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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. You're not an ocean, so looking at the tides and assuming that the moon has a similar influence on you is an unjustified jump of logic. Then, when you start inventing specific effects for the moon to have, you're clearly in the realm of fiction because you know full well you didn't get the ideas you're writing down from observation.

I have heard before the argument that "being rational wasn't invented until the 1930s, so you can't call anyone before then irrational," but everybody knows intuitively that the truth is something they see or something they infer from what they see, and a lie is something they make up in their own heads.

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They knew for a fact, without any shadow of a doubt that certain activities on earth are synchronised with activity in the heavens. This does include human, animals and plants. Human women have periods roughly synchronised with the movements of the moon, animals and plants have reproductive cycles synchronised with the seasons and movements of the sun and stars. These are facts. Priests and philosophers used astronomical knowledge to predict changes in the seasons, weather, the flooding of the Nile, to navigate at sea, so they had an extensive skills set in this area.

Given that there are known synchronisations, it therefore follows there are likely to be unknown synchronisations, so the logical step is to start looking for them. Unfortunately we know that if you start looking for patterns in phenomena that aren't correlated, human beings have a proclivity to find them anyway. People back then did not know this, and did not have the conceptual tools to critically analyse evidence to the extent that we do.

One example of such an inference is, "heart = courage, courage = lion, lion = yellow, yellow = sun, sun = sunflower, therefore heart medicine = sunflower seeds." However, even by the standards of the day, that last link could just as well have been "heart-stopping poison = sunflower seeds." Alchemical tomes were not all consistent with each other, they disagreed which is what you would expect if there was a large fictional component to their makeup. People of all cultures knew better than to make up fiction and tell it to people as if it were true, however in those times it was not as easy to stop that from happening as it is today. (And it is not easy even today!)

All it takes is plausibility to make the leap palatable to a large number of people. In the modern day, an equivalent would be economics.

There are pundits in remote villages in India, who can predict the exact timing of eclipses based just on a old almanac written thousands of years ago, with absolutely no modern scientific equipment (telescope) or knowledge (Galileo/Newton/Keppler). Indians have been doing astronomy and astrology (Yes, planetary positions do both indicate and affect your personality) for millenia. They still do it when matching horoscopes for marriage.

What you hear about 'astrology' in Western world, is just a half-baked misunderstood version. It's like CSI doing a science episode saying 'enhance', and hoping things work out.

> "being rational wasn't invented until the 1930s

Rationality -- which is to say reason and logic, was already formalized over 2000 years ago, by Aristotle and other greek philosophers. It wasn't reason that the ancients lacked, but empiricism as embodied in the scientific method -- although even that was used to some degree by people such as Galen and Aristotle.

Reason alone can take you down deep rabbit holes, because it's heavily dependent on what you take as postulates, and without empirical measurements, it's difficult to figure out where to start the chain of reasoning from.

It took a long time to standardize measurements and record keeping to the point where people could do accurate experiments that could prove theories that people had developed through reason.

For example -- the ancient greeks had already developed the idea of atoms! [0] But they had no chance of proving that atoms existed, so it was one theory among many. What ended up becoming the general accepted theory of matter was hylomorphism [1]. They lacked physical and intellectual tools that they would have needed to be able to distinguish the two theories through experiment, similar to the status of string theory today. Some religious ideas that seem absurd today -- for example the catholic belief that bread is literally transformed into the body of christ -- were justified by the belief in hylomorphism. In the case of transubstantiation, the church claimed that while the accidental properties of the bread, the form of the bread were unchanged, the underlying substance of the bread was completely different -- in the same way that for example a petrified tree was transubstianted from wood to stone, while many of the accidental properties and the form where unchanged.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hylomorphism

Jump of logic for us. Not for people in the past. This is called a "vertical" (or magic) world view where things with similar properties are believed to be connected. Examples:

1. The moon is influencing the ocean? -> It will also influence humans

2. Those berries are red? Blood is red, too -> Those berries are good for your blood.

3. This planet is moving fast (Mercure)? -> Mercure is connected to things moving/changing fast (mercury, travellers,...)

(Example 2 is still practiced in traditional Chinese medicine today)

I like example 2, because it's also an example of my point. Why good? Even if you accept that it's related to blood, it could be bad for blood. There's no way to convert analogical reasoning into specific ideas about what is good or bad without making stuff up.

> Why good?

Who knows? We would need a time machine to know that. I could imagine several reasons:

- Because it works sometimes (coincidence or not)

- Because believing to understand what is going on around you gives you an illusion of savety in a dangerous world

- Because it gives you power over people (if you are the king/emperor/village doctor/priest)

- Because it is embedded in a religious/philosophical context that might have advantages beyond that specific case

> There's no way to convert analogical reasoning into specific ideas about what is good or bad without making stuff up

I am pretty sure that traditional Chinese medicine has developed some complex theories that explain why some red berries are good for your blood and others not.

