contagious diseases then, but realised that if it can kill you, something would show up within 14 days and it's better if you don't enter community spaces. Reframing these rituals as explanations that could be given at time is a good way to look at the world.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  Likewise, circumcision was a health practice, still applied today to pigs for the same reason. With both health things and laws, it's often easier to convince people they have to do it because a higher power than them says so, than to explain the reasoning to them. I mean think of children or dogs (if I may be cruel). A dog doesn't understand why he shouldn't eat off the table, but they do understand that if they do they will get punished. You can't reason with a dog (although it's cute if you talk to them), but you can teach them cause and effect. I'm still pretty convinced that, while humans individually are and have been pretty smart for as long as we can remember, as a group and statistically they're pretty stupid. If percentage-wise more people will wash their hands and feet more often if they do it as part of a religious ritual, then it's worthwhile.
- unmole 4y ago
  > They couldn't explain contagious diseases then, but realised that if it can kill you, something would show up within 14 days and it's better if you don't enter community spaces. But somehow no text suggests anything of the sort and the reasoning is always in terms of ritual purity. And the prohibition is only on entering sacred spaces which must be kept ritually pure. There is no prohibition in entering other community spaces.
dools 4y ago
I remember the first time I genuinely lost my "modern techno hubris", I was about 25 years old. I was in the throes of lamenting the peak oil situation after watching the doco The End of Suburbia and reading The Long Emergency. I was at the tail end of a mechatronic engineering degree and thought it was just my luck that, after having found something I really enjoyed, it was all about to become obsolete as we devolved into picking through rubbish tips for food scraps. I became interested in permaculture and went to visit a farm on the outskirts of Sydney to see how it worked. While talking to the guy there about the land, I all of a sudden realised how information rich this environment was, and how similar the task of managing it was to any other creative or engineering endeavour. I realised that the people who stood in that spot 60,000 years ago and worked with the land to sustain themselves were "doing engineering" as much as I could ever hope to. It was a tremendous relief to know that I could get the same thrill from engineering a landscape as I could from engineering a microcontroller, and it gave me a respect for Indigenous Technical Knowledge. I thought about how much ITK must have been lost during colonisation, and how we might regain it.
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
  Similar experience, about twenty years ago I hung out briefly at David Holmgrens house (Melliodora) in Dja Dja Wurrung Country in Central Victoria (Hepburn Springs), followed by some WWOOFing experiences in Tasmania, where I returned to ten years ago. My primary income is engineering focused still, and definitely glad I have that permaculture mindset.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  I love watching this guy on youtube, Primitive Technology, because I see him do things and think, if I were in that situation - or out in the sticks with nothing but my trousers on - I too would get creative with clay and whatever else he's got available to him, with just the basic knowledge of things that I have picked up over the years. And that's just from absorption, if you and a hundred generations of your ancestors lived in that situation they'd thrive. I can see why there's many that claim that older times were more leisurely, as in, less time spent "working" as people do today. I'm not saying it was easier, but definitely simpler.
- 4y ago
exitb 4y ago
People went to the Moon and praised their god there, it doesn’t seem like that much of a stretch that humans in the past could be both competent and religious.
nopenotthat 4y ago
[flagged]
- _corvo_ 4y ago
  This feels like a personal attack on the author. I see this as an opinion and everyone is entitled to theirs. In fact, author makes good points like the consensus building via runes/fortune tellers. Can you provide examples of ignorance, arrogance?
  - swatcoder 4y ago
    “I thought everybody was dumb but it turns out they saw the same things in weird ways!” Is wrong twice (ignorance), while still asserting superiority (arrogance). Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but said opinions can still be ignorant and arrogant. It was going off-guidelines for them to say the author should be embarrassed but not for calling out the character of the essay itself. It’s genuinely very insensitive, uninformed, and misguided.
    - _corvo_ 4y ago
      “I thought everybody was dumb but it turns out they saw the same things in weird ways!” I see superiority but ignorance? If anything, author is admitting ignorance here. Re-reading some parts and looking at other quotes, they're definitely coming across as arrogant. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but said opinions can still be ignorant and arrogant. I agree, my issue was that parent comment felt like an Ad hominem attack. Looking at rest of the discussion, I can see how a lot of the essay is insensitive. And it's a little bit of self promotion as well (author submitting their own article). I still learned at least one thing that changed my world view slightly, so I wanted to argue against such a dismissal. Could be my situation, I'm wrestling with some of the religious beliefs with my family. If nothing, seeing utility of existing customs is an improvement over dismissing them outright as useless or uninformed.
      - nopenotthat 4y ago
ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
I broke a 10 year spell of entrepreneurial failure with vase breathing, kaballah and rituals. I am an atheist. But there is something about the idea about the aether containing ideas which you can pluck from. Einstein and company were fond of it too. The mind is like a radio and all that. Point being, this year I had $4 million profits / taxable income. Pure rationality just wasn't enough.
- tmp60beb0ed 4y ago
  Can you say more?
  - ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
    Sure. Anything particular? Basically, it is all about mindset and filters right? You have better ideas about things your mind focuses on which is sold as the "law of attraction". But you can get to a state where ideas are free flowing and make sense in the context of the problem when the mind has had the chance to break free from the usual loops it is running. All these activities I mentioned essentially do that in a way which doesn't make sense to the rational brain so it can't cordon it off. This Quora answer might also help: https://qr.ae/prWLjc https://qr.ae/prWLjc
- adrianN 4y ago
  Don't attribute to magic what can also be attributed to luck.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
    Sure. But I haven't had luck in the past? I think it is a bit more than that. I think it is alchemical change of an entire person. The philosopher's stone is less important than the actual whole personhood change. And once you go down this path you will realize, it is not some one off magical event. It is rather a change of state. That is why it is so hard to explain and test for.
- mxmbrb 4y ago
  Beeing determined is the limiting trait in healthy educated humans. If we can fix this by culture, devices or drugs, humanity will take its bigges leap since the invention of machines and evolve into an never before seen powerhouse of technology, compassion, creativity and innovation.
thriftwy 4y ago
Looking at all the architecture around me would suggest that people all had an IQ of 170 one and half century ago, whereas our current average is 80. You can't end admiring the people who built these beautiful (but also ironic and meaningful) houses.
- vore 4y ago
  This is just a complete baloney non-sequitur. What does architectural style have to do with the average IQ?
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    There is an argument to be made that people of olden times were far, far, far, far more capable at a fundamental level than people of today.
    - edent 4y ago
      Because they had to be. I don't need to know how to grow crops, weave a shirt, or wire a plug - those things have been mechanised and automated. Would someone from 200 years ago trade having to gather firewood for flicking a switch for instant heat? Absolutely! Would you trade access to Wikipedia for having to travel to a monastery in order to look up a scrap of information? Unlikely!
      - swatcoder 4y ago
        Hah. There are absolutely people here on HN right now who would be happy to live in a world of quiet labor and pilgrimages and digital disconnection. Other lifestyles needn’t be romanticized more than our own, but they also don’t need to be demonized. Keeping yourself safe and fed isn’t a big stress for most people through most of history, yet does get quite hard for some people some times even now. The difference is mostly just textural.
