Comment by site-packages1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by site-packages1 | Hacker News Reader

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Really good read enjoyable prose, if not a bit "much" at times.

This was thought provoking, particularly the second sentence:

"Do not forget that medieval England was one of the most devoutly Catholic nations in Europe and one should never underestimate the ability of the pertinaciously pious to behave irrationally. A medieval person’s moral and world views were so intensely bound up with those of the Church that he would have had no doubt that these trials by ordeal were entirely genuine. It would never have crossed the mind of most medieval citizens that being tied up and lobbed into the local lake was not an effective method of proving guilt; shockingly, fluid dynamics and gravity weren’t particularly common topics of study in the thirteenth century. A person’s logic was interchangeable with that of the Church or the ramblings of the one-eyed crackpot codger at the local tavern."

Was this true, did people really not question anything? I always assumed people went along with it for fear of punishment but probably thought it was a little ridiculous. Are we this, forgive me--stupid--today? I would like to think not, but I also see some of the things happening in my own country in places like Florida and think maybe this is just human nature to want to put down our sense of curiosity and willingness to question and give it over to another entity.

> Was this true, did people really not question anything?

No, it's not. This is what an YouTube entertainer writes to get viewers, playing into gossipy, naive folk history to reinforce the narrative they want to tell.

There's no shortage of primary sources and modern academic history that show, very plainly, wide exercise of skepticism, logic, critical thought, diversity of thought and (of course) disinterest with abstract concepts altogether. Yes, there were times when one epistemic regime or another dominated public discourse, just like there is now, but it turns out people suck at conformance with those regimes and have their own private experiences independent of the public discourse, just like they do now.

Private and subculture beliefs are, and have always been, all over the place.

> There's no shortage of primary sources and modern academic history that show, very plainly, wide exercise of skepticism, logic, critical thought, diversity of thought and (of course) disinterest with abstract concepts altogether.

But we're not talking about educated people here, a very small elite of mostly clergymen, we're talking about an average peasant.

I’m not sure I follow.

If you’re saying we can’t have insight into the experience of an average peasant from primary sources and modern analysis, then we can’t draw the conclusions suggested in the article either, right?

But if you accept that those sources may speak to the experience, the point is that the article’s supposition runs counter to them.

The article’s story just articulates an ahistorical, folksy ideology where historical people (and others) are more one-dimensional and uniform than enlightened “modern” people.

Ah yes, the famous 'every past generation was ignorant and every future generation is lazy'

I honestly struggle to understand the writings of common authors of the past and think this is where people confuse intelligence with knowledge. We have more knowledge now, but are we truly more intelligent than people 400 years ago? 1000 years ago?

The implication, though it's still quite conspiracy-minded, is that we're just as credulous today about things that fit within our worldview, the current paradigm. And utterly blind to what those things are, they just seem to be how the world works. Yet future generations will boggle at the the things we believed.

I'm not sure that's necessarily fully true - most likely we're more rational than medieval peasants were, while they were probably more pragmatic than typically believed. But it is thought-provoking.

We may be more intelligent. It depends on whether you're willing to believe that certain phases of society has a eugenic effect on intelligence.

For example, in the medieval era, the upper classes has more surviving children than the lower classes. Without any economic growth (because the economy was tied to land, not capital or innovation, and thus the size of the economy was basically fixed), this creates a constant flow of downward social mobility, where the ten children of a wealthy couple must compete with each other to be among the two who get to inherit their parents' slot in society.

If you think that intelligence could improve someone's chance of rising to the top of such a society, and staying there, then yes, you'd logically think that people in the past were dumber.

Evolution is slow when creating new features. But evolution is very fast when it's just changing the proportions of existing features. It's not hard to see how the above trend would cause a 2 point IQ gain per century, which would mean 10 points in 500 years. There's a big difference between 90 and 100 IQ.

About the ten children: let's assume half were boys and half girls. That leaves three boys fighting it out to inherit. The girls get married off.

One son goes into the army. One goes into the clergy. I'm not sure about the third, if there even were five boys. Two or three is probably more common.

> We have more knowledge now, but are we truly more intelligent than people 400 years ago? 1000 years ago?

Absolutely. Nutrition is very important for development, and people today eat more diversely and better, on average than a 1000 years ago. Not to mention that nowadays pretty much everyone (in a developed and many developing) countries gets an education starting a young age, which surely helps too.

Most people still don't question anything and blindly accept whatever the authority figure on TV tells them.

>I always assumed people went along with it for fear of punishment but probably thought it was a little ridiculous.

Sounds eerily similar to what we do day to day in the postmodern West, isn't it?

the history of peasant rebellion is proof that people were not compliant

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