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I don’t understand how people underestimate it so badly when we have so much history we are taught that demonstrates it. History makes it abundantly clear that

I don’t understand how people underestimate it so badly when we have so much history we are taught that demonstrates it. History makes it abundantly clear that it is a regular occurrence for large groups of people to collectively believe things for which there is little evidence, and furthermore, to take extreme actions based on such beliefs. This applies to you too, reader. Many would read the above and fully agree with it, but fail to apply it to themselves and the groups they identify with. It is even more important to critically consider your own beliefs than the beliefs of others.

Eisenstein 2y ago
> I don’t understand how people underestimate it so badly when we have so much history we are taught that demonstrates it. It is the tendency to think that people in the past were dumb, and we aren't. Like, there always has to be some explanation involved when we learn that people did something unintuitive in the past -- people learned how to make beer by accidentally leaving leftover bread in liquid and then drank it when they were starving. Maybe? Or maybe they figured out that things ferment and played with it until it worked, like we would have done it? Why does it always have to be an accident? People may have had less access to information and technology, but that didn't make them any dumber than we are now.
- RajT88 2y ago
  > People may have had less access to information and technology, but that didn't make them any dumber than we are now. There's probably an aspect to people confusing "knowledge" with "brainpower". People in the past were just as good at figuring stuff out as we are today. We have the advantage of Millenia of stuff figured out and documented. So we know on average more about how the universe works than people in the distant past.
  - abakker 2y ago
    I’d say it: we know that some people currently know more, but, the average person mostly knows something about what is known, rather than knowing it directly.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    > People in the past were just as good at figuring stuff out as we are today. I seriously doubt that. My experience in college was not to learn facts and formulae, but to learn how to learn. I.e. training the mind. It's similar to athletes. The worst Olympic athlete today would blow away the best from a century ago. That's not because people are inherently stronger today, but because we know how to train much better.
    - Eisenstein 2y ago
      But again, that is access to knowledge. How good would your college education have been if there was no library or textbooks? If you took the athletes today without their support team and sent them back in time two years before an Olympics event to compete on their own, I don't think it would be as big of a blowout as you suggest.
      - sethherr 2y ago
        It would be a huge blowout. We didn’t know how to train or eat and athletes smoked and drank substantially more. Meanwhile, the gear evolutions make significant difference. But take distance running - prior to 1954, nobody had done a sub 4 minute mile. After that was known to be possible multiple people sub 4 minute miled in the following decade. If you sent a top runner back a hundred years they would be able to run a sub 4 minute mile, even with 1920s equipment - and the world record in 1923 was 4:10
        yread 2y ago
        > even with 1920s equipment Are you sure about that? Can you post a result where someone ran with leather shoes on asphalt?
        hilux 2y ago
        Zola Budd, a woman, ran a barefoot mile in 4:17.57, which is about 10 seconds slower than the current women's WR. The men's mile WR is about 24 seconds faster than the women's. Presumably plenty of barefoot African dudes could run a mile a lot faster than Budd did. With the exception of the new "energy return" shoes, there's no evidence that shoes help runners run faster - probably the opposite.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  Initial technological progress was agonizingly slow. Presuming that man then was just as smart as today, why would that be so? I suspect it is because the thought of what might be possible just never entered their minds. For example, Edison invented the idea of the invention development laboratory. Very, very recently. The Wright Bros were the first to come up with the idea of a research and development laboratory - just over a century ago.
  - Eisenstein 2y ago
    More likely it was because the systems didn't exist that incentivized figuring out solutions to the problems which technology solves. Agriculture, animal husbandry, arts, warfare, engineering were all very sophisticated, limited by the materials science available (firearms, for instance, need very strong metals not to explode). The scientists that existed before the industrial age in the West were upper class, bored and educated men who did it for their own amusement. It wasn't until the abandonment of the economic system which worked on the assumption that international economics was zero sum and capitalism (and imperialism) took hold that the incentive structure for creating novel technologies could exist. This is all recollection based on various histories I have consumed and may not be entirely correct, but I'm pretty sure the idea is solid.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      > More likely it was because the systems didn't exist that incentivized figuring out solutions to the problems which technology solves. That is partially true. There is no incentive, for example, for slaves to make any improvements. I cannot think of any technology developed by slaves. That meant the few people in power were not enough to think of much new stuff. You could say free markets were the greatest invention, because it incentivized everyone to be a creator. The evolution of guns is an interesting topic. So is the evolution of sailing ships. The latter occurred over thousands of years. Very very slow! You might want to investigate James Burke's "Connections" book and series. It's an entertaining overview of the history of invention.
