> For most of my life I had assumed that all the people that had lived before our modern times were dumb. Really dumb. Borderline braindead.
What education institution is responsible for this?
What education institution is responsible for this?
Yes scientific papers are great, no I don't put too much weight on someone's take on hapiness, truth, or the fundamental nature of our universe just because they're wearing a lab coat, that would quite literally be thinking that the cowl makes the monk.
Sounds a bit like a straw man to me. "Scientific fact" by definition is subject to change. The "scientific facts" we have right now are the best explanation for reality that we have. Nobody who isn't a researcher in a particular field has the required context to judge whether some fringe theories have the potential to displace the current consensus, so it's prudent to just accept the consensus as a layperson.
Healthy skepticism is the root of all things science, if you forfeit that for any reason you are anything but being scientific.
When you paint faithful people as morons, primitive people as stupid, old fashioned people as out of touch, etc., kids and even younger adults are going to come to the logical conclusion.
We aren't even getting into the recent nonsense of declaring our histories as shameful pieces of shit to be revised and forgotten.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
The underlying assumption seems to be that people in the past were stupid and incapable of writing the great code that we today are capable of writing.
I mean obviously old code can be written badly (just as modern code can be written badly). And sometimes there are newer techniques or libraries which weren't available at the time the original code was written. But more than a few times I've seen old code rewritten by modern code where the modern code is worse than the old code, and the justification is nothing more than the code was "old". Or the way desktop UIs change and evolve and throw away old paradigms - but the people who developed Windows 95 weren't fools just because they lived in the past. (e.g. all icons are monochromatic now whereas it was a design guideline in the past to use colours to aid memory of which icon was which.)
People in 500 years will probably say the same about us. "Look at these morons from the year 2023. Most of them were dumb and wasted their lives."
That said, from what I know, education in Denmark and Germany is sufficiently similar for my hypothesis to not really hold. Another interesting data point is that he is in marketing (advises people on how to cold email potential customers from what I've read) - maybe that's a more meaningful cohort. Not education per se, more socialisation in the work life.
But I suppose correlation does not imply causation anyway.