The deadly “dancing plague” of 1518
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bigthink.com
Dancing Plague of 1518 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35509132 - April 2023 (84 comments)
Dancing Plague of 1518 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27028941 - May 2021 (2 comments)
Historic Hysteria: The Dancing Plague of 1518 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25957689 - Jan 2021 (5 comments)
The Dancing Plague of 1518 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17499671 - July 2018 (6 comments)
Dancing Plague of 1518 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7571625 - April 2014 (2 comments)
Dancing Plague of 1518 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6083844 - July 2013 (1 comment)
Among other things the list you posted illustrates a counterpoint I often made — that engagement on HN is often not due to how compelling the actual content posted is but rather is highly dependent on “group contagion” or serendipitous factors, like a few people coming to comment and upvote early on.
That’s why there is a large incentive for people to “astroturf” their first few comments and votes, by asking friends to upvote, or something. Having posted on HN since 2009 without any such “cheating” I have seen it get harder to “go viral” than in the past, it’s basically the Red Queen theory.
I also noticed that posting long videos or long thoughtful articles that take a while to read results in far less chance of it being upvoted — by the time people finish reading it, it has been “outcompeted” by shorter and more shallow content - because more people come back and upvote it sooner, so the algorithm prioritizes it.
I would suggest A/B testing other algorithms for ranking on HN, like Google did with their search engine, rather than just using pagerank as a single signal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii
There's a bunch of literature about this gondii thing. A lot of it sounds like bait for pop psych articles
Especially since nothing similar has ever happened again.
The article says otherwise.
1. No one could be paid to dance until their own death, and 2. Mass dancing hysteria has happened several times over the ages. Just Google it. And there have been other types of mass psychosis as well, some even in the last century. Heck, Havana Syndrome from a few years ago [1] may be a case of it.
In low to moderate doses they act as a deliriant which is why they were commonly added to low-quality beer but at high doses things get really weird. Some of the bizarre effects of these compounds is it causes people to be easily influenced and causes vivid hyper-realistic hallucinations akin to a psychotic break. Also it's incredibly long lasting especially scopolamine. Effects from scopolamine overdoses have been reported to last for up to 48 hours or more. In fact scopolamine was a compound the CIA experimented with as a 'truth serum' back in the day.
No it didn’t. Just think about it, beer is what? 4-10% ABV? That’s not even remotely enough to sterilize anything.
Boiling which is part of the beer making process obviously helped and beer could be stored for longer than some other beverages but people obviously drank water and understood that boiling it made it safer to drink.
Do remember that untill Pasteur proved the Germ theory in the mid 19th centurys. Many doctors never washed their hands before a surgery. Many, many women died unnecessarily during child birth because doctors helped with labor and did research on corpses on the same day.
(Besides that I won't comment on the "medievals drank beer instead of water" controversy as I always see people on either side talking with equal confidence and plausibility)
Not really. It’s a myth created in the early 1900s or maybe a few decades earlier.
6% ABV was enough to kill germs prior to their discovery but then suddenly it became 60% in the 1800s? Interesting..
People were boiling “dirty” water to make it drinkable since at least Ancient Egypt. There is plenty of evidence they did that during the middle ages. Obviously people preferred clean water and it generally was obtainable most of the time in most inhabited places:
> Do remember that untill Pasteur proved the Germ theory in the mid 19th centurys.
Ok I will. I’m not sure how is this relevant though. I mean if I understand you correctly you’re arguing that people didn’t understood that boiling water killed bacteria, however they knew that turning it into beer did?
> So no, you are in fact wrong.
About what? Obviously people drank beer and they also drank water, clean water was generally available even if much more difficult to procure than nowadays.
> Also, getting a mug of beer from a vat i
You do know that beer (ale) without hops doesn’t really last that long in room temperature? It can and will go bad in days or weeks. Hops weren’t really used in England for instance until the 1400s..
It led to a handful of people dancing till they die, ok, but maybe only in a dense urban setting which wasn't an issue before. Maybe that gene conferred other benefits, like more stamina.
Maybe it's like a lot of disease which don't seem to have benefits but still affect a much larger part of the population.
Intelligent humans are in some ways the dumbest humans. You assume that your consciousness/will is the only "code" executing inside your skull.
It isn't. You're just unaware of the rest. What is it doing, and how much influence or control does it have on your overt behavior? Well, wouldn't you like to know.
