This applies to you too, reader. Many would read the above and fully agree with it, but fail to apply it to themselves and the groups they identify with. It is even more important to critically consider your own beliefs than the beliefs of others.
It is the tendency to think that people in the past were dumb, and we aren't. Like, there always has to be some explanation involved when we learn that people did something unintuitive in the past -- people learned how to make beer by accidentally leaving leftover bread in liquid and then drank it when they were starving. Maybe? Or maybe they figured out that things ferment and played with it until it worked, like we would have done it? Why does it always have to be an accident?
People may have had less access to information and technology, but that didn't make them any dumber than we are now.
There's probably an aspect to people confusing "knowledge" with "brainpower". People in the past were just as good at figuring stuff out as we are today.
We have the advantage of Millenia of stuff figured out and documented. So we know on average more about how the universe works than people in the distant past.
I seriously doubt that. My experience in college was not to learn facts and formulae, but to learn how to learn. I.e. training the mind.
It's similar to athletes. The worst Olympic athlete today would blow away the best from a century ago. That's not because people are inherently stronger today, but because we know how to train much better.
If you took the athletes today without their support team and sent them back in time two years before an Olympics event to compete on their own, I don't think it would be as big of a blowout as you suggest.
BTW, the discovery of the Scientific Method was a great leap forward in how to discover more knowledge.
So you went through classes with no written material? You listened to lecture, took notes, and then did assignments and passed tests with no documents to study?
> BTW, the discovery of the Scientific Method was a great leap forward in how to discover more knowledge.
The scientific method is a set of protocols that are followed in order to formalize evidence and prediction. Putting it into a set of words is important, but not required. Humans managed to sail across oceans and build wonders just fine without it.
When was 'before the scientific method' exactly?
> it was slow and kind of random.
I would argue it wasn't random at all -- it was directed towards human needs and desires as appropriate to the times. There was never a period where humans stopped using their intelligence and problem solving skills to improve their lives in whatever ways were available.
> If you look at the historical pace of innovation it tremendously accelerated after the scientific method became widespread.
When did it become widespread? Where did it spread to? Did those places all show a similar increase in innovation in the years after?
"While elements of the scientific method existed in ancient times, the modern scientific method is generally attributed to Sir Francis Bacon who outlined it in his 1620 treatise "Novum Organum," placing the invention of the scientific method during the early 17th century during the Scientific Revolution;"
which sounds about right.
It was much more prevalent in free market countries. Authoritarian economies tend to be too rigid to experiment and develop new things.
Which specific aspect of that work was responsible for humans being better able to solve complex problems after its development which could not have been solved before it, if the same access to materials and resources were available?
> Authoritarian economies tend to be too rigid to experiment and develop new things.
The German regime during the years between 1930 and 1945 is generally understood to have been highly authoritarian and was responsible for some very famous technological breakthroughs in fields such as rocketry and aviation.
It sounds like you don't know what the scientific method is?
> The German regime
Yes, it was. And I wrote "tend to be" not "absolutely 100%".
I take from that response that you just assume that the scientific method was important but don't know why. I will posit that is because it wasn't as important as you assume.
> tend to be
What number of exceptions would there need to be before you accepted that the entire premise was wrong?
That's right.
I learned to never miss a lecture, and take copious notes. I also never missed a retch session. And still sometimes I needed help from a patient classmate.
The fun thing about the notes was when reviewing them, I'd recall the verbal part of the lecture. This helped a great deal.
Sadly, the passage of decades has silenced that voice, and I have a hard time understanding the notes today. I've wished many times I'd have had the foresight to bring a cassette recorder to lecture and record them. Too bad all those lectures are lost to time. But nobody recorded lectures in those days, and it never occurred to me.
But take distance running - prior to 1954, nobody had done a sub 4 minute mile. After that was known to be possible multiple people sub 4 minute miled in the following decade. If you sent a top runner back a hundred years they would be able to run a sub 4 minute mile, even with 1920s equipment - and the world record in 1923 was 4:10
The story of a sudden breach is perhaps more attractive though.
