Comment by p-e-w | Hacker News Reader

Comment by p-e-w | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not a fan of such relativizations. Today's understanding of just about anything is unimaginably more complete than it was 200 years ago. The amount of thought that tends to go into such projects today puts to shame all that 19th century people did or could have come up with.

When trying to predict how people in 200 years will view today's civilization, looking back 200 years into the past is a poor approach. Just because phlogiston theory was garbage, doesn't mean we should expect our understanding of combustion to turn out to be equally flawed. I've read about modern time capsules containing descriptions in hundreds of different languages, including pictograms and algorithms, instructions for bootstrapping data retrieval devices, earthquake safety taking into account plate tectonics tens of thousands of years into the future etc... Such projects today are most certainly not just putting a bunch of stuff in a closed chamber and leaving future generations to puzzle about why.

An example of this is an air collection, which operates in Tasmania. They fill diving canisters with air samples, and mark them by date and climate/conditions.

They also collect community sourced air, dive schools and dive charter boats ring them up and say "we've got a cylinder which sat out back from 1972 do you want it" and they get an albiet dirtier, less certain view of the air, at that place and time.

Future science is going to have a field day.

A couple of well established air samples from when scientific glass blowing first happened have also been found I believe. Obviously collection techniques impart different qualities, but it's still amazing what you can do, with a reasonably well authenticated pocket of air of known provenance.

https://youtu.be/bu5-VERN3XY?si=gdKL1ef-BLs51zSt For more of the Tasmania air

At the same time, there are so many things that people 2000 years ago understood quite well, and didn’t have much worse of a grasp on than we do today. I could be wrong, but it seems that specialized technologies and the knowledge they yield are the vast majority of improved understandings. There’s a lot otherwise that maybe we haven’t made much progress on.

What are some examples of things people 2000 years ago understood almost as well as us?

The rise and fall of the Nile.

The influence of the moon and the sun on weather and tides.

Where baby animals come from.

How to make beer and bread.

> The rise and fall of the Nile.

The ancients noticed patterns, but had almost no causative understanding of what was happening.

> The influence of the moon and the sun on weather and tides.

Even Newton didn't correctly understand how tides actually work (there is no oceanic "tidal bulge"). It took until Laplace for dynamic theory to be developed. The ancients were unable to predict tides except by repeated observation of a specific location.

> Where baby animals come from.

There was zero understanding of biological reproduction before the modern era. Claiming that people 2000 years ago understood this phenomenon "almost as well as we do" is absurd. They didn't even know about sperm cells, nevermind chromosomes or DNA.

> How to make beer and bread.

Alchemy, with no insight into what was really going on.

The ancients understood none of the things you mention even remotely as well as we do today. In fact, I'd argue that they essentially didn't understand them at all.

For the purposes of planning, I think they understood them about as well as most modern people do. Specialists now understand them a damn sight better but in practical terms I suspect a brewer in Egypt knew when the beer was ready about as well as some hipster with his alcohol meter, and the Egyptian shepard knew when sheep fell pregnant, and how to tell which ones had been tupped by the Ram.

Very few people trying for a baby think about DNA. They think about the fertility of the woman in terms of her menstrual cycle. Thats practical science which has been unchanged for a very long time.

You're not wrong. I am literally wrong of course. Figuratively I think I'm less wrong than you say.

Literally none of these are even remotely close to “examples of things people 2000 years ago understood almost as well as us”.

Knowing when the beer is ready is a damn sight less than the chemistry done by even a good number of amateur home brewers these days. Knowing the sheep are pregnant is a far cry from the directed breeding done even at small farms today, to say nothing of the genetic programs at larger ones.

Well, human psychology is a good example in my opinion. Technology has allowed us to make progress here, but even philosophies from this era still hold incredible insight that many, many modern humans may never acquire in their own lives.

Look at Buddhism or stoicism as examples. The deeply nuanced and detailed understanding of human behaviour in some writing is almost dumbfounding at times. You can learn so much from it. Sure, there are weird parts too. But kids these days like skibidi toilet, and I know people who like tv shows about guessing if something is made out of cake or not. We’re as weird as ever.

Nothing. It was all magic and gods. They lived as long as their rotting teeth allowed. And discovering that you can observe things and have power over your own mind isn't exactly huge these days.

Well for one thing, fewer people back then believed ridiculous Whig histories that portrayed the past as incomprehensibly barbarous.

It’s one thing to discover it or have a cursory understanding of it, but it’s another thing to essentially invent CBT millennia before it was formalized by modern humans.

If you think their work was trivial, you might not understand how competent and insightful they were, or how little so many aspects of this knowledge and these theories have changed in thousands of years.

I was a fan of Marcus Aurelius as a teen, and I grew out of it. But that doesn't give me the right to call people ignorant in some online forum. Your opinions are your own and so are mine.

The design of a time capsule is above all else a task of cross-cultural communication. Until very recently, ethnography, linguistics, and social psychology simply didn't exist as formal disciplines. Prior to the 20th century, questions like "What are people in the future going to look for when trying to understand this?" could have only been answered by random guessing, if indeed such questions were even being asked in the first place. Today, there are mountains of literature and research into those topics. That's not even remotely comparable.

I'd like to think there are some things today which we have got completely wrong. That we're not just refining correct theories.

I think today's explosion of LLMs etc will lead (eventually) to actual understanding. Data precedes theory.

You're thinking of nuclear waste? Not representative of today's time capsule, any more than space shuttle software development is representative of software development in general.

"I think today's explosion of LLMs etc will lead (eventually) to actual understanding."

Or the opposite. Most people become too lazy to think and let the AI do it for them... and so the AIs can never overcome their baked in biases, so no real progress will happen.

And about what we have got wrong, I think the problem is mostly how we (the average human) lives.

Every story about dark energy should just be labeled “our astronomy has some large but unknown flaw.”

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