The biggest part of the illusion that "you" are in control, is your capacity to re-interpret your behaviors after the fact. Someone asks you, "hey, why'd you A?" and your brain panics at the idea of blurting out "I honestly don't know". There has to be an answer. You're not exactly lying when you come up with that answer, it's more like your best guess. I think in some ways, all those teachers and other authority figures that punished you extra if you said "I dunno" when they asked why'd you break the rules have something to do with this too.
Finally, if you could be the one person immune to so-called dancing plagues... would you really want to be the inhuman freak who didn't?
Where your eyes don't go a part of you is hovering It's a nightmare that you'll never be discoverin' You're free to come and go, or talk like Kurtis Blow But there's a pair of eyes, in back of your head
Where your eyes don't go a filthy scarecrow waves its broomstick arms When you turn around to look it's gone behind you On its face it's wearin' your confused expression Where your eyes don't go
I think, at least here in the States, we've improved our cultural understanding of how to appropriately talk to/discipline children since then, however.
I've never seen anything even resembling a "don't punish kids if they say they don't know why they misbehaved". I do remember being chastised for it when I was a child myself. And in the last 3 or 4 years, I've seen hints of a few psychological studies that have posited that people often don't know why they do things, but make up reasonings for their behavior after the fact.
But never has anyone put two and two together that I am aware of.
I could write books on the evidence I have for why we've not "improved our understanding of how to discipline children".
I don't know very much about parenting strategies (I don't have any children yet so I've never taken the time), but I feel like that's compatible with some things I've heard about responsive parenting. I'm guessing you'd know more though?
Based on past exchanges, there's a 20% chance of someone linking to something from 10 or 15 years ago titled "Don't punish your kids if they say they don't know why they misbehaved".
If so, I'll be happy to see it. If not, still a decent chance that it's out there, and no one knew it to link to it.
But I'm unwilling to assume it exists merely because I'd like to live in a world where it was true. Someone's going to have to show me.
It seems plausible to me that a bunch of people were exposed to a neurotoxin and that they moved around in a sort of dance.
Better to understand that this is innate human nature and guard against it than to just say "couldn't be me".
They were held at gunpoint, probably drugged, and being told that they were going to face a fate worse than death if they didn’t kill then selves.
The vast majority of these people were almost certainly not happy with the setting, to say the least
There are disease processes which cause some pretty distinctive movements, and this was pointed out last time this topic came up here.
The leg movements in the below case report are dance-like and it’s epilepsy. https://bmcneurol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12883-...
In the first link Dang has posted (early 2023) user c3534l started a thread that is interesting. St. Vitis' Dance and Sydenham’s chorea are discussed and it’s an interesting and convincing read.
Almost certainly not; somewhat more than that died related to the cult on the day in question, but many of them, including at the compound, were murdered either outright (as occurred in the mass killing/assassination used deliberately by Jones to justify the call to suicide as the only option for his followers, painting a picture that they would otherwise be killed for their association with the act, an idea that had been carefully prepped by extensive prior indoctrination into the idea that they were targeted), or coerced into taking the poison.
But closed coercive authoritarian cults are a separate phenomenon than any that would explain the “dancing plague”.
in short, the Jonestown massacre was an organized mass murder that had nothing to do with mass psychogenic illness, as the mechanisms of cult mind control have been studied and documented for decades and are well understood.
People will dance, jog, shriek 'spontaneously'. Some of it would be acted but there's strong social pressure to join. The booming sounds and bright lights contribute.
(0) or better, don't unless you use an incognito window lest you get recommendations for more.
I seem to recall "Deep House Cures Depression" being a theme on some promotions. Maybe they were on to something.
Historical accuracy is difficult even on short time scales. Penn and Tell on their show BS used the "official" recipe of Elvis Presely Banana Bacon Sandwich as an example of how even in living memory two people in a position of authority on these things could have two very different recipes.
To be a little more high brow, Pliny the Elder was the one that wrote of Emperor Nero playing the harp as watching Rome burn. He wrote this 150 years (?) after the fact and was very skeptical of this claim as it had been passed along verbally and manipulated heavily along the way.
Could be similar here.
Once I realized this, the world makes more sense.
“In the hopes of wearing the dancers out, the Strasbourg city council decided to build a stage and hire musicians. Their theory was that the dancers had fevers, “hot blood” that could only be cured by dancing it out. This was obviously a terrible idea: The performance merely encouraged more citizens to join the crazed dancers.”
In the future, crazy tales will be told about the early 2020s.