How ancient people saw themselves | Hacker News Reader

How ancient people saw themselves

worldhistory.substack.com

252 pointscrescit_eundo170 comments

This is a good piece to consider in light of some stuff I've been thinking about with LLMs - new technology, that is. I've been reflecting on how some tech changes our relationship with the world, and can do so with such thoroughness that we forget that other ways of thinking even existed.

Plato didn't like books. Trithemius stood up for the scriptorium against the onslaught of the printing press. Baudelaire lamented photography as a refuge for lazy painters. And on it goes.

Mirrors are so commoditized now that they are a mere utility, but there was a time when they were miraculous...mirror..aculous...never mind. Special. That's fun to think about. Especially thinking about something like Snow White, a story that people still understand but probably has a link or two to the past with the "mirror on the wall who's the fairest of them all" stuff.

I was actually talking with some small children recently about the snow white story, and I found it amazing how for them there was nothing magical about the mirror on the wall - it's just a different form factor of a google home device.

Edit: on a separate note, this got me thinking - why does the story make it a mirror? I don't recall it ever being used for its reflective property. Is there supposed to be some deeper meaning to the mirror being a reflection of the queen? Because otherwise, it could have just been a magic talking picture.

I'd caution against looking for deliberate symbolism in these ancient tales. The Grimm brothers wrote these in the early 19th century, but the folk tales they drew from are far older. But the mirror seems to be a representation of vanity. The Queen is gazing in the mirror because she's obsessed with her beauty, which is why she's jealous of the younger Snow White.

Perhaps the fable needs a modern update:

“GPTmazon-Portal on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?”

“Excellent question! Before we delve into the answer, let me tell you about today’s sponsored product presented by Samsung advertisement -- crypto.com beauty credits!”

I don't know for sure, but it's worth noting that the original story was from 1812, which is...based on a quick wiki search, right on the cusp of mirrors being made for the masses. (Seems like they would have been available for royalty though.) And as the story was retold, it wasn't always a mirror.

The Grim version was published in 1812, but it's based on older stories. Here's one published in 1782 that also features a mirror:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richilde_(fairy_tale)

However these are both just published versions of oral folktales. The basic outline of the story might go back hundreds of years earlier, and nobody will ever be able to say when the mirror first showed up.

To the extent that I'm trying to make a point, I think this supports it!

> By the time Richilde is fifteen, she is an orphan and the new Countess. Her dying mother warned her to be virtuous and never use the mirror for frivolity

This is something that would be a lot harder to synthesize in a world where mirrors are abundant, and the link between self-reflection and vanity is strong here.

Mirrors have many supernatural associations. Vampires, for instance, cast no reflection within them. They invoke spirits if the spirt's name is spoken three times. Sometimes, they can trap spirits or demons (must be a dozen modern movies that still utilize this trope, though the writers don't necessarily even recognize where the trope originates).

It's some very ancient meme (in the true sense of the word) that follows humans around without them even recognizing that it's there.

The thing with vampires was because silver is considered pure (c.f. silver bullet) and ‘could not countenance evil’. iirc this was added quite late in the development of the vampire mythos.

Photography as well. Some cultures thought that having your photograph taken would steal your soul.

My first introduction to this idea as a kid was a great episode of the TMNT cartoon named "Camera Bugged"[0], which had aliens with a camera that actually made people disappear.

[0] https://turtlepedia.fandom.com/wiki/Camera_Bugged

as others have noted there are elements of vanity associated with mirrors. But that is not all of the reason, generally when one makes a decision in a story there are many things leading into the decision and the mirror is superior to a painting. The reasons follow:

1. A mirror does offer a current view of who you are, she asks it who is the fairest of all and looks at herself, but one day the mirror tells her she is not the fairest when she looks at it. This is as noted vanity, but it is also true. She is vain to ask the mirror who the fairest is, expecting the answer to be be her, but the mirror is truthful.

2. paintings do not move, a mirror moves, it is a better subject to query. You look at yourself in the mirror you move it moves, people can talk to themselves in the mirror. The painting of yourself offers the past and should stay untouched. This is why the picture of Dorian Gray does not say untouched, it behaves as a mirror, showing the truth while Dorian behaves as a painting showing the past and falsehood. The mirror is a better object to interrogate, the painting a better object to observe.

3. I believe at the time mirrors were known and more valued as objects to possess by the lower classes. This is just my belief. It is difficult for me to conceive of poor people thinking boy, I sure would like to have a portrait of me done up super fine. That would be sweet! Whereas I can totally imagine them thinking Wow, having a really large mirror would be super luxury and so useful! Damn I wish I had a mirror!!

on edit: obviously there can be many more reasons for choosing a mirror, these are just the three that immediately spring to mind if I were writing the story what I would choose.

My interpretation: the mirror is a symbol of vanity.

The association between beauty, vanity, and mirrors is pretty clear I would think.

Also, mirrors have always carried some mystical qualities in folklore. In my country, many superstitious people still cover up mirrors for a few days in the house of a recently deceased, out of some obviously pre-Christian belief that the soul could get trapped/hide inside.

The name of a tool is often closely associated with its primary use case, not the mechanism of its function. Tools which offer expansions of a particular use case are often named for the tool that they build upon, not for the mechanism by which they fulfill that use. Smartphones, for instance, are clearly computers, yet we call them "phones" because we use them for social connections over long distance—it expands the use case for the Western Electric 500, not so much a Compaq 386. (This is why the fight to preserve total app freedom on Android is a lost cause; success would make an Android phone a better Compaq but a worse phone.)

If the queen had an ordinary mirror, she would use it to ensure and maintain her beauty. It's specifically a magic mirror because it expands that use case, through magical properties that allow her to compare her beauty to that of every other woman in the kingdom.