      - 2y ago
- jyounker 2y ago
  > Why does it always have to be an accident? Because that's a surprisingly common way for things to be discovered. Saccharine? Somebody working in a lab didn't clean their hands well, licked their fingers, and discovered it was sweet. Aspartame? Somebody working in a lab didn't clean their hands well, licked their fingers, and discovered it was sweet. I think this is true of basically every major artificial sweetener except invert sugar.
  - rob74 2y ago
    Same as the famous discovery of Penicillin in a petri dish contaminated with a mold that killed off the bacteria? ...but now I'm starting to wonder how many people working in a lab didn't clean their hands well, licked their fingers, and died, because they had accidentally discovered a toxin?
    - Eisenstein 2y ago
      Except it happened to be in a petri dish and it happened to be observed at the time by a scientist. Total accident!
      - bregma 2y ago
        Serendipity favours the prepared mind. That's all.
    - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
      Dying is still a valuable scientific outcome, but few people become famous for it except maybe Marie Curie.
- sdwr 2y ago
  The funny thing is that, if anything, we are the dumb ones in this scenario. They figured it out through reasoning and trial and error and raw experience, while for us it's apparently impossible to learn anything we don't already know the answer for.
kykeonaut 2y ago
thinking about lizard with lizard brain hard
darepublic 2y ago
> I don’t understand how people underestimate it so badly ... explained by(?) > History makes it abundantly clear that it is a regular occurrence for large groups of people to collectively believe things for which there is little evidence, and furthermore, to take extreme actions based on such beliefs.
carlosjobim 2y ago
We have just gone through the most massive event in this category in the lifetime of most people alive today, and the next such event is quite openly being planned for execution. Each and every one of us knows very well by now how we reacted to mass psychological movements and how we will react to the next one, which is of course the next great war.
- Loughla 2y ago
  What? What great war did we all live through and what's being openly planned? I feel like either you're being dramatic or I'm waaaayyyyy more out of touch than I thought I was. Both are possible, so I need some clarification.
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
    We went through covid, just a couple of years ago. Each of us know how we reacted and how we behaved. The great war between Russia and NATO is being openly planned right now, by both sides. European and Russian media has reached a war frenzy that probably hasn't been seen since WWI.
    - aguaviva 2y ago
      The great war between Russia and NATO is being openly planned right now, by both sides. I don't see any basis for this view. There are indications that the two sides may be sleepwalking towards a great conflict. But neither side is specifically intending to start or escalate towards such a conflict.
      - carlosjobim 2y ago
        Today from Russian media: "All NATO decision-makers from countries that provided military assistance to Bandera Ukraine are participating in a hybrid or conventional war against Russia… All these individuals can and should be considered legitimate military targets for the Russian state,” Medvedev said" Every media outlet in Nordic countries talk about a Russia-NATO war within the near future or whether Russia and NATO already are at war. NATO leaders are publicly asking for more defense spending to combat Russia. If you read Nordic message boards, most users are cheerfully looking forward to "winning a war against Ruzzia", and I don't doubt that the same idiotic attitudes are found among the Russians as well.
dboreham 2y ago
The counter delusion is a built in emergent property of the system.
mithametacs 2y ago
I've undergone psychiatric care for things not related to psychosis. As for psychosis, I am mentally healthy. As a child I was obsessed with math. I had a pseudo-religious obsession with Platonism, connected with my childhood fear of mortality. A bizarre belief system. While trying to make new friends in a new city, I was shunned from a new group for unknown reasons. I was going through a breakup from an abuser. I was depressed and grasping for explanations, thinking I was being conspired against. A persecution complex. Lack of information and strong emotion are enough.
nathan_compton 2y ago
Arguably its because in many cases mass delusion is adaptive - it organizes and simplifies how groups of people behave. Religion is a cultural mass delusion (don't worry, I'm not talking about YOUR religion, just the other ones) with significant adaptive qualities, people argue. Even more broadly, rationality and empiricism are extremely powerful tools for understanding the world, but they are also extremely difficult and costly to use, to say nothing of their known limitations at tackling complex systems. People have to and do believe stuff just to get through their day. I think this only becomes disturbing when its just one part of the culture which decides to believe some other complex of ideas than the mainstream one.

