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Comment by HuShifang | Hacker News Reader

You can always find examples of irrational behavior, but the difference is scale. Today a major state isn't spending inordinate resources to ensure that the cookies left for Santa are prepared using the finest ingredients (say, a few million dollars' worth of gold) by the most accomplished bakers, and then placed on a dish so large that it can be seen from space (and hundreds or thousands of people died making it).

If you can show me the tomb of a prominent world leader from the last, let's say, 500 years that's decorated with images of his/her enemies' severed genitalia, I'll concede the point.

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> Today a major state isn't spending inordinate resources to ensure that the cookies left for Santa

I get the impression that the degree to which people took religion literally varied a lot from person to person, and even priest to priest throughout history.

It’s not clear whether more people took religious belief literally, or if they just said they did for political and social reasons.

I feel that the problem with your claim is that within 500 years all humans everywhere have suddenly become abstracters extraordinaire, which just seems terribly unrealistic.

Generally every theory which talks about these great leaps in human cognition, and ties these to human "development" while ascribing diminished intellectual capabilities to our ancestors, seems to fall apart after scrutiny (e.g., Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, bicameral theory of mind).

Also, we've seen plenty of "undoing" of abstraction in long-continuing cultures. E.g., in Hinduism, idol worship wasn't really a thing in Vedic times, and only became popular in Puranic times (over a 1000 years later). Many Hindus do believe that some idols contain portions of gods, especially those idols that reside ones in "big" temples. I would not say that these folks have lost their ability to abstract. As another example, post-Vedic religion underwent a large amount of abstraction in the Upanishads, but then reverted to personification of deities via the bhakti movement and in Puranic religion. Again, I wouldn't say that Hindus lost their ability to think abstractly.

> I feel that the problem with your claim is that within 500 years all humans everywhere have suddenly become abstracters extraordinaire, which just seems terribly unrealistic.

Isn’t something like this the general explanation for the Flynn effect? (that newer generations in modern societies are better at IQ tests because they’re better at IQ test-style abstractions)

Christmas is a major part of economics.

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