Isn't it a mirror because the queen is so obsessed with her looks? She gazes at her own beauty in the mirror, before asking the mirror to confirm that she is indeed most beautiful in the land.

That is probably part of it, but mirrors are often used in the occult to summon spirits and see the future, so it's also an appropriately "witchy" thing to do.

Ever try implementing a mirror in a video game? They're just inherently magical objects, portals into an illusory world, you see into them in a way you don't with a picture. A magical talking picture just wouldn't hit the same, it'd be too clearly fictional.

Ever try implementing a mirror in a video game?

Completely off-topic, but how many people would you realistically expect to answer “yes” to that question?

Very few lol, I haven't even tried it myself to be honest but I couldn't quite think of a better way to express what I meant. It's more that if you've ever looked into the kinds of tricks that are necessary to do it, and compare that to how trivial it is to splash a simple texture onto a wall, that's a good demonstration of why they're so much more magical.

Yes. All the things in the mirror are actually there. It’s not just a trick of the light, it’s an actual hole in space leading to a mirror dimension. Kinda creepy if you think about it.

> why does the story make it a mirror?

This is what's called a metaphor.

ok what's it a metaphor for?

A mirror is a metaphor for yourself, your interior world. The image she saw in the mirror was her own.

> can do so with such thoroughness that we forget that other ways of thinking even existed.

There is a debate between Chomsky and Foucault [1] where they discuss exactly that at some point (I don't remember the timestamp, sorry). There is an argument about how most of the knowledge of a specific era is "lost" when there is a big discovery. It was a random recommendation from YouTube, and I was quite pleased when I decided to give it a watch.

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=eF9BtrX0YEE&pp=ygUVQ2hvbXNreSBhb...

I encountered this in book form way back in my 20s and it was a real treasure. Somehow it didn't click that of course there was a video recording of the actual debate itself - a real debate! - and of course that recording is now on YouTube.

Thanks for the link, I'll have to muster up the attention span to give it a (re?)watch

One fun one is that people used counting boards for all of their complicated calculations (literally "calculi" = "pebbles", i.e. counters) for many thousands of years, starting we don't know precisely when but maybe sometime before 3000 BC in Mesopotamia, and at least in Europe continuing up until only a few centuries ago (in some places until the 18th century or after) and now almost no one has even heard of them, let alone has any idea how to use one.

(For what it's worth: I think a counting board is still the best way to get small kids doing some basic calculations and understanding a positional number system: moving buttons or pennies around on a piece of paper with some lines drawn on it takes much less manual dexterity than writing, and the representation is much more direct and concrete than written symbols.)

The abacus is a standard part of elementary education in several Asian countries, for precisely the reasons you mentioned regarding numerical intuition. In American education, a student might only learn about the abacus from a brief paragraph in their history textbook.

Even today, there are average people in the Chinese countryside who know how to calculate the solution to a set of linear equations with counting sticks (a technique known as fāngchéng - 方程). My point being that usage of mechanical calculation assistance is indeed a useful skill, and would probably be beneficial in American/western education as well.

A sliding-bead suanpan or soroban is a practical and very portable tool for doing basic sums and differences, but after working with my own kids I don't think it's as good as a teaching tool as a counting board is, and I expect it's probably not as effective for doing more advanced calculations either, compared to a flat counting board where counters can be positioned arbitrarily, and where it's easy to add as many additional counts as you want by just making some more lines on a new piece of paper.

The real advantages of a counting board are (1) it needs no special equipment beyond a pile of pebbles, pennies, buttons, or other tokens; (2) it can be easily modified to apply to different number systems or specific calculations (though it's perhaps not as conveniently flexible as symbolic writing); and (3) there are many different representations of any number, and the game of calculation is about starting the problem off immediately with one version of "the right answer" already on the board and then performing various meaning-preserving operations to simplify the representation until arriving at one which is convenient to interpret or compare. This seems quite different psychologically from the use of a soroban (disclaimer: I'm not an expert) which is more about performing a sequence of steps in a pre-determined algorithm to obtain a correct answer, with intermediate steps not showing a representation of the same number because the soroban has only one unique way to represent any particular string of digits. I think the more flexible and representation-agnostic tool better promotes an essential skill which only increase in use as people get to higher levels of mathematics and other technical subjects. The soroban might be better for an accounting tool but the inflexibility is a deficiency for a teaching/thinking tool.

I have a toddler, do you have any recommendations of things you did with a counting board with your kids for teaching basic math at a young age?

We use a variant of Steve Stephenson's counting board, which we call "button arithmetic" as an activity. Stephenson (since deceased) was a retired engineer turned high school teacher who got very interested in counting boards in the 2000s. He made some YouTube videos here:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL545ABCC6BA8D6F44

and some web pages:

https://ethw.org/Ancient_Computers

https://web.archive.org/web/20170903104702/http://sks23cu.ne...

Some of Stephenson's historical speculations are somewhat implausible, but it's fun to think about, or try to invent your own alternative ideas, and overall I think ancient calculation methods are underestimated by many modern scholars.

With my kids (now 9 and 6), we haven't bothered with Stephenson's floating-point-with-exponents system, but we do base ten arithmetic using horizontal lines for powers of ten and a vertical line to separate positive/negative. The space between two lines represents (as in medieval Europe) five times the previous power of ten.

I went to a fabric store and examined every type of button they had in bulk, then bought a bunch of my favorite type: some round metal ones, somewhat smaller than pennies, symmetrical on top/bottom, with a slightly domed shape that makes them much easier to pick up than coins. But pennies also work okay, as do carefully chosen beach pebbles.