    - vore 4y ago
      We are no longer a hunter-gatherer or agrarian society -- people of olden times would fare as well in our society as we would in theirs. Maybe they could be more self-sufficient, but modern society is free from tending to our fields or bison or whatever so we can have more time to do things beyond just subsistence farming during all our waking hours.
monero-xmr 4y ago
I literally go worship a sky deity every week with my family, along with a lot of my friends
- Terretta 4y ago
  One, or three, or three-in-one?
  - monero-xmr 4y ago
    three-in-one
braingenious 4y ago
tl;dr: Tech founder newsletter guy saw a boat and was absolutely ethered by the idea that he had single-handedly manifested the concept that there were smart people before now. The sheer weight of the this beautiful satori inspired a post of heretofore unimaginable power
- iamflimflam1 4y ago
  Probably more likely - tech founder newsletter guy needs to keep up his posting schedule and knocked together some low effort content.
LudwigNagasena 4y ago
I feel like the author barely learned anything from that experience. One can imagine the irony of reading writings by a devout Christian who gets surprised by sophistication of heretics like Aristotle and Avicenna yet still keeps his absolute conviction in his own beliefs without any doubt or self-reflection as if it is something self-evident. Have the author ever tried to understand what is science and engineering, and how they are justified? Does he believe in human rights? Have he ever thought where his ethical system originates? The author seems to firmly believe that he lives in “the end of history”; so the biggest insight he could come up with is that scriptures are kind of self-help books and prayers are kind of exercises that treat anxiety.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  >I feel like the author barely learned anything from that experience. The author very likely did learn nothing, he unfortunately doesn't have a sense for appreciation and learning: "... when you visit a museum everything is kind of broken, so nothing is really that impressive." You have to have a certain level of historical, scientific, and cultural apathy and arrogance to be able to say something like that with a straight face. Being in a museum is a humbling experience.
  - cturner 4y ago
    He is explaining an experience. Usually museums have no effect on him, he cannot appreciate, for reasons stated. This he did appreciate, and he explains it.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  Yeah, I agree. It starts out all "Woah, I was arrogant as hell to believe that everyone who lived in the past was very dumb" and moves right on into "these ignorant backwards spiritualists believe in nonsense, but purely by coincidence that nonsense happens to actually be effective and if I reframe it in the clearly superior terms of secular western society it can make sense".
- beepbooptheory 4y ago
  Right, this is just Dawkin's-type nonesense with a patronizing mask on. In what way is even our modern scientific secularism not ultimately the same kind of faith that the author thinks is "dumb"? Yes, yes, empiricism, method, peer review, the proof is in the technology pudding. All so many things that still produce a mind ultimately indistinguishable from a religious fanatic who is assured in their beliefs, mobilized to tell people they are wrong.. One can't help but have some kind of faith, you have to believe in something. Putting your belief in an entire enterprise of empirical observation doesn't change the act itself, your not smarter because you happen to live at this time where you can put your belief into this particular enterprise of modern science, its just the cards you were dealt.
rich_sasha 4y ago
...or, you know, some kind of spiritual world is real, and people of the past, being less distracted with stuff, were better attuned to it. Like most people can't see the starry skies anymore (direct and obvious evidence that it doesn't exist!) and yet, you know, it's there. I guess you put the line somewhere between considering other people's beliefs and "duh".
simple-thoughts 4y ago
It’s funny to see someone, after realizing that humans in the past are just as intelligent as the ones today, interpret all past human beliefs through his own worldview rather than seriously considering that his worldview may be the one that is flawed rather than the most intelligent humans of the past. Believing that people in pre industrial societies had post industrial beliefs and were only pretending flies in the face of mountains of evidence both historical and anthropological.
- feoren 4y ago
  > interpret all past human beliefs through his own worldview rather than seriously considering that his worldview may be the one that is flawed rather than the most intelligent humans of the past You're saying it's irrational to assume that smart people with the accumulated knowledge of nearly all of humanity at their fingertips, backed by hundreds of years of the most effective method for knowledge collection humanity has ever known, analyzed by incredibly sophisticated statistics, pondered by a network of millions of specialists, distributed and digested and re-interpreted and challenged by literally billions of literate humans; versus smart people with much less efficient means of knowledge collection, an extremely low literacy rate, no effective methods of statistical analysis, poor data collection measures, no scientific method, and only a handful of knowledge specialists ... it's irrational to assume the former group has a better understanding of the world than the latter?
  - simple-thoughts 4y ago
    Our current collective knowledge strongly indicates that pre industrial societies really, sincerely believed many things we consider ridiculous today. Those beliefs were the product of an ecosystem that was just as detailed and complex to them as our society is to us - a realization the author of this blog post had after viewing a Viking ship that you apparently haven’t had yet. Of course our beliefs make sense to us in our post industrial society, and even if those beliefs aren’t some kind of ultimate truth they are incredibly useful for navigating our world. For instance, even though the function of corporate logos may be closer to magic sigils than rational objects, thinking of them as rational objects allows branding agencies to design more effective logos. But in a past world where marketing agencies didn’t exist, treating symbols as having inherent magical power more closely reflected the realities of certain times. There’s a further step since our world isn’t static, and many of us carry beliefs that just don’t work well anymore. An example some might agree with is the rejection of any kind of religiosity. Humans need social community to live a healthy and happy life. While I’m not saying that we should return to a religious era, someone who found themselves in a lonely situation might want to reconsider what beliefs led to that situation and update them to be more effective.
taylorius 4y ago
I can definitely relate to the notion that really good ideas come from somewhere outside oneself. This happens to me sometimes with musical ideas. If I consciously try to come up with a melody, it will never sound any good - whereas any good musical ideas I've had, just sort of appear fully formed - from somewhere...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
wolverine876 4y ago
> For most of my life I had assumed that all the people that had lived before our modern times were dumb. Really dumb. Borderline braindead. It's an extreme strawperson argument. That's not what I think and thought of pre-modern people, nor does it match anything I've read. They were biologically the same species as us. However, there was almost universal illiteracy and belief in things like causing sick people to bleed, witches, alchemy; embrace of extreme cruetly; disasterous (by modern standards) outcomes for lifespan, health, survival of children, justice, freedom, prosperity, famine, war, etc. etc. We're not so perfect. The trick is to learn about humanity - about ourselves - from them, and look closely in the mirror for our own cruetly, etc. How many people die from lack of healthcare, for example?
Nevermark 4y ago
> And sometimes it is better to have a truly random decision than to continue to follow the predictable inclinations of one’s established prejudices. Surely, the enemy will not be able to predict a shaman’s completely random decision. Our individual brains do this too. Belief grabs hold of one viewpoint, because it looks like the best for a moment, because things will go better for us if agree with our group, because it makes us feel better, because we want other people to believe it for our own reasons, because we are too tired to care, ... Then it discards future alternatives, saving wasted cognition rethinking over and over. Our brains don't care what the truth is, they care that we operate well. And there are so many good reasons to believe something that isn't true. Many people have a hard time grasping that their feelings of overwhelming certainty, have virtually nothing to do with actual certainty. And that is the way our DNA builds us! Constantly integrating new idea's is costly. Fatiguing. Ideology is so cognitively efficient. And our certainty feels so good!
