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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

One problem of radical ideas is selection bias. The radical ideas that were true and useful are widely known. However, there are a lot of radical ideas that did not work out.

One example, I see is in psychology. Pretty much every time I see an article published that goes against "conventional wisdom", I find that some time later that there is an issue with statistics or sample or the article is otherwise not reproducible.

Basically, humans are generally smart and over time figure out what works.

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The same problem exists from the other end. How many traditional ideas are useful and true vs. how many have been clearly shown to be useless or destructive nonsense? If you need examples of the latter the most fruitful area to search is probably traditional medicine. Pre-enlightenment medicine provides an abundance of things that don't work or are downright harmful.

Producing such tallies would be extremely difficult. It's hard to even classify complex ideas as traditional or radical/rational.

Is communism traditional or radical? At first glance it's quite novel but it's full of ideas and sentiments that closely resemble those found in many religions and more tribal or family oriented cultures. The idea of collective ownership wouldn't be that foreign to a nomadic culture, and those are among the most traditional and oldest societies on Earth. One could argue it's a mere modern repackaging of a lot of extremely old ideas.

If you assume humans have not evolved significantly over the past 20,000 years, you have to wonder what all the geniuses were doing.

Perhaps genius is a function of childhood nutrition and medicine, but if a genius is 1 in 1000, then every village must have had one at some point.

What did people just as intelligent as us but without knowledge do for their entire lives? They build on tradition.

>If you assume humans have not evolved significantly over the past 20,000 years, you have to wonder what all the geniuses were doing.

They were mostly preoccupied trying to stay alive. Also, any physical defect could be a death sentence. Have poor vision, you get eaten by a lion that you didn’t see. Unable to keep up with the tribe, you get left behind.

That's true, but it only redeuces the probability some. There existed well-fed healthy populations at many points in history and geography.

Even if the probability is much lower, there is estimated to be over 100 billions humans that have lived.

I think we intuitively underestimate ancient peoples' individual abilities because we have so much knowledge and wisdom that's been built up over millennia easily available to us. But someone had to figure out how to farm using primitive tools and develop the tradition for the community.

What was medieval Von Neumann doing?

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