I think counting boards are quite helpful for kids, a powerful and flexible tool that they can grow into. They can get started with it at age 3–4, before having the manual dexterity to write numerals.

Thank you!

> The abacus is a standard part of elementary education in several Asian countries, for precisely the reasons you mentioned regarding numerical intuition. In American education, a student might only learn about the abacus from a brief paragraph in their history textbook.

IIRC, Montessori schools use them, or something like them.

The abacus is awesome, and fun to learn. My parents bought me a miniature one on a trip to San Francisco when I was 8 years old (first time visiting Chinatown). It came with an illustrated pamphlet and I started practicing with it and figured out how to use it for basic math. I'd recommend it for any kid.

American schools do use "manipulatives" to introduce counting and numbers, addition, subtraction, etc. They might use checkers, or popsicle sticks, or anything small and easy to hold/move.

The use of various kinds of mathematical manipulatives and concrete materials is great (including base ten blocks, cuisenaire rods, ten frames, number lines, dice, balance scales with weights, geoboards, pattern blocks, multi-link cubes, etc.). I'm a fan of all of them. But I think the counting board, per se, is a sadly neglected tool, not least because it gives a nice connection to the past.

I'd like to read the accounts of contemporary curmudgeons bemoaning the way young Greeks are clamoring for mom's mirror, and how you should limit your kids to no more than one twelfth of a day of mirror time, setting the clepsydra if necessary.

Or even today, the rediscovered idea of separating the sink (and mirror) from the toilet, so preeners aren't holding up the flow.

Makes you wonder if mirrors have been a net negative on civilization, for its acceleration of vanity.

Yeah, for sure! I mean, Narcissus is in the public consciousness there to back up your idea.

It's an interesting idea: that a piece of tech can represent one thing and have certain moral sensibilities that form around it, and then some innovation or something changes our relationship with it (in this case, puts it on a wall in every bathroom).

Maybe it changed us in ways we can't fully know! Maybe commoditizing the mirror largely robbed it of its power. Or maybe we're all a bunch of narcissists in ways we can't comprehend because we don't have the anti-mirror people out there scolding us.

Before mirrors, people would say there was something stuck in your teeth and you had to just believe them.

::inspired by this comment, drafts a thousand word blog post about the decay of teeth, and social trust::

Our tools define what is possible, so it's not too surprising. I've yet to dream about CLI tools or Microsoft Word fortunately

I thought you were going to go a different direction and point out that many people don’t realize how easily LLMs can act like “mirrors” and reflect their own thoughts back to them.

The Pun Committee accepts your pun and salutes you.

This is calling out for experimental archaeologists to make the best possible front surface reflections they can from polished copper, bronze, steel, obsidian, glass. The Romans had metallised glass. They knew how to roast glass. They may well have known how to vaporise metal onto glass.

The state of the reflecting surface with 2ky of corrosion does not match even looking at your reflections in water.

There's this tendency to assume ancient = primitive, but these were skilled artisans with deep material knowledge

Agreed. I imagine that obsidian surface must have been as polished as my smartphone screen in its prime, and probably as useful as a mirror (screen turned off). I am not sure of the flatness they were able to achieve though, so the reflection might not have been perfect. In theory a perfectly flat surface is achievable if they used the same tool to polish multiple mirrors at the same time!

> In the myth of Narcissus, a beautiful young demigod who saw his own reflection in a pool of water became so enamored with it that he refused to move. He rejected the advances of beautiful young women and eventually wasted away, unable to break the spell of his own image.

Alternative, deeper understanding — https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/10/the_story_of_narciss...

Thank you; I enjoyed this quite a bit.

I didn't expect it to be about literally seeing.

About 3/4 into the article, “wait, it’s all about mirrors? ...Oh!”

The subtitle is "The Art of the Ancient Mirror", so perhaps not so surprising…

I thought it would be about how much work went into different objects and how that made people behave, with the first example being mirrors.

Ended up being about mirrors.

I'm surprised more museums don't have modern replicas demonstrating what the ancient artifacts would have looked like when pristine.

There are stories of when near perfect mirrors entered trade. Some stories are sweet, and others rather macabre:

https://www.japanpowered.com/folklore-and-urban-legends/mirr...

Technology tends to influence cultures in subtle ways few remember a generation later. =3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Dangerous_Animal_In_T...

Or even polish up the corroded artifacts and mirrors they do have. Why don't they do this?

I think there is a tension between preserving artifacts as-is, vs restoring them.

Restoring them would also cause repeated wear and tear, and potentially erasing clues we haven't recognised as important yet.

Making replicas is more suitable: the public can also touch and use them as well.

Ever seen a polished steel mirror in a gas station bathroom?

British Museum actually does this with their Greek statues - shows how they were painted. The gap between "marble perfection" and "gaudy colors" is wild. Makes you realize how much our idea of classical taste is just patina.

So the sculptors had much better taste than the painters they allowed? Or are the reproductions not faithful?

One view is that the western idea of "good taste" was informed by people looking at greek and roman statues and buildings and incorrectly assuming they were always intended to be plain.

Sort of explains a lot doesn’t it

There are frescoes of statues[1] and architecture[2] in Pompeii. Feel free to compare them with the reproductions.

[1] https://www.worldhistory.org/image/2232/fresco-of-a-statue-o...

You forgot link 2

Sorry.

https://www.maxwellanderson.com/pompeian-frescoes-in-the-met...

We don’t know. The painted reconstructions are based on pigments found on the statues, but we dont know exactly how the painting looked.

But the paintings which have been preserved from antiquity are quite beautiful.

This is why I prefer my rust bucket of a car to something new. In 2,000 years the masses will view it as good taste.

sounds like partly they didn't have access to great pigments back then

Well, they didn't have pigments that would maintain their color and adhere to a surface for 2000 years.

