I used to be tempted to think that our modern generations are extra smart because of the cool gadgets we have.
Seeing stuff like this, and reading ancient political / philosophical writings, gives me a much-needed reality check.
Seeing stuff like this, and reading ancient political / philosophical writings, gives me a much-needed reality check.
We are just as smart as our predecessors. We just have a much higher population, a higher % of them are well educated, and we have an enormous body of historical knowledge (as well as easy ways for anyone to access it).
"On the shoulder of giants" etc.
Specialization and trade accelerated with the Industrial Revolution as well; Adam Smith’s division of labour combined with man’s propensity to truck, barter, and exchange.
It is much easier for stupid people to survive today.
Good case are miners areas - men work hard like 12 hours a day under ground and die young. Women have to earn for themselves and for kids once they are dead however possible.
1950 middle class household is not all there is to be about how historical families existed. Most of the time, the amount of work to do was basically infinite. And the more "anyone" could do, the better. That includes 6-7 years old kids who were already expected to be useful. (Here the kids started to work at 5, they would pasture gooses, which is super easy but was to large extend unsupervised).
Also, origin of kindergarten are German cities where both parents worked 12 hours a day in factory and small kids were left to own devices whole day. Obviously we are talking about poorer people here, but poor were large part of society.
Also, asshole.
Most of the time in human history people were struggling to even stay alive. You had to work until you got enough food to feed your family, or you'd die. Live was not great, it was very stressful and inefficient (but people were used to it). This is still the case in most of the world, although overall not as bad as it once was, it is improving constantly.
We're the lucky ones who can sustain ourselve with 8 hours of work, food is cheap and abundant, we can afford luxury items like iphones even if a 300$ android smartphone would do the same job.
No, at average, people are not working harder now, because we don't have to. We managed to improve efficiency so much already and quality of life continues to rise.
Our inefficient stuff is made by people in foreign countries working in factories whose lives really aren't any better than middle ages Europe.
Also, People like farming and hard physical labour. In the suburbs every household has a little miniature hobby farm that yields a useless crop, and people farm it for fun over and above their regular job. When people don't have to do any hard labour as part of their job, they go to a gym and pay money for the privelege of moving heavy things around even though it serves no practical purpose.
All this inefficiency is destroying the planet, which is the dumbest thing of all.
We very much have. We couldn't support our population with 14th century levels of efficiency. We wouldn't have enough farm land, fresh water, etc, etc.
Life expectancy in the most typical manufacturing hotspots is actually better than Western standards of 1900. Even poorer countries today have much better healthcare than Queen Victoria used to have. Middle Ages is right out in this comparison.
> It takes a couple decades of education before a person can even begin to enter the workforce.
This obviously depends on profession. On the contrary, you no longer need to go to college or trade school since everything is online. Seriously, it's amazing how proficient some of these children can get just from YouTube videos.
> Raising kids was once an investment, now people can barely afford to raise 1 or 2.
Hey at least you have a choice now. Before, raising lots of children was almost a necessity in order to help around the farm. Now things are so efficient that you really don't need to raise children at all.
> Our inefficient stuff is made by people in foreign countries working in factories whose lives really aren't any better than middle ages Europe.
Can you provide evidence on this?
> People like farming and hard physical labour
Most people would probably disagree with you on this. There is a big difference between occasional hard labor and doing hard labor every single day. It takes an enormous toll on the body.
> When people don't have to do any hard labour as part of their job, they go to a gym and pay money for the privelege of moving heavy things around even though it serves no practical purpose.
Isn't the purpose to be healthy or look better?
Peasants (over 90% of the society) were usually working less hours but much harder than we do. And they were living in much worse conditions of course.
Farming (especially without modern technology) is very cyclical, most of the time you have too much labour and too little land/food. Then for a few months you have too few people to do everything that needs to be done.
And there was no easy way for vast majority of people to store surplus for more than a few years. And there was a real possibility of starvation if a few factors independent of you happen at the same time.
So the whole society and economy was structured around these constraints - that's why it doesn't follow our intuitions. It made no sense to increase gains by 10% if you had to increase risk by 1% to do that. It made no sense to work harder if you have enough and it's gonna spoil anyway. You're just risking injury to throw it all away later.
There was a great series of articles about it: https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...
With exception of very rich people in few periods (idle aristocracy, middle class 1950 household), majority of people needed to work a lot. That includes both women and men.
Construction, for example, is incredibly hard work even with modern tools, and they had none of those.
That we can live comfortably with all the modern amenities on 40 hours a week, which for many is just sitting in a chair, typing text, is really good. I'm not bashing office workers here, btw.
Could definitely work less, maybe the push for shorter work days will gain traction.
It's an even more typical mistake to believe that our time is the pinnacle in all respects (because of all the cool gadgets that we have). But we are not the pinnacle in all respects; perhaps the largest danger is that we are delegating all multifaceted work (which ultimately is what produces skill) to automation and/or extreme specialists, so that we can push the enjoyment button (or take the enjoyment pill) in solitude without end.
We are on a path to an 'Idiocracy' type of society which would likely have been an abomination to generations past if they were to see it.