> The four-minute barrier was first broken on 6 May 1954 at Oxford University's Iffley Road Track, by British athlete Roger Bannister
> On 21 June 1954, at an international meet at Turku, Finland, Australia's John Landy became the second man, after Bannister, to achieve a sub-four-minute mile.
In 1955 Laszlo Tabori was the third person to break the 4 minute barrier. Then, in 1956, three runners broke the four-minute barrier in a single race.
This matches what I described, multiple people attained it once it was understood to be possible. It was linear up to the 4 minute mark, but the point is that records that used to be impossible are now humdrum once achieved.
With for example: "What this shows us is that the issue wasn’t massively psychological. If it was, we would have seen athletes running 1,500m races much faster than their corresponding mile time. Instead, we see that the progression matches up nicely. People were stuck on 4 minutes at the same time they were stuck on 3:43. Do we really think that runners were stuck on a mythical 3:43.0 barrier?"
In case you don't want to read it, it says that other distances had similar "breakthroughs" but they were not associated with a mental barrier like "4 minute mile". Rather, the article argues, the development may have been related to WW2.
Edit: it just so happened that for mile running, the stagnation after WW2 occured just around the four minute mark. You need to look at other distances and perhaps even other sports to see the pattern.
Indeed, my country Sweden won the olympic football/soccer in 1948 - a result widely regarded as being due to other countries have sent all their young men to the war while Sweden stayed neutral/did not fight the germans.
Are you sure about that? Can you post a result where someone ran with leather shoes on asphalt?
The men's mile WR is about 24 seconds faster than the women's. Presumably plenty of barefoot African dudes could run a mile a lot faster than Budd did.
With the exception of the new "energy return" shoes, there's no evidence that shoes help runners run faster - probably the opposite.
I also don’t think that brainpower/learning ability correspond as directly to training regimen as physical ability. We also don’t have as clear of an idea for what the “best” ways to increase learning ability are as for fitness. And of course our methods to quantify intelligence are much less objective than for fitness - partly because we separate fitness ability into different domains in a way that we tend not to for intelligence.
I suspect it is because the thought of what might be possible just never entered their minds.
For example, Edison invented the idea of the invention development laboratory. Very, very recently. The Wright Bros were the first to come up with the idea of a research and development laboratory - just over a century ago.
The scientists that existed before the industrial age in the West were upper class, bored and educated men who did it for their own amusement.
It wasn't until the abandonment of the economic system which worked on the assumption that international economics was zero sum and capitalism (and imperialism) took hold that the incentive structure for creating novel technologies could exist.
This is all recollection based on various histories I have consumed and may not be entirely correct, but I'm pretty sure the idea is solid.
That is partially true. There is no incentive, for example, for slaves to make any improvements. I cannot think of any technology developed by slaves. That meant the few people in power were not enough to think of much new stuff.
You could say free markets were the greatest invention, because it incentivized everyone to be a creator.
The evolution of guns is an interesting topic. So is the evolution of sailing ships. The latter occurred over thousands of years. Very very slow!
You might want to investigate James Burke's "Connections" book and series. It's an entertaining overview of the history of invention.
You can't think of any technology developed by slaves because they wouldn't get credit for it. I am sure all sorts of useful things have been invented by slaves, but if you yourself are property I don't know how you expect credit for your intellectual property.
> You could say free markets were the greatest invention, because it incentivized everyone to be a creator.
The free markets are about efficient allocation and exploitation of resources. People are incentivized to create things that help with that. The byproduct of such efficiency is free time and access to those resources.
> The latter occurred over thousands of years. Very very slow!
Well, it isn't exactly easy to invent a lightbulb when you don't have access to vacuum pumps, transparent glass, filaments, and electric generators. I'm sure if you had a hunk of ore and a hearth you would be making machined parts within a fortnight but our ancestors had to wait for crucial inventions and materials science advances before they move from sails to steam.