Do we?

Now you've duped everyone with the wrong headline, let's discuss what we thought it was about.

I bet ancient people saw themselves as the pinnacle of civilisation, much like we do now.

I'm sure Romans were sitting there with their cities and aqueducts and street vendors and Colosseum and huge empire thinking this is as good as society had ever been.

Nobody was sitting there saying "we don't even have electricity" or "of course light doesn't come out of our eyes to see, that easily fails the scientific method" because they didn't know those things existed.

I get the thrust of what you say but this wasn't always the case. The idea of linear progress upwards is not universal. Many cultures placed the pinnacle age in their past, before some corruption or decay took place -the ultimate expression of such would be like the biblical story of the Fall, but it also existed on less cosmic scales. The golden age when people were better, seeing your age as decay against the valorized past is in fact more common.

Also just because others thought similar things doesn't mean it isn't true now. The progress since sometime in the 1800s has been insane. If in 100,000 years a super smart civilization, unimaginably advanced, looks at an estimated world population time series, they will be objectively impressed that those guys figured out / stumbled upon some impressive things to manage that. It's really interesting to think about just how desolate the world was even a few hundred years ago. Almost all our big cities today were little towns, except for like 1 or 2 globally. The change is undeniable. It's not all subjective and "they said X, we say X, nobody can decide if X is true, what is truth anyway, etc"

In many cultures, there is/was also the idea of cyclical history. Things don't go forward or backward, they just repeat themselves in slightly different ways infinitely.

It reminds me of Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought trilogy, especially the observation the traders make in the second book that all planet-bound civilizations are doomed to collapse at some point. They are usually able to restore technological progress more quickly the more records they have, but without leaving the planet are still doomed to repeat the cycle. IIRC there is even more-or-less standardized "uplift" protocols - series of technological reveals for less-developed civilizations to rapidly advance/restore their capabilities.

I wonder if there is academic study comparing past-focused, future-focused, and cyclical views of human progress in literature.

"Collapse" is maybe hyperbole in this case, if it's building on our own history to extrapolate forward. For us, certain societies have collapsed, and with them have been lost certain practices or technologies, but human civilization as a whole has been largely steady or growing since the agricultural revolution (using population size as a heuristic). There's always the threat of ecological collapse, but that's something that has only happened a few times in the history of life on the planet, and we haven't really faced anything like it before at civilization-wide scale. There's always been another group to move in and take up the abandoned land. Without some major technological breakthroughs, yes, we're likely to face a collapse eventually, but as a biosphere, not merely a civilization. Short of that, people seem to keep on keeping on.

I think the mistake comes from something common to a lot of sci-fi, which is mistaking the scale of a planetary setting. It takes a lot of energy to disrupt life on a global scale (we're managing it, but it's taken hundreds of years). "At some point" is carrying a lot of weight in that observation.

> "Collapse" is maybe hyperbole in this case, if it's building on our own history to extrapolate forward.

In the story, "at some point" generally involved technologies we are currently incapable of; the greater technology actually facilitating the greater collapse. Which at the most obvious included nuclear catastrophe.

I think my contention is with "collapse" rather than something like "crash". The latter implies a cyclical downswing (reasonable), the former implies the absolute end of a cycle through the non-viability of the prior order. One means "start the round/match over," one means "find some wood to start carving a new board and game pieces". The new game probably won't be recognizable, and you're talking about not just the events but the setting and context being unfamiliar. Every civilization goes through that? I suppose, but only because every life-bearing planet goes through that, civilization-bearing or not.

> always been another group to move in and take up the abandoned land

Completely agree with your points, but I think it’s worth mentioning that the collapsing populations may not have been aware of this depending on their level of isolation and cultural view on outsiders.

Sounds like Niven and Pournell's Moties civilization cycle from "The Mote in God's Eye"

Excellent books.

Though isn't progress inherent in that knowledge tends to increase over time? What's useful tends to get passed on to future generations, so there is an inherent advantage compared to earlier generations. Of course it's not perfect (as sometimes things get forgotten) and just knowledge/skills don't always translate to increase in living standards or productivity or well being, but by and large, in the long run, this should be true?

“ all this has happened before. All this shall happen again.”

> Many cultures placed the pinnacle age in their past, before some corruption or decay took place

North America, for example.

> how desolate the world was even a few hundred years ago

Well, those were the Dark Ages which objectively represented a decline of society relative to what came before them.

Besides that, agreed to all you wrote.

> The progress

Progress towards what, exactly?

Victory over the terror of the natural world on all of its fronts. That doesn't mean decimation of natural beauty, but answering the question "how will I live comfortably and not die today?" everyday for everyone forever.

Do you/we think this is a truly possible or laudable goal.

Leaving aside the heart death of the universe, I can imagine a future that's a more utopian version of the Altered Carbon universe, where everyone who wants to have daily backups, which they could set to restore either in the cloud or in a biological/robotic body in the case of an unintended death.

I don't know if it's a laudable goal, but I think it'll eventually be possible.

I was asked about the direction of the destination. Saying the direction and having everyone agree on it is worth a lot when the current bus driver is heading towards a cliff. I do think things get better if we all pursued this destination together.

If you asked me several years ago I would have said "yes, the star trek future is at least partially attainable", but that requires a lot of optimism in technological advancement that I don't have. I do think that with the technology and resources available to us today (or the near future) we could support 10 billion people working safe labor in air conditioning, full stomachs, free time, and on a planet that is still hospitable.

If you want to know how to actually get there: I have no idea, but I do know if we don't agree on the direction and make steps towards it continuously for many generations that we'll never get there. For now I'm voting with my feet and contributing my labor to a cause I think pushes us in the right direction.