jerrygoyal 4y ago
Do reverse psychology i.e. how do you keep people from doing bad things? Religions/societies around the world have different ways to maintain the order. Hindu religion propose incarnation belief.. they say if you do bad stuff in this life, the bad stuff will happen to you in your next life and of course you won't be able to remember your previous life. It's a perfect theory because it's unfalsifiable. And it works in India. Of course you don't necessarily need to believe in such theories to know that you shouldn't do be doing bad stuff anyway but hey most people aren't that smart hence the unfalsifiable theory :)
azubinski 4y ago
"Usually, when you visit a museum everything is kind of broken, so nothing is really that impressive" "Writer on entrepreneurship, creativity, and marketing with over 10,000 email subscribers" O woe to vikings, woe to us.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  And we wonder why the modern business environment is so toxic, broken, and self centered.
red_admiral 4y ago
There is a lot more on the role of gods and magic in the book "The Secret of our Success" [1]. I'm not sure if all of the studies in there have been replicated, but it's certainly food for thought. One theory is that divination functioned as a kind of RNG for those cases when picking something at random was better than relying on your own bias, such as when and on which flank to attack an opposing army - where being unpredictable is a feature. Another example from the book is that certain types of shark were taboo to pregnant women in ancient Polynesia; no-one could explain why except for things like "it would upset the gods otherwise". But it turns out that said animals' meat actually contain chemicals that are indeed bad to consume when you're pregnant. I can also recommend Brett Deveraux' "Practical Polytheism" series [2]. One of his key quotes is "It is safe to assume that people in the past believed their religion." (Actually, I can recommend all of acoup.blog to HN readers, including the latest post on ChatGPT, but that's going off topic.) [1] https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Our-Success-Evolution-Domesticating/dp/0691166854 https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Our-Success-Evolution-Domestic... [2] https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polytheism-part-i-knowledge/ https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polythei...
- Terretta 4y ago
  > There is a lot more on the role of gods and magic in [this book] ... One theory is that divination functioned as a kind of RNG for those cases when picking something at random was better than relying on your own bias, such as when and on which flank to attack an opposing army - where being unpredictable is a feature. Or, you could have discovered that stated about one scroll down from top of the article: "And sometimes it is better to have a truly random decision than to continue to follow the predictable inclinations of one’s established prejudices. Surely, the enemy will not be able to predict a shaman’s completely random decision."
fellerts 4y ago
For context, I assume the author is referring to the Oseberg Ship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oseberg_Ship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oseberg_Ship It's rather humbling to walk into its display room and I urge anyone visiting Oslo to check it out.
- deltarholamda 4y ago
  The construction methods of longboats is really quite impressive. You get a lot of strength out of the clinker-style construction, but the structure retains a lot of flexibility so it moves with the ocean. Which means you can trade beam for length and get a faster boat. And it was the SUV of its day. Shallow draft meant it had access to inland waterways, much to the consternation of various monasteries and villages.
- ianburrell 4y ago
  I think it is interesting that when author switched to thinking they were smart, he could only talk about religion. Not about the technology or how it developed.
Damogran6 4y ago
A few years back, I committed myself to learning how to machine metal. Bought a mid-60's lathe and tore it down to the bits to clean and restore it. Someone told me to buy How To Run a Lathe (https://idoc.pub/documents/how-to-run-a-lathepdf-x4e6k0o189n3 https://idoc.pub/documents/how-to-run-a-lathepdf-x4e6k0o189n...) First print was in the early 1910's, and the intro described how the magic of a lathe is that a less-precise tool can be used to make a more precise tool...how you could start with a hand powered lathe between two trees and end up with a machine that could hold half-a-thousandth of an inch in a surprisingly small number of iterations. Also, the Gingery series (https://kk.org/thetechnium/bootstrapping-t/ https://kk.org/thetechnium/bootstrapping-t/) showed how you could bootstrap a machine shop with scrap aluminum and charcoal. We've been smart apes for thousands of years.
rerdavies 4y ago
There's a much simpler explanation. That those in positions of power don't believe, and those who are not do. Which makes shamans a very effective way to manipulate your followers. Is there actually an element of randomness? Of course not. Any successful shaman knows that if you don't say what the guy in power wants you to, that you're going to wake up dead, and some other shaman is going to be doing your job.
kayodelycaon 4y ago
Lost me when he started talking about gods. Five minutes reading about modern religious practices would dispel his notation that religion was mostly pragmatical. My neighbor burns sages to remove evil spirits from her house. She fully believes this is real.
twic 4y ago
> Now that my frame “people in the past were dumb” was broken, suddenly hundreds of unanswered questions entered my mind. > Most importantly, I started to wonder “what’s up with all these gods people used to believe in?” I mean, a lot of people still believe in gods. I don't think you necessarily have to think people in the past were dumber than they are now, or had different cognitive needs than they do now, to explain gods. (Jesus really was a mushroom though)
stuckinhell 4y ago
It reads like he just discovered Graham Hancock. I do agree that the ancient peoples were not dumb, in fact as smart as we are today. So we should really think about why they decided on certain cultural traditions.
UncleMeat 4y ago
This sort of content is intensely frustrating. OP is a software engineer and entrepreneur. There are actual people who actually study this stuff for a living. They are called historians and they work extremely hard for minimal pay in a field with few jobs and crushing hours. Then some random startup person comes in and writes a blog post with a sentence like > But there’s also another option if we don’t take it for granted that people in the past were really that different from us. Like... this is the sort of sentence that makes people tear their hair out and scream into the void. It is like somebody coming to you and saying "wait... maybe we can... just hear me out... write a program in text and edit it over time to build software." My wife is a professor of history and has done work on some of the questions raised in this blog post. Usually I show her these things because I know it'll be fun to rage at them together. But this one I chose not to show her because I do not believe that I have ever seen online writing that is more dismissive of her profession than this. Like, and I cannot express this clear enough, OP is just making shit up about a field of study that is centuries old and involves professionals who work 60+ hour weeks for shit pay because they are so invested in these topics.
- davidivadavid 4y ago
  I gave this post a pass because it's not as arrogant as most HN-variety STEMlords, but yeah, it's pretty embarrassing.
  - feoren 4y ago
    I took "HN-variety STEMlord" as a poignant personal attack on me ... and one I absolutely needed to hear. Somehow it's the perfect phrase for something I've (ashamedly) done myself quite a bit. Thank you for this much needed slap in the face.
- olddustytrail 4y ago
  Well all I can say is that you and your wife must be really poor teachers. Here you have a child who knows nothing about history but has come to a realisation all by themselves about people in the past, and instead of praising them and saying, "here's where you can learn more" you decide to deride them for their ignorance. That's not ideal.
ryandrake 4y ago
Ughh, max-width of 540 pixels? This is even worse than most. I really wish sites would stop this madness. This site renders as a tiny vertical sliver down my browser window with 4X that width as whitespace. Blog authors, please stop doing this!
ChrisRR 4y ago
I skimmed the entire thing and have no idea what point he was trying to make. It felt like he's trying to sell me a self-help course.

