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.
One thing is a random blog post. One thing is your frustration that teachers/historians don't get paid well. A third thing is that people find blog posts more engaging than history text-books.
I also find your expression "making shit up" really weird. Anyways that's all for you to unpack -- this is a fun read, if you want to be angry at everyone who has a non-academically-rigorous idea that they type up that's one way to spend your energy.
> Well, sometimes building a consensus is more important than accuracy. A shaman’s random decision is better than a more optimal decision not everyone can get fully behind. This is especially true in war scenarios where conviction is key.
> Sometimes it is better to believe that a decision is sanctioned by a higher authority than to know that it rests on mere conjecture, as it usually does in the real world where we’re always dealing with incomplete information.
> 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.
The author then makes conclusions about the beliefs people in the past had about divination.
This appears to have been derived entirely from the hunches of the author. That's best described as "making shit up."
It starts with the epiphany: "hey, maybe it is actually possible to understand the past" and then doesn't make the barest effort to consider that there are approaches for doing this.
It's an incredibly shallow and ignorant pastiche of pop-culture science-like voodoo nonsense of the Carlos Castaneda/I am Ishmael type.
Fun conversation to have at 2 AM while drunk at an undergraduate party but pure cringe in the context of a published blog entry.
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.
The blog post is not presented as "hey, I am now interested in history and would like to engage with it." It is presented as "I can drive through this sort of analysis purely based on baseless hunches." If the article stopped at "hey, I've been thinking about the past wrongly" then I'd have a completely different response.
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.
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.
Can you expand a bit on that? Because to me statements like that are not right or wrong because to me they don't really mean anything. Clearly to many people it does mean something, because you are far from the only one to make statements like that. To be clear, I don't mean any of this in a condescending way; I'm truly trying to understand.
For starters, what exactly do you mean by 'faith' and 'to believe in something'? I presume that believing in a god will certainly fit the definition, but what about people who are not religious? Would something like believing in the general goodness of people fit the definition?
The thing is, when I read or hear a statement like 'you have to believe in something' I try to determine whether is applies to myself, and then I have a problem. Do I believe in something? I don't know. I don't believe in a god, that's for sure. I do believe in evolution, for example, in the sense that I believe it exists (or more precisely perhaps, I accept the evidence in favor of the theory). But somehow I feel things like that are not what is generally meant by 'something to believe in'. But then I feel like there's nothing really meaningful left that I believe in. And of course then I start to question why I should have to believe in something. But maybe that's just because of a misunderstanding on my part.
"I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain…In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar." - Richard Feynman
The only thing I believe is that what I believe can and should change to fit the data I have available.
This is blind faith and poor understanding of the process. Essentially, they elevate scientists to priesthood where they have direct communication with the higher power where they have access to ultimate truth.
Dawkins's point is that you don't have to believe in something that is clearly wrong, like horoscopes and Christianity, and you can choose not to make major decisions (like punishing people) over beliefs you have no evidence for and have evidence against.
The problem with the author is that he points out people believing in stupid things like shamans and gods and assumes that they must have a smart reason for it. Horoscopes and Christianity are the modern day equivalent, and there is no smart reason for the people who believe in those to do so today, so there is no reason to suppose that there used to be for their equivalents in the past.
In literally hundreds of ways; if you took the effort to read almost any atheist forum you'd find them. I'll give you what I think is most important one:
Scientific secularism is obsessed with proving itself wrong; religion is obsessed with proving itself right.
> Yes, yes, empiricism, method, peer review, the proof is in the technology pudding.
That is the correct answer! How will you refute it?
> 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..
Oh. Big disappointment: you have no refutation, just a lot of insults.
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.
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.
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.
My primary income is engineering focused still, and definitely glad I have that permaculture mindset.
Most evidence suggests the extent of land-work utilized by early Australians was controlled burns. There is a bit of a recent effort to promote the idea that they may have done extensive planting as well, but there's not much evidence for it. It also would have been kind of a waste of effort - the accessible food biomass was high enough for the relatively small population without planting.
This seems circular. Why was the population small?
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
That's pretty much only my beef with it.
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.
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-Domestic... [2] https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polythei...
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."
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.
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.
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.
What education institution is responsible for this?
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.
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.
The underlying assumption seems to be that people in the past were stupid and incapable of writing the great code that we today are capable of writing.
I mean obviously old code can be written badly (just as modern code can be written badly). And sometimes there are newer techniques or libraries which weren't available at the time the original code was written. But more than a few times I've seen old code rewritten by modern code where the modern code is worse than the old code, and the justification is nothing more than the code was "old". Or the way desktop UIs change and evolve and throw away old paradigms - but the people who developed Windows 95 weren't fools just because they lived in the past. (e.g. all icons are monochromatic now whereas it was a design guideline in the past to use colours to aid memory of which icon was which.)
People in 500 years will probably say the same about us. "Look at these morons from the year 2023. Most of them were dumb and wasted their lives."
It's rather humbling to walk into its display room and I urge anyone visiting Oslo to check it out.
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.
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?
My neighbor burns sages to remove evil spirits from her house. She fully believes this is real.
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
Someone told me to buy How To Run a Lathe (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/) showed how you could bootstrap a machine shop with scrap aluminum and charcoal.
We've been smart apes for thousands of years.
I guess you put the line somewhere between considering other people's beliefs and "duh".
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!
"Writer on entrepreneurship, creativity, and marketing with over 10,000 email subscribers"
O woe to vikings, woe to us.
> 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)
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
So yeah, maybe it's just that the landlords had an IQ of 170 a century and half ago, whereas now they have "just" 70.
But also no. Modern architects think they're so much smarter than architects of a century ago, solely on the basis of living later, as the article describes. They think they could do the same greatness effortlessly, whereas when they actually try, they usually fall flat on their face. Turns out, it was actually quite hard even with appropriate practice, and without said practice it's often impossible to just build a nicely-looking house.
So we should really think about why they decided on certain cultural traditions.
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.
The Dunning-Kruger makes my head hurt.
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.
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 :)
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.