Can you think of any in the US Confederacy? Any at all? The cotton gin comes to mind, but that was invented by Eli Whitney in the north.
Can you imagine this?
slave: "Boss, how about if we do it this way, we can be more productive?"
boss: "shut up and do what I told you to."
Slaves had every incentive to do as little as possible, not improve production.
* You have not taken into account factors such as portions of population, different types of slavery or really anything at all
* Your original logic has been shown to be inherently flawed and you are still trying to argue by using evidence that turns out to be an assumption when examined
No thinking needed. A quick search turns this up:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/with-patents-or-wi...
https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/h_counts.h...
Going back further, the Islamic world had a lot of science going on which is often ignored or omitted by the western world when it comes to discussing the origins of science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_in_the_medieval_Islami...
Because that's a surprisingly common way for things to be discovered.
Saccharine? Somebody working in a lab didn't clean their hands well, licked their fingers, and discovered it was sweet.
Aspartame? Somebody working in a lab didn't clean their hands well, licked their fingers, and discovered it was sweet.
I think this is true of basically every major artificial sweetener except invert sugar.
...but now I'm starting to wonder how many people working in a lab didn't clean their hands well, licked their fingers, and died, because they had accidentally discovered a toxin?
They figured it out through reasoning and trial and error and raw experience, while for us it's apparently impossible to learn anything we don't already know the answer for.
As a child I was obsessed with math. I had a pseudo-religious obsession with Platonism, connected with my childhood fear of mortality. A bizarre belief system.
While trying to make new friends in a new city, I was shunned from a new group for unknown reasons. I was going through a breakup from an abuser. I was depressed and grasping for explanations, thinking I was being conspired against. A persecution complex.
Lack of information and strong emotion are enough.
Even more broadly, rationality and empiricism are extremely powerful tools for understanding the world, but they are also extremely difficult and costly to use, to say nothing of their known limitations at tackling complex systems. People have to and do believe stuff just to get through their day. I think this only becomes disturbing when its just one part of the culture which decides to believe some other complex of ideas than the mainstream one.
... explained by(?)
> History makes it abundantly clear that it is a regular occurrence for large groups of people to collectively believe things for which there is little evidence, and furthermore, to take extreme actions based on such beliefs.
Each and every one of us knows very well by now how we reacted to mass psychological movements and how we will react to the next one, which is of course the next great war.
Both are possible, so I need some clarification.
I have heard the spin that Russia made a move on Ukraine because if they became a NATO country there'd be more NATO at Russia's border, but... they still started it. They can't finish it because they vastly underestimated their own abilities though.
I don't see any basis for this view. There are indications that the two sides may be sleepwalking towards a great conflict. But neither side is specifically intending to start or escalate towards such a conflict.
Every media outlet in Nordic countries talk about a Russia-NATO war within the near future or whether Russia and NATO already are at war. NATO leaders are publicly asking for more defense spending to combat Russia. If you read Nordic message boards, most users are cheerfully looking forward to "winning a war against Ruzzia", and I don't doubt that the same idiotic attitudes are found among the Russians as well.
But that is not the same as saying that "war is being planned". The latter implies an actual intent/desire to start a war, the former does not.
Today from Russian media: "Bandera Ukraine, blah, blah"
That phrase on its own should indicate that what you are reading is pure verbal flatulence. The speaker in this case (Medvedev) should be another strong indication.
If you read Nordic message boards, most users are ...
I was referring to actual reality (i.e. what decision makers at the state level are planning). Not what randos on the message boardz are saying.
I find it pretty hard to get on the same wavelength as most people about it. A lot of us feel distinctly human as opposed to, I don’t know, like a smooth ape that is neurotic enough to develop space travel.
I’m half joking. I’ve found the revelation made me love animals a lot more than I had. It brings a sense of unity to my life. Dogs really are family, birds are not nearly as different from us as they seem, and even creatures like fish or squid share remarkable traits with us. These fundamental aspects of being animals.
I really enjoy it. I think it’s a great thing to contemplate and embrace.