Talking to a religious believer today will dispel this kind of thinking quickly. People really do believe in gods! Literally! And they'll die for those beliefs. It was even more true back when we didn't understand what the sun was or why it rose every morning and set every night.

Leo_Germond 4y ago
Yes sure, putting all believers in a single bag really shows how complex and informed your point on the matter is.
- kiba 4y ago
  It is difficult for me to have any faith or belief in any of the Gods or God they worship. That's pretty much only my beef with it.
  - Leo_Germond 4y ago
    It is hard to put yourself in other's people state of mind, and to reason that it's because they must be idiots is not really the proper way to go. I don't have any advice to give on religion, if it's not your thing fine, but painting people with too broad a brush may lead to misuderstandings, conflicting exchanges, and ultimately animosity for no good reason. So my only point is: you probably have something that you hold dear to your heart and you would not liked to be judged or criticized for that, in some ways it's not even anyone's business but yours. Religion, spirituality, or weird new age practices are the same for a lot of people, and it doesn't presuppose that any of this is good or bad, it just is, and mounting a file against all of that at once is bound to be fruitless, and hurtful for the people involved.
    - TomSwirly 4y ago
      > in some ways it's not even anyone's business but yours If religionists ever, ever, ever behaved that way then there would be no problem, but the fact is that for thousands of years they have imposed their beliefs on the rest of us with violence.
    - kiba 4y ago
      It is hard to put yourself in other's people state of mind, and to reason that it's because they must be idiots is not really the proper way to go. I don't have any advice to give on religion, if it's not your thing fine, but painting people with too broad a brush may lead to misuderstandings, conflicting exchanges, and ultimately animosity for no good reason I can't believe something that isn't true. It's not about them being idiots, it's about the sheer lack of evidence.
  - Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    And that's fair, nobody's telling you you should. I think. I don't believe myself, but I can recognize the comfort that people get from faith, either faith in a higher power or a belief in what happens after death. My GF is pagan, she says she can see spirits leaving the body; for her, it makes dealing with death a lot easier. Like when our dog died, she just got on with dealing with the body because it was just an empty meatsack to her. Likewise, she said she doesn't care what happens with her body after death, because empty meatsack. If that gives her comfort, who am I to tell her she's wrong? I don't know either. Personally I'm more of a nihilist and think there's nothing after death, so there's no reason to fear it or care much about it, I won't be around. I've always theorised that life-after-death religions are at least in part based on fear - fear of nothingness, or fear of being judged and punished for things done (or not done) in life. I don't want to live in fear like that myself, but if others are more fearful and find comfort in faith that's good for them.
    - TomSwirly 4y ago
      I get that, but just because a belief makes you happier, doesn't make it true. I know a lot of people who chose to believe that COVID was a hoax, and that vaccination was a conspiracy, because these beliefs made them happier. But the consequences of these false beliefs was an incredibly large amount of death and suffering, all avoidable. > she says she can see spirits leaving the body But we both know this is a false belief. If she tested this scientifically, you know she would be unable to do better than chance.
- JellyBeanThief 4y ago
  Can we please stop putting up with useless sarcasm on this site? Someone's point on a matter is simplistic and uninformed. Fine. But a fancy "you're stupid" as a response is even more devoid of content. Like, I could've just said "Wow, that really deepened the discussion there, good job". But how about this instead: Try actually specifying some of the complexities that have been missed. Try plainly demanding evidence and reasoning. Choose some goal posts and plant them firmly where they can be hit. Because if I wanted to read useless sniping I'd be on reddit.
  - Leo_Germond 4y ago
    I did not use ad hominem, I clearly and unequivocaly reflected on the post's brievity and unearned assertivity as being of little value in the context of a discussion. Maybe I'm doing a bit of sniping, but so are you, and I have the same feeling that if I wanted to read "religious is bad end of discussion" post I'd go on reddit.
    - orwin 4y ago
      I know plenty of those religious people who don't care if people have sex outside of marriage or practice sodomy, wore mismatched textiles and probably offend their god in multiple ways. You can be religious and not a believer, and the original comment only talk about believers.
  - Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    We're not "putting up" with it, we're downvoting it and ignoring it. That's how you get it to stop or at least be filtered out. It's better to shun and ignore an unwanted post than to try to berate, punish and ban or delete it, IMO. Let people shout into the void if they choose to. You gave them the validation - there is no such thing as bad attention.
blowski 4y ago
There’s quite a variety of views when you’re talking about 5 billion people. Though I’m sure it’s true for a lot of them, there are also vast numbers of people who find that style or religion rather distasteful.
ulizzle 4y ago
Ppl believe in silly stuff like gender ideology today, even tho we have an almost complete understanding of human biology, so let’s not throw stones at history
- stouset 4y ago
  > we have an almost complete understanding of human biology Frankly I can’t believe someone would state such a thing with a straight face. Also, gender is a psychological construct more than a biological one. Are you confusing gender and sex?
  - ulizzle 4y ago
    We do have an almost complete understanding, and I actually think I was being too generous; but at least for the purpose of this convo, we certainly do know about X & Y chromosomes. I don’t believe that gender is a psychological construct. I believe that gender & sex are synonymous & it’s a politically correct construct to differentiate them in any way.
    - stouset 4y ago
      Sure, why have two words to describe two separate but related concepts when we could just decide to pretend that one of those concepts doesn’t even exist? “Someone’s physical reproductive bits” and “someone’s own internal perception of their sexual identity” are two separate concepts even if you believe they ought to be in sync with one another. And then when you acknowledge that there do exist people who seem quite certain that those values differ for themselves—even if you think they oughtn’t—isn’t it nice to have a word that allows us to describe this exact scenario? Also, I’d encourage you to ask more or less any biologist whether or not they think we’re just about done wrapping up their field of expertise.
    - adrianN 4y ago
      Some people of the same sex feel differently about their bodies and their sexuality. It seems useful to me to have words to describe that difference. I don't really see an "ideology" in that any more than I see "ideology" in other cultural phenomena, e.g. "surfer dudes", "skaters", or "weed aficionados". It's only made into an ideology by people who seek divisional talking points for political discourse.
hoseja 4y ago
That's because gods evolved to more comprehensively capture their hosts, early gods might not have been so efficient.
m_mueller 4y ago
I'd roughly put individual 'religion' of a person into one of two bags: cultural and faith (what you're talking about). The faith part by far not every member of a religion actually shares if they can talk openly (and the differences between the religion on this matter is quite vast). Some examples: East Asian state religions are almost entirely a cultural thing outside of monk communities. Judaism I'd also expect to be majority cultural only. Christianity in Europe, again, mostly cultural. I think the US has a bit of a different viewpoint since the boundaries between Christians that have faith with those that don't, are much more extreme and seem to regularly cause interpersonal conflict.
- reissbaker 4y ago
  Sure -- that's why I specified religious believer (i.e. someone with faith in their deity/religion, not a religiously-cultural agnostic/atheist). I myself am culturally Jewish, but don't believe in the religion or in any particular deity. But I grew up Orthodox, and for the most part they nearly all actually do believe in a God. It's not fake! And they're not stupid; plenty of them are extremely smart, hold advanced degrees, etc. The OP's belief that since ancient people were smart, they must not have actually believed in gods, just doesn't hold. It's a myopic viewpoint that can be dispelled simply by talking to people today who believe in gods and are perfectly smart too.
  - m_mueller 4y ago
    I suspect again that it comes from this religious-vs-atheist trench warfare that has developed along mostly political boundaries in the US. On the other side of the Atlantic, I'd claim religion is mostly just a private thing that people don't bother each other about much.
    - Jensson 4y ago
      When a large part of the population vote based on their religion then separation of church and state doesn't really work. For example if a part of the population votes that all stores needs to be closed on Sundays because Sundays are holy days then it affects non-believers. That isn't a joke, that is what some countries in Europe looks like, how do you argue against that without arguing that their beliefs are nonsense?
fsckboy 4y ago
why would understanding the sun's energy or orbits change your ideas about the Creator? The foundations of science come from studying nature to learn more about the truth of creation.
- reissbaker 4y ago
  If you previously believed that the sun rose every morning because it was attached to Helios's chariot and he flew it across the sky, and then you discovered that actually the sun didn't rise at all and it only seemed to "rise" and "set" because the Earth was rotating on its axis, and also the sun was a giant perpetually-exploding hydrogen bomb that the Earth orbits and definitely can't be attached to someone's chariot and dragged around the Earth, you might stop believing that the people who told you it was because of Helios and his flying chariot had any idea what they were talking about.
  - generalizations 4y ago
    I don't think the Greeks of Socrates/Plato/Aristotle's time were atheists, though they had some decently mechanistic views of astronomy, IIRC. Not totally sure your example holds up.
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      Actually, in Ancient Greeks some people took that knowledge and actually became atheists. Some of the 'cool' young intellectual would walk into temples and say 'stick me down if you exist' and then were smug when it didn't happen. It also became a common believe that all gods are just historical figures and stories. However the norm for most of history is to find some way to ratify the two believes even if they contradict. Ancient Jewish writers like Philo simply wrote a whole bunch of stuff about how every part of the bible is to be interpreted as some Platonic way. He was very influential on Christianity. Ironically he had basically no influence on what became modern Judaism and his interpretation were all rejected. And this is not just between science and religion. Even within religion this is a problem, because they are simply contradictory. Its literally possible to believe in all of the bible, because it contradicts itself. And trying to reason your way around all that nonsense requires tons of scholars coming up with elaborate explanations on why everything is actually not nonsense. Usually you have some elite set of priests who guard the interpretation. Today, there are whole field of Christian fundamentalists apologists who have whole universities field with smart people who do nothing then trying to 'read' the bible in ways that is not contradicting even if it very clearly is. The simply fact is, unless you view the bible purely allegorically and massively change the interpretation totally from what anybody who actually wrote the bible might have believed you can't have a modern scientific worldview and be a Christian. But at that point you can just base your worldview on Lord of the Rings or whatever you want because its your morals driving the interpretation, not the other way around. So its easy and reasonably consistent to believe in a Prime Originator who started the universe and then just let laws of physics work, but that is very different basically all religion.
sammalloy 4y ago
I think there was likely always a small percentage of the ruling class or philosopher kings who knew it was bogus but needed a "noble lie" to make their society work. Not much has changed.
- Tostino 4y ago
  I think hierarchy of needs comes into play here. You may not spend all that much time thinking about philosophy if you're foraging or farming, and busy with physical labor. Also, messages get lost, and misinterpreted. Quickly. I do believe that most [non explicit cult] religious texts shouldn't be interpreted literally, but instead take them the lessons they teach, or are interpreted to be.
  - sammalloy 4y ago
    It’s an interesting discussion, really. A lot of wisdom literature outside of academic discourse emphasizes the philosophy of the common man. This gets lost at higher levels of study. Zen Buddhism emphasizes the mundane ("chop wood, carry water"), while some Christian sects embody their philosophy through work and service to others. I agree with what you say about not interpreting texts literally, but we have a real problem in the US with angry, vocal, and frankly violent religious people who defend inerrant scriptural readings of the text. Outside of the US, I think it would be difficult to have a discussion in, let’s say, a predominantly Muslim county, where I held a debate about how the Quran should not be interpreted literally. So while I agree completely with the spirit of what you say, the practical reality is very different.