Eisenstein 2y ago

> I don’t understand how people underestimate it so badly when we have so much history we are taught that demonstrates it. It is the tendency to think that people in the past were dumb, and we aren't. Like, there always has to be some explanation involved when we learn that people did something unintuitive in the past -- people learned how to make beer by accidentally leaving leftover bread in liquid and then drank it when they were starving. Maybe? Or maybe they figured out that things ferment and played with it until it worked, like we would have done it? Why does it always have to be an accident? People may have had less access to information and technology, but that didn't make them any dumber than we are now.

RajT88 2y ago
> People may have had less access to information and technology, but that didn't make them any dumber than we are now. There's probably an aspect to people confusing "knowledge" with "brainpower". People in the past were just as good at figuring stuff out as we are today. We have the advantage of Millenia of stuff figured out and documented. So we know on average more about how the universe works than people in the distant past.
- abakker 2y ago
  I’d say it: we know that some people currently know more, but, the average person mostly knows something about what is known, rather than knowing it directly.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- WalterBright 2y ago
  > People in the past were just as good at figuring stuff out as we are today. I seriously doubt that. My experience in college was not to learn facts and formulae, but to learn how to learn. I.e. training the mind. It's similar to athletes. The worst Olympic athlete today would blow away the best from a century ago. That's not because people are inherently stronger today, but because we know how to train much better.
  - Eisenstein 2y ago
    But again, that is access to knowledge. How good would your college education have been if there was no library or textbooks? If you took the athletes today without their support team and sent them back in time two years before an Olympics event to compete on their own, I don't think it would be as big of a blowout as you suggest.
    - sethherr 2y ago
      It would be a huge blowout. We didn’t know how to train or eat and athletes smoked and drank substantially more. Meanwhile, the gear evolutions make significant difference. But take distance running - prior to 1954, nobody had done a sub 4 minute mile. After that was known to be possible multiple people sub 4 minute miled in the following decade. If you sent a top runner back a hundred years they would be able to run a sub 4 minute mile, even with 1920s equipment - and the world record in 1923 was 4:10
      - yread 2y ago
        > even with 1920s equipment Are you sure about that? Can you post a result where someone ran with leather shoes on asphalt?
        hilux 2y ago
        Zola Budd, a woman, ran a barefoot mile in 4:17.57, which is about 10 seconds slower than the current women's WR. The men's mile WR is about 24 seconds faster than the women's. Presumably plenty of barefoot African dudes could run a mile a lot faster than Budd did. With the exception of the new "energy return" shoes, there's no evidence that shoes help runners run faster - probably the opposite.
WalterBright 2y ago
Initial technological progress was agonizingly slow. Presuming that man then was just as smart as today, why would that be so? I suspect it is because the thought of what might be possible just never entered their minds. For example, Edison invented the idea of the invention development laboratory. Very, very recently. The Wright Bros were the first to come up with the idea of a research and development laboratory - just over a century ago.
- Eisenstein 2y ago
  More likely it was because the systems didn't exist that incentivized figuring out solutions to the problems which technology solves. Agriculture, animal husbandry, arts, warfare, engineering were all very sophisticated, limited by the materials science available (firearms, for instance, need very strong metals not to explode). The scientists that existed before the industrial age in the West were upper class, bored and educated men who did it for their own amusement. It wasn't until the abandonment of the economic system which worked on the assumption that international economics was zero sum and capitalism (and imperialism) took hold that the incentive structure for creating novel technologies could exist. This is all recollection based on various histories I have consumed and may not be entirely correct, but I'm pretty sure the idea is solid.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    > More likely it was because the systems didn't exist that incentivized figuring out solutions to the problems which technology solves. That is partially true. There is no incentive, for example, for slaves to make any improvements. I cannot think of any technology developed by slaves. That meant the few people in power were not enough to think of much new stuff. You could say free markets were the greatest invention, because it incentivized everyone to be a creator. The evolution of guns is an interesting topic. So is the evolution of sailing ships. The latter occurred over thousands of years. Very very slow! You might want to investigate James Burke's "Connections" book and series. It's an entertaining overview of the history of invention.
    - 2y ago
jyounker 2y ago
> Why does it always have to be an accident? Because that's a surprisingly common way for things to be discovered. Saccharine? Somebody working in a lab didn't clean their hands well, licked their fingers, and discovered it was sweet. Aspartame? Somebody working in a lab didn't clean their hands well, licked their fingers, and discovered it was sweet. I think this is true of basically every major artificial sweetener except invert sugar.
- rob74 2y ago
  Same as the famous discovery of Penicillin in a petri dish contaminated with a mold that killed off the bacteria? ...but now I'm starting to wonder how many people working in a lab didn't clean their hands well, licked their fingers, and died, because they had accidentally discovered a toxin?
  - Eisenstein 2y ago
    Except it happened to be in a petri dish and it happened to be observed at the time by a scientist. Total accident!
    - bregma 2y ago
      Serendipity favours the prepared mind. That's all.
  - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    Dying is still a valuable scientific outcome, but few people become famous for it except maybe Marie Curie.
sdwr 2y ago
The funny thing is that, if anything, we are the dumb ones in this scenario. They figured it out through reasoning and trial and error and raw experience, while for us it's apparently impossible to learn anything we don't already know the answer for.