My sense of kinship is weak with arthropods. Vertebrates are clearly kin. Birds and mammals are so clearly fellow beings, that I simply can't imagine caring about people if the concept of people must be narrowed to exclude them.
It goes the other way too. I find it easier to love my fellow human animals when I remember they are neurotic hairless apes wearing hats. Our intelligence is so new (in an evolutionary sense), we are just barely smart enough to pull this all off.
Your latter point is a very important one. I think of intelligence as a very tenuous, fragile thing. We can barely utilize it the ways we intend to, and it isn't a guard-rail against all kinds of bad behaviour. It's almost useless to us in all kinds of common scenarios, or barely accessible. We get enraged, drunk, turned on, depressed, etc. and suddenly these faculties are barely function in the ways we need them to be.
So, it becomes much easier to forgive people for making mistakes. You begin to realize we're holding onto this potential by a thread most of the time, not wielding it like a trusted tool. The more you observe this, the more it's a wonder anything works at all.
For people interested, I can highly recommend Our Inner Ape by Frans de Waal. It tells many interesting stories about social interactions between apes that look surprisingly human. By the way, did you know that apes pick their nose, just like humans?
I believe this extends to all kinds of species besides apes (especially mammals, but others as well), and there’s certainly compelling evidence of sentience in places we wouldn’t have thought to find it, but there’s still plenty of research to be done before we can draw conclusions.
> Despite the repeated claims of METH being more addictive or preferred than AMPH, proven differences between METH and AMPH in addiction liability and in reward efficacy have evaded researchers. Animals self-administer METH and AMPH at comparable rates (Balster and Schuster 1973) and humans prefer similar doses (Martin et al. 1971). Also, neither humans nor animals discriminate between equal doses of METH and AMPH (Huang and Ho 1974; Kuhn et al. 1974; Lamb and Henningfield 1994). Furthermore, while METH is commonly believed to be a more potent central psychostimulant than AMPH, no direct comparison on the potency of the two drugs to stimulate central processes have been verified. In addition, no previous study has directly compared the acute effects of the two drugs on locomotor activity, an important central process that contributes tothe definition of psychostimulant. Moreover, there are no known neurobiological differences in action between METH and AMPH that would account for the putatively greater addictive, rewarding, or psychomotor properties of METH.
Do you intentionally cite way out of date scientific research? What is your background in pharmacology? The simple addition of the methyl group is known to effect absorption and potency.
2. None of that is relevant. I'm talking about people taking >30x the dose, not 5x lol. Do you have a background in pharmacology and not understand how that would make a difference?
Of course a higher dosage of a more potent drug will lead to wildly different and markedly increased effects... I think you have your argument wrapped in semantic reasoning rather than pharmacology.
Beyond this, do you admit your premise is flawed?
But this is a philosophical subject, which I'm not educated in.
Each of us makes that choice for ourselves.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/642548/church-attendance-declin...
I'm gratified to see that the lizardman coefficient is consistent. In the chart, 2% of "None/Atheist/Agnostic" apparently attends religious services every week.
"The five largest religious groups by world population, estimated to account for 5.8 billion people and 84% of the population, are Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism (with the relative numbers for Buddhism and Hinduism dependent on the extent of syncretism), and traditional folk religions."
"The five largest religious groups by world population, estimated to account for 5.8 billion people and 84% of the population, are Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism (with the relative numbers for Buddhism and Hinduism dependent on the extent of syncretism), and traditional folk religions."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion#Demographic_classific...
The people who have looked behind the curtain and come to this realization about people and their behavior tend to be the ones who make the skeptic community, so we have that going for us at least.
Combined with the inherent anti intellectual bias of most of America inherited from the nerd hatred of us high schools, reality has no chance against fantasy.
Look at how newspapers treat science. Findings are held up like a freak zoo of "look at what the weirdo science nerds are saying now" as they sensationalize and warp things in the desperate need for clickbait.