readthenotes1 4y ago

Tldr: teenager reads Macbeth and realizes that people are the same then as now. We just put our pants on differently.

2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
Is this guy a teenager? Or do you just mean metaphorically? It’s a weird article. There are Christians right now who are scientists and mathematicians. Are they dumb? Clearly not if they achieved certain levels of education. And if you made it past high school and did sciences, you quickly realise the ancient people figured out all sorts of nifty tricks to workout things like the diameter of the earth in 240BC. Modern people also believe all sorts of dumb things. That’s why we have conspiracy theorists.
- cynicalsecurity 4y ago
  You can get an education and become smart, but not wise. Works for everyone, both believers and not.

mdmglr 4y ago

> For most of my life I had assumed that all the people that had lived before our modern times were dumb. Really dumb. Borderline braindead. What education institution is responsible for this?

Dalewyn 4y ago
Society at large. When you paint faithful people as morons, primitive people as stupid, old fashioned people as out of touch, etc., kids and even younger adults are going to come to the logical conclusion. We aren't even getting into the recent nonsense of declaring our histories as shameful pieces of shit to be revised and forgotten. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
pbazarnik 4y ago
Not teaching history of mathematics, science. Teaching STEM with total disconnect to the historical developments of these disciplines. Perfect theories out of the blue. (Not teaching the dead ends: phlogiston, ether etc)
- Leo_Germond 4y ago
  I believe we are slowly but surely getting out of this. Positivism as a strict adherence to the dogma of "the scientific fact" (with a conveniently moving definition, backed-up by Sagan quotes for TV viewers, or Popper for book readers) is as nefarious as any totalitarian idea. Yes scientific papers are great, no I don't put too much weight on someone's take on hapiness, truth, or the fundamental nature of our universe just because they're wearing a lab coat, that would quite literally be thinking that the cowl makes the monk.
  - adrianN 4y ago
    >Yes scientific papers are great, no I don't put too much weight on someone's take on hapiness, truth, or the fundamental nature of our universe just because they're wearing a lab coat, that would quite literally be thinking that the cowl makes the monk Sounds a bit like a straw man to me. "Scientific fact" by definition is subject to change. The "scientific facts" we have right now are the best explanation for reality that we have. Nobody who isn't a researcher in a particular field has the required context to judge whether some fringe theories have the potential to displace the current consensus, so it's prudent to just accept the consensus as a layperson.

ulizzle 4y ago

How can anyone think that people before modern times did not know anything about science, practically “brain dead” as the article states (CRINGE) when Einstein died almost a century ago? The Dunning-Kruger makes my head hurt.