Also, I'm setting aside the battle with natural death. Preserving brains and their contents indefinitely is not impossible, but transhumanism is as much philosophy as it is technology.

Hmm. I think I get it and its certainly a goal you could get behind. I take it you basically oppose Ivan Illich's premise that modern medicine will never out smart death and fails to help people adapt to the truth of their mortality?

I don't think that death is a certainty. It is today, but we are working on it. We are not supernatural. CGPGrey's thoughts on this mirror a lot of my own.

I grant that not all care given to aged is a kindness, but not fighting aging is not virtuous.

https://youtu.be/C25qzDhGLx8

https://youtu.be/cZYNADOHhVY

Not having half of your kids die, could be one thing:

"For most of human history, around 1 in 2 newborns died before reaching the age of 15. By 1950, that figure had declined to around one-quarter globally. By 2020, it had fallen to 4%."

https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality

Towards maximizing the sum of individual happiness, power, beauty and knowledge. Maybe a few other attributes in there, but these are the bare minimum that no civilization would deny for itself.

The question of course is 'how'. For the last few centuries, the answer has been technology.

Good question, I guess progress to the betterment of society, people's lives, and human knowledge and power.

But no one really knows what future we are heading towards, or what would happen to us in 100,000 years. No one really cares to think that far ahead I guess.

We don’t think about it that much because every assumption we make is likely to turn out to be wildly inaccurate and the technology of the time will likely solve all of the problems we worry about now long before they ever reach that breaking point we are currently worrying about.

Take the example from another thread today. In the 60s we were worried about food shortages to support the exploding population, but it turned out that we solved that problem way before the population number was at that assumed “breaking point”.

We can theorize now about the problems we will face in 100k years, but what about the problems we can’t ever foresee? Aliens with hyperlight laser beams? Rogue asteroids? We have no answers for those types of problems, but they are probably more likely than anything we can dream up today.

astroids are a problem, but we know enough physics to say aliens can't attack. if they exist they are too far away to know we are here.

> we know enough physics to say aliens can't attack

Don't be too optimistic... This isn't just a question of physics but also about the probability of the emergence of complex technological intelligence. Since we only know about a single case, we can't determine this probability. We can make various guesses but these all involve assumptions about things other than physics

all the alien intelligence needs to obey the laws of physics we know. There might be major things we don't know but it still fits in our current laws.

unless you are appealing to 'God can do anything' - but since God wouldn't do that we can ignore that he could.

Well, one thing we don't know physically is whether traversable wormholes exist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole#Traversable_wormholes

Even if all travel is limited by lightspeed, without knowing the probability of emergence of intelligent life, we don't know how far away or how long ago such life is likely to have formed.

Even if we did have a better idea about this probability, we still couldn't rule out that intelligent life had by chance formed relatively nearby, relatively long ago, thereby allowing them to reach us by now. Nothing in physics forbids this as far as I know.

Personally I don't think an advanced alien civ would attack us anyway, because we'd be no threat. Since intelligence seems to imply curiosity, they might want to observe or experiment with us instead, but that's speculative

> Even if we did have a better idea about this probability, we still couldn't rule out that intelligent life had by chance formed relatively nearby, relatively long ago, thereby allowing them to reach us by now.

What is "now"? Within the next 100,000 years? In human terms, that's an eternity, and in galaxy term, that's an insignificant amount of time. In other words, almost certain not to happen. Even if it does, do we even notice? Chances are they either immediately kill us all, or they just observe and will stay hidden. A face to face interaction is scifi, not reality.

Tbh, on the list of things that humankind should worry about, an alien visit isn't even in the top 100.

It's understandable that it's a great topic to muse about, especially among tech folks. It's been part of scifi lore for generations and one can spend a lot of time discussing technical aspects. That's by far less messy and depressing than dealing with actual real-world problems (like wars, drift to dictatorships, oppression of minorities, inequality, climate crisis, human-made ecological disasters, heritary or contagious diseases, etc etc). Though when it's about devoting actual societal resources, it would be a waste to spend them on alien visitor questions beyond writing novels and making movies. Even if it's more fun to nerd out on intergalactical travel rather than preventing school shootings.

> What is "now"?

"by now" means at some time before the present.

I'm just pointing out an alien encounter is not ruled out by physics. I'm not advocating for societal resources to be diverted to prepare for it.

You mention some well-known, difficult problems. Does their existence mean no one should ever talk about anything else?

I'm not sure why you get involved with a conversation just to point out that wars and climate change are happening. Everybody already knows that. I'm taking a little time out to comment on various topics here, as you seem to be doing too.

Anyway, if you're trying to encourage people to spend time on finding solutions to those problems, I'm listening. What's your proposal?

Sorry if I got you on the wrong foot. I was merely generally rambling, not critcizing you personally or your point. Of course it's fine to discuss this, just like it's fine that people discuss pokemon or cool jazz (who am I to judge). I could have posted this anywhere in the discussion tree. I'm merely a little fed up when some tech folks make it sound like this should be top priority for humankind.

Of course you're right about the physics.

And I don't have solutions to the hard problems either. They are hard for a reason.

Ah ok, thanks for clarifying. I certainly don't think it should be a top priority either, partly because of the low subjective probability, but mostly because it would be an outside context problem (excession) - it's impossible to prepare for an event whose implications we can't bound

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession#Outside_Context_Prob...