So combine pseudoreality rules of media with pseudoreality of finance and economics, and the pseudoreality of politics, and reality simple doesn't have a chance.
No amount of intelligence will protect you from confirmation bias, authority bias, social proof, and the numerous other vulnerabilities we all have built in. Actually intellectuals are more vulnerable, since intelligent people tend to have a cognitive bias where they over-estimate their expertise in unrelated fields to their own.
Speaking of blind spots.
Always has been.
To be honest I am kind of surprised that the current hysteria revolves around something plausible (foreign drones) given that past hysteria has been about the totally implausible (alien UFOs… or angels… or whatever).
And this is why "conspiracy" theories exist. I prefer to call them Low Information High Satisfaction theories, as I fee that is a more accurate name.
I am do not intend to pass judgement on this commentor or on people who believe in these theories; in fact, I think that if you tell yourself "I am too smart to believe in conspiracy theories", you are making yourself MORE likely to fall into one.
We are truly living in an age of narrative; it's not the first and it won't be the last.
Book recommendation: High Conflict by Amanda Ripley
If you called them Low Information Excessive Satisfaction theories instead you'd end up with a much more satisfying acronym! :)
However, I think the original thinking behind the term "meme" is probably still the definitive discourse on the subject: in analogy to genes, ideas undergo natural selection for survival/reproduction and the attributes that promote this specific kind of fitness (ease of spread, satisfaction, advantage obtained by spreading) will be selected for in the course of social interaction. Qualities we might like to encourage (accuracy, completeness) will not be selected for except insofar as we can connect them back to the actual selection mechanism.
That said, "meme" really doesn't quite put as sharp of a point on the problem as "LIES."
Another tweak: Low Information Extra Satisfying
But now I think he was vastly over-optimistic.
I guess that proves their point, whoever they were.
Great phrase btw
That's what they want you to think.
I don't think it works that way.
I wouldn't use the word smart to describe the people (that I know) that fall for scams/conspiracy theories.
Now, you could say that they incorrectly think they're to smart, but then that means how smart you consider yourself isn't relevant, i.e. a not-smart person and a smart person both consider themselves smart.
Scams rely on two things:
1. Over-confidence. The often (but not always) target the elderly because the elderly have pride that comes with long living. When you think you've seen it all, you think you know it all.
2. Emotional irrationality. The scammer is expert at quickly putting a person in an emotionally agitated state, negating good rational thinking. This is easier to do when pride creates a blind spot to catch someone off guard.
People fall for scams not because they are stupid, but because they are humans which tend to be easy to manipulate by playing our cognitive biased and emotions against us. Scamming is both an art and an industry as a result.
Assurance makes you a sucker.
Like, I'm too stupid to understand the flat earth science.
This happens all the time in our current media landscape. "Yeah health insurance denies claims sometimes, that's normal" to "wait actually health insurance denies claims routinely to increase its profits!?"
There are tons of things that we decide to ignore to go on with our lives. It's exhausting to freak out about all the things that deserve to be freaked out about.
Absolutely, we all need to filter the overwhelming amount of information we're faced with. The part that seems terrifying is that occasionally our filters can line up in such a way as to pick up what's just pure noise and escalate it into an enormous positive feedback loop.
And of course there's a whole discussion about how those filters are shaped (by the media we consume, authorities we decide to trust, direct experience) and how that's changed over time.
I'm not talking about editorial bias. I'm talking about deliberately manipulating audience attention in order to control the perception of reality. Another way of putting it is to create a framework for rejecting or distracting from 'disagreeable' ideas.
For example, a partisan news organization might highlight the purported cultural and economic threat posed by immigration. Since people have a limited budget for their attention, having their attention and outrage focused on immigration might distract from other issues such as rising inequality.
Hey, let's not go making something out of nothing.
There is no objective test for Havana syndrome, but being diagnosed with it grants significant financial and non-financial benefits.
(coincidentally, the "Mad Gasser" was also in Illinois).
I only know about this because of Frank Zappa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=352dVmsn7y4