kfrzcode 4y ago
Take some pain reliever and chew on it... Also maybe modern times is most commonly known as like the last 2k years or so. Egyptians and Mayans and Olmec and so many other cultures have left fingerprints of their engineering prowess. Listen to Graham Hancock with earnest and you'll have a mystery on your hands.
- wolverine876 4y ago
  Usually, modern history in this sense begins with the Rennaisance (~13th-15th cen). 2,000 years encompasses the Middle Ages, which are held up as nadir of history.
  - defrost 4y ago
    > 2,000 years encompasses the Middle Ages Err, ~ 850 years, maybe 1,000 years at most, from the fall of Rome ( ~470 CE ) to the beginning of the 14th Century (1301 CE) perhaps to 1501 CE depending on your historian of choice. > held up as nadir of history. Not so much a low point of human activity, but definitely a low point in the human activity of recording history.
  - unmole 4y ago
    > encompasses the Middle Ages, which are held up as nadir of history If you think only Europe matters, sure.
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      It is still wrong even if you think only Europe matters!
  - 4y ago

sanat 4y ago

I've had similar revelations to culturally held beliefs which look like rituals. Some Hindu communities don't allow families to enter a temple if someone in your close family has passed away for 14 days. They couldn't explain contagious diseases then, but realised that if it can kill you, something would show up within 14 days and it's better if you don't enter community spaces. Reframing these rituals as explanations that could be given at time is a good way to look at the world.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
Likewise, circumcision was a health practice, still applied today to pigs for the same reason. With both health things and laws, it's often easier to convince people they have to do it because a higher power than them says so, than to explain the reasoning to them. I mean think of children or dogs (if I may be cruel). A dog doesn't understand why he shouldn't eat off the table, but they do understand that if they do they will get punished. You can't reason with a dog (although it's cute if you talk to them), but you can teach them cause and effect. I'm still pretty convinced that, while humans individually are and have been pretty smart for as long as we can remember, as a group and statistically they're pretty stupid. If percentage-wise more people will wash their hands and feet more often if they do it as part of a religious ritual, then it's worthwhile.
unmole 4y ago
> They couldn't explain contagious diseases then, but realised that if it can kill you, something would show up within 14 days and it's better if you don't enter community spaces. But somehow no text suggests anything of the sort and the reasoning is always in terms of ritual purity. And the prohibition is only on entering sacred spaces which must be kept ritually pure. There is no prohibition in entering other community spaces.

dools 4y ago

I remember the first time I genuinely lost my "modern techno hubris", I was about 25 years old. I was in the throes of lamenting the peak oil situation after watching the doco The End of Suburbia and reading The Long Emergency. I was at the tail end of a mechatronic engineering degree and thought it was just my luck that, after having found something I really enjoyed, it was all about to become obsolete as we devolved into picking through rubbish tips for food scraps. I became interested in permaculture and went to visit a farm on the outskirts of Sydney to see how it worked. While talking to the guy there about the land, I all of a sudden realised how information rich this environment was, and how similar the task of managing it was to any other creative or engineering endeavour. I realised that the people who stood in that spot 60,000 years ago and worked with the land to sustain themselves were "doing engineering" as much as I could ever hope to. It was a tremendous relief to know that I could get the same thrill from engineering a landscape as I could from engineering a microcontroller, and it gave me a respect for Indigenous Technical Knowledge. I thought about how much ITK must have been lost during colonisation, and how we might regain it.

TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
Similar experience, about twenty years ago I hung out briefly at David Holmgrens house (Melliodora) in Dja Dja Wurrung Country in Central Victoria (Hepburn Springs), followed by some WWOOFing experiences in Tasmania, where I returned to ten years ago. My primary income is engineering focused still, and definitely glad I have that permaculture mindset.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
I love watching this guy on youtube, Primitive Technology, because I see him do things and think, if I were in that situation - or out in the sticks with nothing but my trousers on - I too would get creative with clay and whatever else he's got available to him, with just the basic knowledge of things that I have picked up over the years. And that's just from absorption, if you and a hundred generations of your ancestors lived in that situation they'd thrive. I can see why there's many that claim that older times were more leisurely, as in, less time spent "working" as people do today. I'm not saying it was easier, but definitely simpler.
4y ago

exitb 4y ago

People went to the Moon and praised their god there, it doesn’t seem like that much of a stretch that humans in the past could be both competent and religious.

nopenotthat 4y ago

[flagged]

_corvo_ 4y ago
This feels like a personal attack on the author. I see this as an opinion and everyone is entitled to theirs. In fact, author makes good points like the consensus building via runes/fortune tellers. Can you provide examples of ignorance, arrogance?
- swatcoder 4y ago
  “I thought everybody was dumb but it turns out they saw the same things in weird ways!” Is wrong twice (ignorance), while still asserting superiority (arrogance). Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but said opinions can still be ignorant and arrogant. It was going off-guidelines for them to say the author should be embarrassed but not for calling out the character of the essay itself. It’s genuinely very insensitive, uninformed, and misguided.
  - _corvo_ 4y ago
    “I thought everybody was dumb but it turns out they saw the same things in weird ways!” I see superiority but ignorance? If anything, author is admitting ignorance here. Re-reading some parts and looking at other quotes, they're definitely coming across as arrogant. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but said opinions can still be ignorant and arrogant. I agree, my issue was that parent comment felt like an Ad hominem attack. Looking at rest of the discussion, I can see how a lot of the essay is insensitive. And it's a little bit of self promotion as well (author submitting their own article). I still learned at least one thing that changed my world view slightly, so I wanted to argue against such a dismissal. Could be my situation, I'm wrestling with some of the religious beliefs with my family. If nothing, seeing utility of existing customs is an improvement over dismissing them outright as useless or uninformed.
    - nopenotthat 4y ago

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago

I broke a 10 year spell of entrepreneurial failure with vase breathing, kaballah and rituals. I am an atheist. But there is something about the idea about the aether containing ideas which you can pluck from. Einstein and company were fond of it too. The mind is like a radio and all that. Point being, this year I had $4 million profits / taxable income. Pure rationality just wasn't enough.

tmp60beb0ed 4y ago
Can you say more?
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
  Sure. Anything particular? Basically, it is all about mindset and filters right? You have better ideas about things your mind focuses on which is sold as the "law of attraction". But you can get to a state where ideas are free flowing and make sense in the context of the problem when the mind has had the chance to break free from the usual loops it is running. All these activities I mentioned essentially do that in a way which doesn't make sense to the rational brain so it can't cordon it off. This Quora answer might also help: https://qr.ae/prWLjc https://qr.ae/prWLjc
adrianN 4y ago
Don't attribute to magic what can also be attributed to luck.
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
  Sure. But I haven't had luck in the past? I think it is a bit more than that. I think it is alchemical change of an entire person. The philosopher's stone is less important than the actual whole personhood change. And once you go down this path you will realize, it is not some one off magical event. It is rather a change of state. That is why it is so hard to explain and test for.
mxmbrb 4y ago
Beeing determined is the limiting trait in healthy educated humans. If we can fix this by culture, devices or drugs, humanity will take its bigges leap since the invention of machines and evolve into an never before seen powerhouse of technology, compassion, creativity and innovation.

thriftwy 4y ago

Looking at all the architecture around me would suggest that people all had an IQ of 170 one and half century ago, whereas our current average is 80. You can't end admiring the people who built these beautiful (but also ironic and meaningful) houses.

vore 4y ago
This is just a complete baloney non-sequitur. What does architectural style have to do with the average IQ?
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  There is an argument to be made that people of olden times were far, far, far, far more capable at a fundamental level than people of today.
  - edent 4y ago
    Because they had to be. I don't need to know how to grow crops, weave a shirt, or wire a plug - those things have been mechanised and automated. Would someone from 200 years ago trade having to gather firewood for flicking a switch for instant heat? Absolutely! Would you trade access to Wikipedia for having to travel to a monastery in order to look up a scrap of information? Unlikely!
    - swatcoder 4y ago
      Hah. There are absolutely people here on HN right now who would be happy to live in a world of quiet labor and pilgrimages and digital disconnection. Other lifestyles needn’t be romanticized more than our own, but they also don’t need to be demonized. Keeping yourself safe and fed isn’t a big stress for most people through most of history, yet does get quite hard for some people some times even now. The difference is mostly just textural.
  - vore 4y ago
    We are no longer a hunter-gatherer or agrarian society -- people of olden times would fare as well in our society as we would in theirs. Maybe they could be more self-sufficient, but modern society is free from tending to our fields or bison or whatever so we can have more time to do things beyond just subsistence farming during all our waking hours.

