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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

> If a tree in falls in the forest, and no hears it, does it really matter?

But people DID hear it, just not in big parts of Europe where most of "our" history is taught / comes from. It's very eurocentric to assume that just because "we" didn't hear about it, it didn't exist. Civilization was miles ahead outside of Europe for a long time.

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Indeed, and if not for the Enlightenment it would still be. That's what made room for science on a much larger scale and in contradiction with lots of things that were considered established knowledge than ever before. The power of science is such that a resource poor part of the world managed to overtake the rest in many ways in a couple of centuries.

Not only resource-poor, but also a cultural backwater burdened with a kind of religious extremism foreign to much of the rest of the world.

Did you conveniently ignore Islam?

No, that's why I said "much of the rest of the world", rather than "the rest of the world".

Cultural backwater right up to that point, and religious extremist right up to that point. Many countries/regions never went through such a phase and that is what allowed Europe to do what it did, it essentially leapfrogged from the dark ages to modernity in an extremely short span of time while elsewhere not much changed. It also enabled a period of expansionism and engendered some of the worst atrocities committed by mankind today, but the scientific and cultural progress can not be denied.

Why do you add the 'today' caveat? I think you again need to add an asterix to 'some of the worst atrocities committed' to instead be commonly recorded or the 'if the tree fell' analogy. What did the sacrifice culture of the Aztecs require to be sustained? Many many peoples of Europe were wiped from the earth (Old Prussians as an easy example). It wasn't about killing non-Europeans as Europeans were just as happy to genocide Europeans. How many many black slaves on whole went to China/East but because they used castration a permanent population was never established. Did this result in more or less suffering than slavery on the eastern seaboard of the Americas? Don't forget for a thousand years before Europeans went international slave hunting Europeans were the hunted (to the point they have mythical an anti-Santa that slave hunts for little European boys and girls). How many struggles like the Sioux almost genociding the Crow happened in the Americas that we don't know about? We have the same principle as being discussed happen in history discussions, only they are used to make European violence look like an outlier that it might not have been.

Because I don't think we've seen the worst yet.

Is it a case here that "we" just didn't hear about it, or that the impact of the knowledge never made it outside the community/region. Did it matter to the people living it? Seems like absolutely yes. Did it endure beyond that community or region? Maybe they do not mean "insignificant" altogether and simply mean insignificant within the context of the ideas and knowledge that endured and were built upon to arrive where we are?

I'm genuinely curious as I feel like this touches on something broader. I think about this with literature and poetry. There's a wonderful effect as you read through time where there are various dialogues happening. People sort of reacting to each other and speaking across generations and cultures. Ginsberg reads differently when you understand his relationship with the Greek epics and other poets before him. I guess my point is, and I may have bungled it spectacularly and just get told I'm an ass, something might not be insignificant unless evaluated as part of a larger context and historic dialog.

edit: removed my ignorant line about the book of optics.

> The wiki seems to indicate not except the book of optics?

Not sure how you reached that conclusion. Perhaps it would be helpful to search for 'Latin' in that wiki page. There's a reason why so many of these Islamic figures had Latinised names - Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi -> 'Rhazes' or Ibn al-Haytham -> 'Al-hazen'. Their works, as with other scholars, were translated into Latin so that they could be read in Europe.

There's a reason why the word 'Algorithm' starts with 'Al' - the etymology comes from the name 'Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm#History

Yeah that's a bad read on my part - sorry for that. Removed that bit :) And thank you for the information!

"If a tree falls in someone else's forest, and I don't hear it, do I even care." I think sums it a bit more accurately.

I'm pretty sure the point of the comment that you're replying to is that, even in the non-European parts of the world where things like this were discovered, those discoveries were lost and forgotten and the significance of those discoveries only became obvious after they were rediscovered in Europe once society was structured in a way that lead to people communicating and building on them.

> Civilization was miles ahead outside of Europe for a long time.

Yes, and what happened to it? It withered after flourishing. Almost all of discoveries made anywhere else in the world were meaningless because they ended up not changing anything.

Astronomy was practiced in all the major civilizations. The telescope just happened to be invented in Europe in ~1600, and it brought to Mughal India and Imperial China (and spread by 'osmosis' to the Ottomans): they were not interested in it.

Certain individuals took it up, but as a whole those other societies disregarded it.

> Certain individuals took it up, but as a whole those other societies disregarded it.

Just like today? How many people today own a telescope? It's a niche tool useful to some but irrelevant to most.

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