If for example reasoning was automated (we're not there yet, but it is on the horizon) then human capacity for nuance would likely diminish further, to the extent where concepts and ideas might only placed in a 'good' or 'bad' category without capacity for further analysis ...
This might be hard to imagine if you're well educated, already working, and in your 20's and the world seems full of excitement and opportunity but you're held back by the annoying need to pay your bills. If you didn't have to work, you might start a business or spend all day on your side project or whatever. But most people aren't in that position. Often, their only sense of fulfillment comes from their work no matter how unpleasant it is, and they only work because they have to to survive.
Maybe, but it is not because we tend to be overly pessimistic in general, that serious problems cannot happen to us. Entire civilizations have diapered in the past, so we should remain vigilant.
After all, another bias that humans have, is a strong tendency to believe that what is true now, will remain true forever.
I often think about the city-states along the Silk Road: healthy, peaceful, cultured, unprecedented prosperity for their time. All defeated when the hordes of Genghis Kahn rode by, many utterly destroyed
The Empire of Mali. The Kingdom of Lithuania. Macedon. Tyre. Babylon. Carthage. Samarkand. Assyria. All once mighty, all gone, perhaps a place-name remains, if that
Aside from perhaps Macedon and Carthage (indirectly via Rome) most of those don't even warrant a mention in the high school history curriculum (in the US, at least).
The simple fact is that pre-industrial history has had literally thousands of different thriving civilizations around the world. It's simply not possible to even briefly cover anything but a fraction of the more "important" in a non-university setting.
For anyone still paying attention, I should have written "The Grand Duchy of Lithuania", which was a powerful state for hundreds of years in the Middle Ages
The Kingdom of Lithuania, while also powerful, lasted about 2 years
Peace from violent thoughts leading to depression and anxiety which are at all time highs, no.
There were Balkan wars and there were Indian wars, but the vast majority of Western population never served in combat.
And people started thinking that this is how it is going to be forever.
However, I do agree with you that people then thought that world peace was achieved. The 1910 book "The Great Illusion" [2] ironically argued European war was unlikely to start due to the great economic costs of destroying trade between nations. It got the consequences right at least.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Prussian_War [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion
Eh... not really. Anger at the loss of Alsace-Lorraine peaked in the immediate aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, when France couldn't do anything, but by the 1880s and 1890s, France had resigned itself to the loss. The massive divisions in French society under the Third Republic meant that it was in no position to do anything to reclaim it. A parallel might well be drawn to Finland's position today over Karelia: they'd certainly like it back, but they're not about to fight for it. It wasn't until World War I broke out that restoration of Alsace-Lorraine to French rule really became feasible, and hence it became a major war aim, but it wasn't a factor until after war had already broken out.
The arms race in question is the naval arms race between Britain and Germany, which itself subsided in 1912 because Germany couldn't afford to keep up.
But you're absolutely right; we get to use the infrastructure, explicit (written) knowledge, tacit knowledge of our society, social structures, institutions, legal systems, property distribution, and peacemaking of our predecessors.
"It has been said that the great scientific disciplines are examples of giants standing on the shoulders of other giants. It has also been said that the software industry is an example of midgets standing on the toes of other midgets." -Alan Cooper
We are not smarter than the subset of our predecessors who had the privilege of developing without ever starving.
https://thinkprogress.org/exclusive-elevated-co2-levels-dire...
Even if we doubled yearly increases in ppm we'd be a century away from a measurable impact on human cognition for outdoor air.
A couple of other studies showed no effects of elevated CO2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23161403
Will they think that it was ingenious to design machines in different parts, from different materials, then assembled and shipped to where they are needed? With the limited technology and methods of our time? That we used to engineer and create special machines for these different purposes because in their world, everything you can conceive will come out of replicators [0] instead? Fully functional, no matter which materials it consists of? And humans no longer involved in the design process because a solution was computer generated after stating the purpose of the tool?
Poetry that actually sounds good?
Paintings that make sense and take skill instead of bullshit art?
Repairing relationships and mending things?
Cooking for themselves?
One specific marvel is the self-aligned gate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-aligned_gate)
Evolution rarely produces something useless, especially something that consumes a lot of precious energy like the brain.
More likely these people were exquisitely knowledgeable about their environment.
Either that, or their brains were the same size as ours, but far less efficient.
Whether this means Neandertal had greater cognitive capacity, or sapiens brain is more efficient, isn't clear to me.
Only because we expect a far lesser fraction of societal productivity to be spent on them.
I don't know if anyone's run the numbers for the pyramids but European castles and cathedrals took a massive fraction of their area's productivity to create compared to modern civil engineering products.
Recreating the pyramids would only be "big" because modern society doesn't spend big on vanity projects like that anymore. With modern tech we could build the same pyramids much cheaper or many more pyramids for the same money.
Prime movers activate transports, lifts, and pumps. Energy and process controls yield more and more uniform or tuned materials. R&D is a phenomenally expensive, but cumulative, process yielding large returns with time.
Precision measurement, coordination, communication, logistics, mamagement, modelling, quality control, and other advances are all based on that initial bolus of energy provided when we realised we could dig and pump up ancient burnable biomass.
Ancient technology was very often no less innovative, only vastly more constrained.