monero-xmr 4y ago

I literally go worship a sky deity every week with my family, along with a lot of my friends

Terretta 4y ago
One, or three, or three-in-one?
- monero-xmr 4y ago
  three-in-one

braingenious 4y ago

tl;dr: Tech founder newsletter guy saw a boat and was absolutely ethered by the idea that he had single-handedly manifested the concept that there were smart people before now. The sheer weight of the this beautiful satori inspired a post of heretofore unimaginable power

iamflimflam1 4y ago
Probably more likely - tech founder newsletter guy needs to keep up his posting schedule and knocked together some low effort content.

LudwigNagasena 4y ago

I feel like the author barely learned anything from that experience. One can imagine the irony of reading writings by a devout Christian who gets surprised by sophistication of heretics like Aristotle and Avicenna yet still keeps his absolute conviction in his own beliefs without any doubt or self-reflection as if it is something self-evident. Have the author ever tried to understand what is science and engineering, and how they are justified? Does he believe in human rights? Have he ever thought where his ethical system originates? The author seems to firmly believe that he lives in “the end of history”; so the biggest insight he could come up with is that scriptures are kind of self-help books and prayers are kind of exercises that treat anxiety.

Dalewyn 4y ago
>I feel like the author barely learned anything from that experience. The author very likely did learn nothing, he unfortunately doesn't have a sense for appreciation and learning: "... when you visit a museum everything is kind of broken, so nothing is really that impressive." You have to have a certain level of historical, scientific, and cultural apathy and arrogance to be able to say something like that with a straight face. Being in a museum is a humbling experience.
- cturner 4y ago
  He is explaining an experience. Usually museums have no effect on him, he cannot appreciate, for reasons stated. This he did appreciate, and he explains it.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
Yeah, I agree. It starts out all "Woah, I was arrogant as hell to believe that everyone who lived in the past was very dumb" and moves right on into "these ignorant backwards spiritualists believe in nonsense, but purely by coincidence that nonsense happens to actually be effective and if I reframe it in the clearly superior terms of secular western society it can make sense".
beepbooptheory 4y ago
Right, this is just Dawkin's-type nonesense with a patronizing mask on. In what way is even our modern scientific secularism not ultimately the same kind of faith that the author thinks is "dumb"? Yes, yes, empiricism, method, peer review, the proof is in the technology pudding. All so many things that still produce a mind ultimately indistinguishable from a religious fanatic who is assured in their beliefs, mobilized to tell people they are wrong.. One can't help but have some kind of faith, you have to believe in something. Putting your belief in an entire enterprise of empirical observation doesn't change the act itself, your not smarter because you happen to live at this time where you can put your belief into this particular enterprise of modern science, its just the cards you were dealt.

rich_sasha 4y ago

...or, you know, some kind of spiritual world is real, and people of the past, being less distracted with stuff, were better attuned to it. Like most people can't see the starry skies anymore (direct and obvious evidence that it doesn't exist!) and yet, you know, it's there. I guess you put the line somewhere between considering other people's beliefs and "duh".

simple-thoughts 4y ago

It’s funny to see someone, after realizing that humans in the past are just as intelligent as the ones today, interpret all past human beliefs through his own worldview rather than seriously considering that his worldview may be the one that is flawed rather than the most intelligent humans of the past. Believing that people in pre industrial societies had post industrial beliefs and were only pretending flies in the face of mountains of evidence both historical and anthropological.

feoren 4y ago
> interpret all past human beliefs through his own worldview rather than seriously considering that his worldview may be the one that is flawed rather than the most intelligent humans of the past You're saying it's irrational to assume that smart people with the accumulated knowledge of nearly all of humanity at their fingertips, backed by hundreds of years of the most effective method for knowledge collection humanity has ever known, analyzed by incredibly sophisticated statistics, pondered by a network of millions of specialists, distributed and digested and re-interpreted and challenged by literally billions of literate humans; versus smart people with much less efficient means of knowledge collection, an extremely low literacy rate, no effective methods of statistical analysis, poor data collection measures, no scientific method, and only a handful of knowledge specialists ... it's irrational to assume the former group has a better understanding of the world than the latter?
- simple-thoughts 4y ago
  Our current collective knowledge strongly indicates that pre industrial societies really, sincerely believed many things we consider ridiculous today. Those beliefs were the product of an ecosystem that was just as detailed and complex to them as our society is to us - a realization the author of this blog post had after viewing a Viking ship that you apparently haven’t had yet. Of course our beliefs make sense to us in our post industrial society, and even if those beliefs aren’t some kind of ultimate truth they are incredibly useful for navigating our world. For instance, even though the function of corporate logos may be closer to magic sigils than rational objects, thinking of them as rational objects allows branding agencies to design more effective logos. But in a past world where marketing agencies didn’t exist, treating symbols as having inherent magical power more closely reflected the realities of certain times. There’s a further step since our world isn’t static, and many of us carry beliefs that just don’t work well anymore. An example some might agree with is the rejection of any kind of religiosity. Humans need social community to live a healthy and happy life. While I’m not saying that we should return to a religious era, someone who found themselves in a lonely situation might want to reconsider what beliefs led to that situation and update them to be more effective.

taylorius 4y ago

I can definitely relate to the notion that really good ideas come from somewhere outside oneself. This happens to me sometimes with musical ideas. If I consciously try to come up with a melody, it will never sound any good - whereas any good musical ideas I've had, just sort of appear fully formed - from somewhere...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

wolverine876 4y ago

> For most of my life I had assumed that all the people that had lived before our modern times were dumb. Really dumb. Borderline braindead. It's an extreme strawperson argument. That's not what I think and thought of pre-modern people, nor does it match anything I've read. They were biologically the same species as us. However, there was almost universal illiteracy and belief in things like causing sick people to bleed, witches, alchemy; embrace of extreme cruetly; disasterous (by modern standards) outcomes for lifespan, health, survival of children, justice, freedom, prosperity, famine, war, etc. etc. We're not so perfect. The trick is to learn about humanity - about ourselves - from them, and look closely in the mirror for our own cruetly, etc. How many people die from lack of healthcare, for example?