kykeonaut 2y ago

thinking about lizard with lizard brain hard

darepublic 2y ago

> I don’t understand how people underestimate it so badly ... explained by(?) > History makes it abundantly clear that it is a regular occurrence for large groups of people to collectively believe things for which there is little evidence, and furthermore, to take extreme actions based on such beliefs.

carlosjobim 2y ago

We have just gone through the most massive event in this category in the lifetime of most people alive today, and the next such event is quite openly being planned for execution. Each and every one of us knows very well by now how we reacted to mass psychological movements and how we will react to the next one, which is of course the next great war.

Loughla 2y ago
What? What great war did we all live through and what's being openly planned? I feel like either you're being dramatic or I'm waaaayyyyy more out of touch than I thought I was. Both are possible, so I need some clarification.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  We went through covid, just a couple of years ago. Each of us know how we reacted and how we behaved. The great war between Russia and NATO is being openly planned right now, by both sides. European and Russian media has reached a war frenzy that probably hasn't been seen since WWI.
  - aguaviva 2y ago
    The great war between Russia and NATO is being openly planned right now, by both sides. I don't see any basis for this view. There are indications that the two sides may be sleepwalking towards a great conflict. But neither side is specifically intending to start or escalate towards such a conflict.
    - carlosjobim 2y ago
      Today from Russian media: "All NATO decision-makers from countries that provided military assistance to Bandera Ukraine are participating in a hybrid or conventional war against Russia… All these individuals can and should be considered legitimate military targets for the Russian state,” Medvedev said" Every media outlet in Nordic countries talk about a Russia-NATO war within the near future or whether Russia and NATO already are at war. NATO leaders are publicly asking for more defense spending to combat Russia. If you read Nordic message boards, most users are cheerfully looking forward to "winning a war against Ruzzia", and I don't doubt that the same idiotic attitudes are found among the Russians as well.

dboreham 2y ago

The counter delusion is a built in emergent property of the system.

mithametacs 2y ago

I've undergone psychiatric care for things not related to psychosis. As for psychosis, I am mentally healthy. As a child I was obsessed with math. I had a pseudo-religious obsession with Platonism, connected with my childhood fear of mortality. A bizarre belief system. While trying to make new friends in a new city, I was shunned from a new group for unknown reasons. I was going through a breakup from an abuser. I was depressed and grasping for explanations, thinking I was being conspired against. A persecution complex. Lack of information and strong emotion are enough.

nathan_compton 2y ago

Arguably its because in many cases mass delusion is adaptive - it organizes and simplifies how groups of people behave. Religion is a cultural mass delusion (don't worry, I'm not talking about YOUR religion, just the other ones) with significant adaptive qualities, people argue. Even more broadly, rationality and empiricism are extremely powerful tools for understanding the world, but they are also extremely difficult and costly to use, to say nothing of their known limitations at tackling complex systems. People have to and do believe stuff just to get through their day. I think this only becomes disturbing when its just one part of the culture which decides to believe some other complex of ideas than the mainstream one.