Why did everything take so long? | Hacker News Reader

Why did everything take so long?

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15 pointsjseliger6 comments

Concerning the wheel, it might be useful to look at ancient Mesoamerica. They had children's pull toys with wheels, and other things which were wheel-like, but no wheels used in transport.

The common explanation, for example at http://www.zoesaadia.com/real-smart-folks-but-no-wheel/ , is that wheels aren't very useful without draft animals, and without land which is conducive to road-building (vs, say, water transport).

The counter example is the Chinese wheelbarrow, which is useful without draft animals and without roads, but that also makes your point. It's sophisticated enough that it's not hard to understand why it took so long to be invented without anything simpler and useful to evolve from.

Thanks for pointing that out. I didn't know about that history. http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese-wheelbarr... gives more details, like:

> The one-wheeled vehicle appeared around the time the extensive Ancient Chinese road infrastructure began to disintegrate. Instead of holding on to carts, wagons and wide paved roads, the Chinese turned their focus to a much more easily maintainable network of narrow paths designed for wheelbarrows. The Europeans, faced with similar problems at the time, did not adapt and subsequently lost the option of smooth land transportation for almost one thousand years.

> ... It is interesting to note that the wheelbarrow appeared at least 2,000 years later than two-wheeled carts and four-wheeled wagons.

Just because we haven't found evidence of progress in early civilizations doesn't mean it wasn't there. Any small marginal gains were probably immediately lost to time, though.

We needed civilization to spread out enough for commerce to protect new inventions from luddite regime changes to avoid losing progress (think Mao's book burning and communist regimes like Pol Pot's slaughtering academics/people who look smart - probably based on what Qin Shi Huang did 2000 years ago.)

Why is a wheel even useful? Sounds like a solution in search of a problem. I remember the good old days when we didn't even think about needing wheels for all the made up problems we've created for ourselves.

Honestly though, just replace wheel with AI and that's exactly what most non-techie people I know think about AI. Humans probably haven't changed that much since 4000 BC.

We hate creatve people who want to take our nice things and change them into sonething weird. We make an effort to kill that behaviour in people.

There probably is some good excuse for the instinct, some experience long long ago.

I'm coining the graffiti fish phenomenon to illustrate the concept. Tell me you didnt like it.

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