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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

> But that's my point: any presentation of history as some appealing narrative leading to a conclusion is wrong

All simplified models are wrong. Some are useful. (And it's very hard to avoid 'appeal' being a critical factor in the popularity of any model or narrative. It acts as a single point of failure in any truth-seeking mechanism, including academia and the like. This of course explains much about the popularity of some contemporary ideas.)

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Well, Yarvin's "model" is both very wrong (much more wrong than most models by actual scholars) and not useful; we know that because that "model" was once mainstream, and quite harmful.

Harmful to whom?

To a far greater portion of human society than those it was perhaps useful for, if anyone.

Yet, it was the horrible, horrible Europe that Moldbug mythologizes and romanticizes that made virtually all advances in science and technology until a few decades ago.

Ancient Greece produced mechanical computers. Only recently did the great civilizations of China and India overcome Hellenic science & technology. Having Mandarins cataloging the Emperor's property is not a great use of human capital.

What? Non-sequitur much?

While the so-called European Miracle of the past 500 years is a fascinating and complex area of research that will undoubtedly be studied for generations and centuries to come, I wasn't aware that anyone considers modern (18th c. and beyond) romanticist ideology to be the major driving force of science and technology.

"Romanticist ideology" is a remarkably vague term, but I think one could make a case that something like it ended up being very much a factor. Of course, the reverse is also true; in the absence of 18th- and 19th-century science (including advancements in the social sciences, mostly coming from the "humanist" side as Carlyle knew quite well!) no "romanticist" ideology would even exist.

That’s a... debatable assertion about the history of science in those places.

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