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0 pointsgniv2y ago0 comments

> The much more parsimonious explanation is that “great men” were in the right place at the right time to apply their (undisputed!) talents.

But isn’t this part of the point? How many times did we not get the right person in the right place? How much further would we be if we had gotten, say, a Galileo during Rome’s heyday?

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woodruffw2y ago· 2 in thread

> How much further would we be if we had gotten, say, a Galileo during Rome’s heyday?

Who says we didn’t? There isn’t a single point in human history that wasn’t covered by exceptional intelligence; the observation is that this doesn’t make discoveries fungible over time. Discovery, innovation, invention, etc. are instead all compounding processes.

gnivOP2y ago

Yes, of course. What I meant was we could have had all the stuff that lead to Galileo before the great reset that was the fall of Rome, so maybe civilization would have been ahead a few hundred years.

woodruffw2y ago

This doesn’t require belief in the great man theory: progress can ebb and flow under any theory of history.

Besides: there is no point in history that’s identifiable as “the fall of Rome.” The Western Empire declined over the course of three centuries; the Eastern Empire arguably never fell at all. The idea of the “fall” comes from the same period of historical theorization as the “great man” framework; it’s not widely accepted as a useful milestone today.

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lll-o-lll2y ago· 1 in thread

> How many times did we not get the right person in the right place? How much further would we be if we had gotten, say, a Galileo during Rome’s heyday?

As psychohistory rigorously proves; individuals are of no consequence to the thrusting arc of history. It is not Galileo that created history, but rather history that created Galileo.

dmn3222y ago

psychohistory is from "the foundation" and last time I checked is fictional. If someone has a new theory of sociology which they've named after the field in the book, you might link it and introduce it as if it's a new unknown field, rather than some established thing that everyone should know about and agree with.

If it were truly rigorously proved and were able to make quantitative predictions, it would have some pretty significant implications for policy, finance, politics, etc..

However if the creator was brash enough to name their pet theory after the theory in the book, I'm skeptical that they were careful enough to get it right.

mongol2y ago

A Galileo during Rome's heyday could not have taken advantage of the telescope, like Galileo Galilei could. It was not invented yet.

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