Edit: Ah, I understand your comment better now. You say that this kind of reasoning does not help you to predict whether a red berry that you see for the first time is good or bad, right? Well, I think you are right :) We are talking here about world views, not scientific theories.

Ancient Chinese culture as well as 1600s European culture shared enough of our norms related to truth that they would have judged astrologists as violators, if they had realized what astrologers were doing. A civilization whose norms do not distinguish between false and true testimonies cannot have a functioning court system, but those cultures clearly did. Any system that has a concept of punishment must have along with it a norm against making up a story and telling it to people as if it were true (recall that horrible period after the French revolution for an example of what happens when you have punishment but nothing preventing false testimonies). Observations and inferences were just as important to them as they are to us.

Now, there is an interesting possibility that I don't know of any examples of, but could have happened. Suppose a primitive tribe with no norms against lying developed a bunch of superstitions due to the wild stories people were telling. Later, the tribe develops those norms after they get tired of punishing clearly innocent people, but by then a bunch of true believers are spreading the superstition. In that case the false beliefs have been "smuggled past the norms boundary." But, again, I am not aware of any people group that doesn't have a norm against false testimonies.

People have obvious tendency for apophenia, seeing patterns and cause of action, even when there is no scientific connection between two, I call it intuition. Many argue it's part of evolution. If our ancestor interpreted noise in jungle as a danger he was more likely to survive. This behavior evolved and thanks to it we are able to discover many things unfortunately it also leads us to false conclusions like thinking that red berries are good for blood and psychics exists.

There's a difference between assuming that similar properties are connected because they appear similar on the surface, and rationally connecting similar properties because they are caused by the same physics.

Modern thinkers will ask "Why/how does the moon influence the ocean", and expect that "how" to apply to other things, not the "what". Modern science has convenient answers like "F = G x m1 x m2 / r^2", you apply that and expect the moon to exert 2.7 x 10^-3 Newtons of force on a person, not to generically lift and lower something about their mental or medical state.

The critical question to me, though, is what a person does when presented with a question to which they don't have a "how" available to answer it.

Presented with a piece of equipment that uses sensor technology or algorithms they don't understand, or a street performer that uses slight-of-hand tricks they can't catch, do they assume it is just 'magic' and extrapolate its effects to things that might not be achievable based on the actual mechanism behind the demonstration? For example, one might expect a voice recognition app that can detect someone saying "Hey Google" to also understand "Excuse me, Google" and natural language processing, or expect a street performer who knows what card is going to be flipped over to know other things that will happen in the future. Another might observe that "Hey Google" causes the device to respond, and either ask questions about how that works until they learn about microphones, digital signal processing, and hidden Markov models - and eventually about natural language processing, and might expect the street performer to simply have performed a card trick with a normal means of knowing what card would be turned up (looking at the card at some point in the past).

I honestly don't know what you or I would do in the past. With so few effective concepts of basic physics, chemistry, or medicine, not knowing the mechanism and requiring hundreds of years of scientific observations to discover it leaves "assume it's magic and extrapolate" as the only viable world view.

> it leaves "assume it's magic and extrapolate" as the only viable world view.

Yeah, and, to be fair to people in the past, the assumption that similar things are connected often works well in practice. If you already know what a tiger is and you see a lion for the first time, your assumption that "things with large teeth are dangerous" will save your life. You are not starting to write a paper about the taxonomy of mammals in that situation :)

The assumption wasn't that similar things had similar properties, it was that similar things had sympathetic connections where one could affect another. In your example, that would be the belief that lion bites could be treated with tiger fur because both lions and tigers looked like big cats.

You're making a classic blunder: assuming that ancient people were stupid. They knew less than we do, so it is easy to look back with 20/20 hindsight and say "but the answer is so obvious!" because you already know the answer. They were still deriving that answer. Put in the same time, with the same level of knowledge, it is likely you would think the same way they did.

>You're not an ocean, so looking at the tides and assuming that the moon has a similar influence on you is an unjustified jump of logic.

When you have nothing else, your options are to make assumptions or do nothing. In general those who made assumptions sometimes get them right and eventually lead to progress that gives way to science. Those who do nothing remain frozen in their development.

These days, with the understanding the average kid has when they graduate high school, it is an unreasonable assumption. But we are talking a far far different sort of society when these assumptions were being made.

>When you have nothing else, your options are to make assumptions or do nothing.

Even in ancient cultures, "do nothing" (as in, don't make stuff up just because you don't know the answer) was pretty clearly the right option. If your bread goes missing while you're away, do you randomly pick a person and then accost them with full confidence that they stole it?

The 1930s were one of the most irrational times on record, with Stalin and Hitler being heroes for most of the world.

Anyway, if rationality was ever invented, it was a few hundred years earlier with the scientific revolution.

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