Well it can be fun (sometimes terrifying) to try and imagine that far ahead, but unlike hindsight, it is, at the end of a day, just a guess

I didn't mean it in a moral sense, but in sheer production, population, the physical energy moved around the mass of materials moved around etc. It's a wholly orthogonal question whether this is better in a moral sense, whether people are happier, live more in harmony with their authentic selves or with God or whatever. The point is that even an alien would be able to see that this age is not simply like any other where people thought highly of themselves. There has been massive material-technological improvement in the last two centuries in a way that doesn't apply to every era at all. Seriously look at a chart of a world population. It's a hockey stick. Again I'm not claiming here and now that this is a moral improvement. Maybe you think it's for the worse and take the cautionary view, like the stories of Icarus, or the Tower of Babel and think it's bad that we took too much control of things. But that's an orthogonal question.

IIRC the ancient Greeks did not view themselves as the "pinnacle of civilisation", but somewhat fallen from a time of heroes or a golden age in the past. This golden age is when many of their well known epics take place. Another point of interest here is that I have heard the estimated timing of the golden age to be right before the bronze age collapse, meaning that they were literally a kind of post apocalyptic society reminiscing about their past.

Or, if you were less charitable about the nature of Bronze Age social organization, you could say it's a society of former slaves hopelessly romanticizing their former masters.

On a related note, I think the whole mystery of the Bronze Age collapse becomes fairly obvious once you consider the nature of Bronze Age societies and the way they'd be affected by a technology [iron] that allows a village with a can-do attitude to resist the predations of the local god-king. (Or to become predators themselves, perhaps by taking to the sea.)

Doonesbury: "Aha! The Hittites!" "You know their work?" "Complete degenerates. But tough to beat after they invented iron." https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1978/12/26

Ea-Nasir's buddies were experimenting with adding hematite flux to remove slag from copper. They wanted to improve their copper, and wound up giving us IRON. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-year-copper-smelting-site-key....

Slavery was quite common in classical Greece too, especially in Sparta.

Athens too - the vast majority of the population were slaves or 'metics' - non-Athenian foreigners. Some slaves worked as partners with their citizen master and it wasn't unusual for such a slave to be adopted into a family and thus become a citizen. Such slaves had greater rights than women, who could never become citizens.

That was chattel slavery which doesn't generate the same feelings of devotion compared to divine monarchy. We've all seen the great sadness of the North Korean people at the passing of their Dear Leaders.

This in spite of the tendency of said Dear Leaders to keep their charges in famine conditions, something absent even from most modern systems that are close to chattel slavery, for example in the Gulf states and in human trafficking operations.

Many people in USA are very fond of their Dear Leader, despite cuts on basic survival needs such as food stamps.

Since I'm assuming that Bret Devereaux [1] isn't here to raise the point, I'll do it instead: "ancient people" is a term that, as we colloquially understand it, tends to exclude most of the ancient people, namely, the peasants. Sure, a Roman would sit with their aqueducts, but for that one person in the city you need a couple orders of magnitude more people working the fields.

As I understand Bret's last post about the life of peasants[2] regarding how they saw life,

> the lives of these peasants work in a series of cycles. There’s a reason agrarian societies of these sort often do not think in terms of time as a linear progression, but instead as a set of ‘ages’ or ‘cycles,’ with the present, in a sense, endlessly repeating in a static sort of rhythm. For these societies technological and social progress, while real is often so slow as to be almost or entirely imperceptible on a normal human lifespan.

[1] https://acoup.blog

[2] https://acoup.blog/2025/10/17/collections-life-work-death-an...

I think your (perhaps intentionally) missing the point as a pretext to pontificate about and link to things that are only tangentially related.

Even if these people aren't well recorded in history you can take a pretty ironclad estimate as to what they thought in aggregate by looking at the clergy, the administrators, etc, etc and what they were preaching, saying, etc.

How one sees their individual life doesn't have direct bearing on the society they live in.

Let's take for example a farmer on the outskirts of some village in southwest England. His bloodline may have been occupying the same land for Millenia. Their feelings about doing so may not even change over that time. But depending on the century you put him in he and everyone else in the society he lives in think of the way they fit into the larger world very differently.

This is a very flat view - the Roman empire is born in a period of civil war, and after a relatively brief period of peace in the imperial core starts imploding and rebuilding itself in different configurations.

The art and culture was very often echoing an imagined past of yeoman landholders + citizens.(very similar to the invocation of 'Real America' today). And their foundation myth imagines that they are a continuation of the trojan civilization.

For everyone who was not at the top of the imperial hierarchy it's pretty easy to imagine that they thought civilization could be improved! Aristotle writes a defense of slavery - which implies that someone was attacking the institution. It's not a big leap to think that enslaved people could picture a world where they weren't enslaved, or that women could imagine having political/civil/property rights.

I think maybe something you are getting at is that those structures felt indestructible at the time, that in christianity associating the end of the roman empire with the apocalypse. Needless to say we aren't posting this in latin.

Is the headline actually wrong? Its literally about how they saw themselves.

At the time, they were right; it was as good as society had ever been.

I think they were much like us in many ways. They probably imagined that things could get better (even if they didn't imagine electricity or computers).

> At the time, they were right; it was as good as society had ever been.

Debatable. Proponents of "original affluent society" argue that agricultural civilization was a major step back in terms of quality of life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society

Every era probably feels like the apex of human progress because people can only measure against what they know

I would argue (without any proof, just by feeling) that currently there are more people that think the past is better than the present. There is even a statement "every past time was better": is a subjective perception influenced by cognitive biases like rosy retrospection, which causes people to remember the past more fondly and forget its difficulties.

Many many people today tend towards ecologism, thinking we are now just ruining the planet, and should go back in time.

No, most ancient people believed in a steady decline from a golden age in the past.

[flagged]

I'm not sure every era did think it was the apex of human progress, though, because sometimes they had physical or cultural evidence that previous generations could do things that they couldn't.