Nevermark 4y ago

> And sometimes it is better to have a truly random decision than to continue to follow the predictable inclinations of one’s established prejudices. Surely, the enemy will not be able to predict a shaman’s completely random decision. Our individual brains do this too. Belief grabs hold of one viewpoint, because it looks like the best for a moment, because things will go better for us if agree with our group, because it makes us feel better, because we want other people to believe it for our own reasons, because we are too tired to care, ... Then it discards future alternatives, saving wasted cognition rethinking over and over. Our brains don't care what the truth is, they care that we operate well. And there are so many good reasons to believe something that isn't true. Many people have a hard time grasping that their feelings of overwhelming certainty, have virtually nothing to do with actual certainty. And that is the way our DNA builds us! Constantly integrating new idea's is costly. Fatiguing. Ideology is so cognitively efficient. And our certainty feels so good!

jerrygoyal 4y ago

Do reverse psychology i.e. how do you keep people from doing bad things? Religions/societies around the world have different ways to maintain the order. Hindu religion propose incarnation belief.. they say if you do bad stuff in this life, the bad stuff will happen to you in your next life and of course you won't be able to remember your previous life. It's a perfect theory because it's unfalsifiable. And it works in India. Of course you don't necessarily need to believe in such theories to know that you shouldn't do be doing bad stuff anyway but hey most people aren't that smart hence the unfalsifiable theory :)

azubinski 4y ago

"Usually, when you visit a museum everything is kind of broken, so nothing is really that impressive" "Writer on entrepreneurship, creativity, and marketing with over 10,000 email subscribers" O woe to vikings, woe to us.

mrguyorama 4y ago
And we wonder why the modern business environment is so toxic, broken, and self centered.

red_admiral 4y ago

There is a lot more on the role of gods and magic in the book "The Secret of our Success" [1]. I'm not sure if all of the studies in there have been replicated, but it's certainly food for thought. One theory is that divination functioned as a kind of RNG for those cases when picking something at random was better than relying on your own bias, such as when and on which flank to attack an opposing army - where being unpredictable is a feature. Another example from the book is that certain types of shark were taboo to pregnant women in ancient Polynesia; no-one could explain why except for things like "it would upset the gods otherwise". But it turns out that said animals' meat actually contain chemicals that are indeed bad to consume when you're pregnant. I can also recommend Brett Deveraux' "Practical Polytheism" series [2]. One of his key quotes is "It is safe to assume that people in the past believed their religion." (Actually, I can recommend all of acoup.blog to HN readers, including the latest post on ChatGPT, but that's going off topic.) [1] https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Our-Success-Evolution-Domesticating/dp/0691166854 https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Our-Success-Evolution-Domestic... [2] https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polytheism-part-i-knowledge/ https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polythei...

Terretta 4y ago
> There is a lot more on the role of gods and magic in [this book] ... One theory is that divination functioned as a kind of RNG for those cases when picking something at random was better than relying on your own bias, such as when and on which flank to attack an opposing army - where being unpredictable is a feature. Or, you could have discovered that stated about one scroll down from top of the article: "And sometimes it is better to have a truly random decision than to continue to follow the predictable inclinations of one’s established prejudices. Surely, the enemy will not be able to predict a shaman’s completely random decision."

fellerts 4y ago

For context, I assume the author is referring to the Oseberg Ship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oseberg_Ship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oseberg_Ship It's rather humbling to walk into its display room and I urge anyone visiting Oslo to check it out.

deltarholamda 4y ago
The construction methods of longboats is really quite impressive. You get a lot of strength out of the clinker-style construction, but the structure retains a lot of flexibility so it moves with the ocean. Which means you can trade beam for length and get a faster boat. And it was the SUV of its day. Shallow draft meant it had access to inland waterways, much to the consternation of various monasteries and villages.
ianburrell 4y ago
I think it is interesting that when author switched to thinking they were smart, he could only talk about religion. Not about the technology or how it developed.

Damogran6 4y ago

A few years back, I committed myself to learning how to machine metal. Bought a mid-60's lathe and tore it down to the bits to clean and restore it. Someone told me to buy How To Run a Lathe (https://idoc.pub/documents/how-to-run-a-lathepdf-x4e6k0o189n3 https://idoc.pub/documents/how-to-run-a-lathepdf-x4e6k0o189n...) First print was in the early 1910's, and the intro described how the magic of a lathe is that a less-precise tool can be used to make a more precise tool...how you could start with a hand powered lathe between two trees and end up with a machine that could hold half-a-thousandth of an inch in a surprisingly small number of iterations. Also, the Gingery series (https://kk.org/thetechnium/bootstrapping-t/ https://kk.org/thetechnium/bootstrapping-t/) showed how you could bootstrap a machine shop with scrap aluminum and charcoal. We've been smart apes for thousands of years.

rerdavies 4y ago

There's a much simpler explanation. That those in positions of power don't believe, and those who are not do. Which makes shamans a very effective way to manipulate your followers. Is there actually an element of randomness? Of course not. Any successful shaman knows that if you don't say what the guy in power wants you to, that you're going to wake up dead, and some other shaman is going to be doing your job.

kayodelycaon 4y ago

Lost me when he started talking about gods. Five minutes reading about modern religious practices would dispel his notation that religion was mostly pragmatical. My neighbor burns sages to remove evil spirits from her house. She fully believes this is real.

twic 4y ago

> Now that my frame “people in the past were dumb” was broken, suddenly hundreds of unanswered questions entered my mind. > Most importantly, I started to wonder “what’s up with all these gods people used to believe in?” I mean, a lot of people still believe in gods. I don't think you necessarily have to think people in the past were dumber than they are now, or had different cognitive needs than they do now, to explain gods. (Jesus really was a mushroom though)

stuckinhell 4y ago

It reads like he just discovered Graham Hancock. I do agree that the ancient peoples were not dumb, in fact as smart as we are today. So we should really think about why they decided on certain cultural traditions.

UncleMeat 4y ago

This sort of content is intensely frustrating. OP is a software engineer and entrepreneur. There are actual people who actually study this stuff for a living. They are called historians and they work extremely hard for minimal pay in a field with few jobs and crushing hours. Then some random startup person comes in and writes a blog post with a sentence like > But there’s also another option if we don’t take it for granted that people in the past were really that different from us. Like... this is the sort of sentence that makes people tear their hair out and scream into the void. It is like somebody coming to you and saying "wait... maybe we can... just hear me out... write a program in text and edit it over time to build software." My wife is a professor of history and has done work on some of the questions raised in this blog post. Usually I show her these things because I know it'll be fun to rage at them together. But this one I chose not to show her because I do not believe that I have ever seen online writing that is more dismissive of her profession than this. Like, and I cannot express this clear enough, OP is just making shit up about a field of study that is centuries old and involves professionals who work 60+ hour weeks for shit pay because they are so invested in these topics.

davidivadavid 4y ago
I gave this post a pass because it's not as arrogant as most HN-variety STEMlords, but yeah, it's pretty embarrassing.
- feoren 4y ago
  I took "HN-variety STEMlord" as a poignant personal attack on me ... and one I absolutely needed to hear. Somehow it's the perfect phrase for something I've (ashamedly) done myself quite a bit. Thank you for this much needed slap in the face.
olddustytrail 4y ago
Well all I can say is that you and your wife must be really poor teachers. Here you have a child who knows nothing about history but has come to a realisation all by themselves about people in the past, and instead of praising them and saying, "here's where you can learn more" you decide to deride them for their ignorance. That's not ideal.

ryandrake 4y ago

Ughh, max-width of 540 pixels? This is even worse than most. I really wish sites would stop this madness. This site renders as a tiny vertical sliver down my browser window with 4X that width as whitespace. Blog authors, please stop doing this!

ChrisRR 4y ago

I skimmed the entire thing and have no idea what point he was trying to make. It felt like he's trying to sell me a self-help course.