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I think history is a lot more interesting and makes a lot more sense when you finally realize that people in the past were just as aware and smart as us, as opp
by rthomas6 12y ago
I think history is a lot more interesting and makes a lot more sense when you finally realize that people in the past were just as aware and smart as us, as opposed to the bumbling idiots we often assume them to be.
- adevine 12y agoMeh, let's not overestimate our current selves.
- innguest 12y agoPlease share how you realized that people in the past were just as aware and smart as us.
- rthomas6 12y agoDan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast cemented the idea in my mind more than it had been before. http://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/ http://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/
- logfromblammo 12y agoIf they saw less far, it is only because they stood upon the shoulders of not giants, but dwarves, and many of those had also excavated deep and luxurious holes in the ground for the purposes of their habitation. Most people, up until the development of scientific inquiry, operated from a position of either complete ignorance or propagated misinformation. If you transplanted a medieval child into modern times, and afforded the same advantages that we now enjoy, such as low-cost education and easy collaboration with people who have similar interests, you would be hard-pressed to find any difference between that child and one born to this era. As we know well from trying to solve the problems of AI, intelligence and knowledge are difficult to separate. Medieval people were equally intelligent, but they had far less knowledge, and what they had was less persistent and transferable.
- tjradcliffe 12y agoIf by "aware" you mean "ignorant of the most basic facts that we take for granted", then yeah. It's very hard to get our heads around the pre-scientific mindset. These people were not stupid (if intelligence is even a little bit heritable and provides any selective advantage they were in smarter than us, as there has been zero selection for anything in the past 200 years, so we are the dumbest generation of humans ever to live). But they, like Jon Snow, knew nothing. They filled that vast void of ignorance with beliefs that make modern anti-science people like opponents of vaccinations, GMOs and nuclear power look like caricatures of the most rigidly limited kind of reductive materialism. The thought that anyone might publicly test an idea that "just made sense" using systematic observation, controlled experiment or Bayesian inference (which people used long before Bayes, of course) as a matter of routine was simply unknown. Arguments were settled via disputations over imagination, putting one form of plausible bullshit against another and seeing which advocate could sway the crowd of ignorant scholars. So the world was full of causes no one could see, whose existence "just made sense" so no one bothered to test. "Humours" and their "balance" caused health and sickness. Saints and demons influenced all chance events. Thinking made it so. God's plan was manifest by signs and portents. No major decision was taken without prayer. People (some people) laughed at George W Bush when he talked about doing God's will, but a few hundred years ago everyone talked, and thought that way. They took it for granted and they meant it with a depth and unquestioning sincerity that today can be found only amongst Islamists and a few others. They were capable technologists (there is an argument that technological capability led the sciences in important ways) but they way technologists thought about their materials and structures was completely alien to us. Much of it was raw empiricism ("do this, that happens") wrapped in a tattered clock of sympathetic magic and tortured religious/hermetic metaphor. Imagine a world organized in all walks of life around the ideas and mode of thinking practiced by Jenny McCarthy, Food Babe, and Deepak Chopra and you'll get a sense of it, absurd as it sounds.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- nbouscal 12y ago> there has been zero selection for anything in the past 200 years This is false to the point of being absurd. For there to be zero selection, mating would have to be completely random, as would death at reproductively viable ages.
- dragonwriter 12y ago> I think history is a lot more interesting and makes a lot more sense when you finally realize that people in the past were just as aware and smart as us, as opposed to the bumbling idiots we often assume them to be. I think the present is a lot more depressing, but makes a lot more sense, when you finally realize that people today are just as much bumbling idiots as those in the past, as opposed to the aware and smart people we often assume ourselves to be.
- rthomas6 12y agoYes, this is equally true! I think this re-casting of what I said sheds even more light on both history and the present. We're not as enlightened and different as we like to think. Knowledge and technology increases, but people and emotions don't change.
- robbrown451 12y agoMaybe, but that doesn't mean it is correct. I wouldn't call them bumbling idiots, but to think they were as knowledgeable as the average modern person in the first world is rather absurd.