E.g. if you were a petty kingdom emerging in the centuries after the Romans left Britain, you'd be fairly sure that you no longer had the technology to build aqueducts, baths or villas. And for centuries after that, a large element of learning was trying to recreate / understand the classics - e.g. the influence of Galen and Aristotle.

Doesn't the modern idea of inevitable human progress really come in with the enlightenment?

Those petty kingdoms did have the technology to build that - they just were too small to have enough people.

Did they? For example, the Roman formula for waterproof concrete was lost and only rediscovered (in the 15th Century) when a manuscript came to light. I think it's more than just a lack of people or wealth (though that comes into it of course): people thought of the Romans as being 'superior', hence the effort they went to to preserve surviving classic manuscripts.

It's not to say that the early medieval period couldn't eventually built magnificent edifices or build on the knowledge, but for many centuries, Rome and Greece was seen as something to aspire to.

That isn't relevant as they didn't have the spare resources to dedicate people to the task. If they did a few smart researchers could figure something out. Just going through all their archives would have done the job if they had people to dedicate to the search (though of course they couldn't have known that and so a track to create it from scratch would also be needed).

Depending on where you are talking about there may not have been local resources to make waterproof concrete, which back to my point: they didn't have the resources if they wanted to. Though we have plenty of buildings (most obviously Cathedrals) dating to well before the rediscovery of roman concrete to prove that isn't needed. Those Cathedrals only exist because they had a few resources and so they could build them over time. Those cathedrals also were in use for church services - usually in the first year of construction - to fuel the dream.

> Those Cathedrals only exist because they had a few resources and so they could build them over time

They also only exist because they used architectural techniques that the Romans never developed, namely the flying buttress, which could support massive relatively thin wall without hundreds of columns and arches everywhere.

I don't think anybody seriously suggests that the medieval period was incapable of developing anything new or of building some stunning things – it's clearly nonsense. They had as many geniuses and craftsman as any generation and they produced some wonderful things comparable to anything we can.

I don't think it's simply a matter of lack of resources, though – some of the early kings had the manpower to do things like build an 80 mile rampart between Mercia and the Welsh states.

In thinking about what you've written, I started to look for more detail on any research into why there was such a drastic change in architecture post the collapse and you're right, it clearly is more complicated than just lost knowledge. I didn't look far, only https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_architecture, but that's enough to suggest that it's now accepted that conscious cultural choice had a lot to do with it as well (if not more…). So I learnt something and will dig into it more - thanks!

But I'm not sure that specific (Anglo Saxon architecture) point really negates the proposition that for a thousand years people looked back to Rome (and later Greece) writers to legitimise their knowledge. This knowledge was sought after and preserved (and amended to fit in with religious dogma, of course). There were innovators, of course, but there's a reason that writers like Galen and Vitruvius, held so much sway for so long, isn't there?

In the political sphere, there were countless (real and figurative) battles to be seen as the heir to the Roman Empire because that was what success looked like… Yes, all these states would have torn each other to shreds anyway, because that's what states do if they're not stopped, but isn't it telling that they did explicitly so in terms of being the inheritor of Rome?

Of course it's all more complicated than that, but it does seem fairly clear that the ancient world generally was seen as something to aspire to, to get back to, in a way that's probably foreign to us now.

Unless you're Mussolini, of course…

> Every era probably feels like the apex of human progress

Tell that to 600s Western Europe. They were fully aware that there was a society before them that had the capacity to do things they could not.

Roman elites were obsessed with Greek culture, in a way similar to many Americans' current fascination with the British class system (Downton Abbey, Bridgerton, Rivals, etc.)

> I bet ancient people saw themselves as the pinnacle of civilisation, much like we do now.

I think the Romans were right to believe that, and so are we today.

But the ride wasn't sa clean, steady slope up. For example there's a reason the dark ages are called dark. Most people of the time (except the few educated) didn't know there was something better in another time and another place. They probably thought that's as good as anyone's ever had.

Now we live in the first period in history where knowledge of history is accessible to almost any person. So as a regular guy you can have a good sense of where to place these times on the scale of civilization.

> For example there's a reason the dark ages are called dark. Most people of the time (except the few educated) didn't know there was something better in another time and another place. They probably thought that's as good as anyone's ever had.

I am pretty sure you are wrong on multiple counts there.

1. The "dark ages" were called dark because of a lack of written records, after the collapse of the Roman Empire and its centralised systems and imperial bureaucracy.

2. A lot of people did know there had been a different age before. Even if not literate they would regard the literate as the source of knowledge and every village would have some literate people.

3. Life was better for many people. An obvious example was the decline of slavery ( a huge proportion of the population of the Roman Empire) but the descendants of slaves were not the only people who benefitted from the removal of imperial power, and heavy imperial taxes, etc.

https://www.medievalists.net/2023/06/middle-ages-dark-ages/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)

Well that was trigger happy and arguing for the sale of arguing. We have different definitions of what an advanced civilization is.

On #1, do you see the lack of written records as cutting down bureaucracy? Because historians see it as a period of civilization downturn and turmoil. No focus on things outside the necessities which were mostly about survival. The enlightenment or renaissance didn’t have these names for the return to documenting thoroughly. It was because of everything in between.

#2 “A lot of people” says nothing. The average person in the year 900 had no formal education so would probably know at best some stories or legends about what came 500 years before. But let’s not pretend this changes the meaning of what I said.

#3 Many people today are slaves so were the dark ages more civilized?

I think that's true (particularly about the Dark ages not being uncultured), but in some places, the signs that what came before was vastly superior technologically (and culturally) would have been all around them.

E.g. a century after the Romans left Britain, it would be fairly obvious to everyone that whoever built the aqueducts, villas, fortresses etc had vastly superior technology.

And much of the literacy was aimed at preserving what knowledge had survived from the classical period – in the service of religion in the monasteries, of course, but also in what we'd know call 'science'. E.g. wasn't Aristotle taken as the go to authority in scientific matters for the scholastics?

> E.g. a century after the Romans left Britain, it would be fairly obvious to everyone that whoever built the aqueducts, villas, fortresses etc had vastly superior technology.

Yes, but

1. Britain was where there is the best case for a serious regression. 2. Building those systems was also a matter of imperial priorities and imperial centralisation. Smaller kingdoms did not need it.

> And much of the literacy was aimed at preserving what knowledge had survived from the classical period

Much was, and Aristotle was taken as far too much of an authority. There were probably not many advances in science during the early middle ages, but there were in high and late medieval. Even in the early middle ages there were advances in architecture and agriculture and some amazing art produced.

I chose Roman Britain because I live in a city (Deva) which was once meant to be the capital of the whole province, where the evidence of lost glories would have been glaringly apparent to everybody for a long time, even though the settlement was still major in contemporary terms.

More generally, some technology was lost everywhere (well, in the Western world anyway): nobody knew how to make waterproof concrete again until a manuscript reappeared in the fifteenth century.

Roman Britain is just one example, but it does disprove the general thesis that people always think they are the pinnacle of civilisation – and it's by far from the only example, of course. For much of the next thousand years (and beyond) Classical Rome, and later, Ancient Greece were seen as a lost golden age, something to learn from and aspire to (and adapt to religious dogma in a fallen world which was going to end fairly shortly anyway…)

Of course they had their fair share of brilliant people and they made significant advances and it's facile to disparage them ("Dark ages") but it does seem like a very different mental view of the world.

Wasn't the Renaissance about the idea that, after nearly a thousand years, society was finally approaching the levels that Rome had achieved?

There were many medieval advances in technology, art, architecture and science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_technology

There were serious scientific advances including the beginnings of the scientific method which goes back about 500 yeas earlier than the renaissance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_science_in_the_Middle...

>There were many medieval advances in technology, art, architecture and science.

My favorite is the gothic arch because it basically decomposes into the math of man hours, calories and the work of moving stone. They didn't have the surpluses the Romans did so they were forced to invent a more efficient arch.

Yes, I'm not denying that there were a lot of developments in that time period - more that there was a perception that things were declining, even if that wasn't actually true.

Medieval != Dark Ages

The Dark Ages refers to the 2-3 centuries immediately after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Medieval era / Middle Ages extend all the way to the start of the Renaissance.

The lack of written records during the Dark Ages is a sign of a major civilizational regression.

Writing and learning retreated to a relatively small group - the clergy. The cities that had thrived under the empire - and the public works that supported them - disappeared.

There has been a historiographical tendency to downplay the significance of the fall of the Western Roman Empire and to euphemistically refer to it as a "transformation." But we're talking about a massive decline in literacy and economic activity, and there are all sorts of indicators (like average human height) that show that people were dramatically worse off.

> An obvious example was the decline of slavery ( a huge proportion of the population of the Roman Empire) but the descendants of slaves were not the only people who benefitted from the removal of imperial power, and heavy imperial taxes, etc.

Look at how a lot of those societies were structured. Were those people really doing "better" or are we just assuming that because of the biases our modern culture brings?

Being not a slave across the rome-middle ages boundary is like having a degree in liberal arts. It might've meant something at first but the back slide basically watered it down to nothing for a lot of people. That's why it went away. There was no point in maintaining it as an institution generally after Rome fell.

More broadly, there's a reason nobody really cared about slavery, rights, freedom, etc, etc, until the 1600s+ (i.e. the beginning of the off ramp toward industrialized societies). Prior to then so much of society was enslaved by the literal physics of the work that needed to be done to keep a roof over everyone's head and food in their stomachs that it didn't really matter. Almost nobody was in a place to exert more influence upon their life arc than the wind does upon the path of a stone thrown through the air (which is to say some but not much) so society didn't expend effort to hash out the details of something that wasn't relevant. Only once there were more surpluses the various shades of freedom become something that society could benefit from defining.

Vaguely relevant: the biological symbol for female (the circle with a cross below it) is a stylisation of a hand holding a hand mirror.

Lol. I had always assumed it was a stylized womb.

It's about mirrors, it's about how they literally saw themselves in mirrors

Called it.

> These mirrors were valuable — they’ve been found with other luxury grave goods — but only somewhat useful. They were reflective to an extent, but aren’t capable of reflecting much detail or color [image] Still, the people of ancient Anatolia thought it was worth hours of labor to see even a dim reflection of their own faces.

I can't help but wonder if there's something we've lost, some stropping material or process capable of making them significantly more reflective than we image.

According to the Fall of Civilizations Podcast, the Sumerians considered themselves to be on the forefront of humanity and technology (which was true). I believe the reason was a mythological-religious understanding of a more ancient people to whom the gods or a god had given gifts like reason and technology (which is not new theme any of the many times it has been told), thus becoming the then-contemporary Sumerians.

Thats so cool. I have built a mirror with some added technology for science exhibitions and now seeing that this has been an ancient endeavour going back to the greeks is awesome: https://kryptokommun.ist/portfolio/projects/tech/2024/07/01/...

> I have no idea how difficult it is to manufacture these items, or how it’s done; the work associated with their creation is purposefully obscured from view.

On the contrary, often these processes are easy to find via youtube or the ever reliable How It’s Made series. I’d argue that for most common items, folks just prefer to not know or at least not seek.

What _is_ obscured is the process of acquiring the resources.

It's weird to think that we need a mirror (or other means of imaging) to see our own face. We can see a large part of our own body directly, but we will never be able to directly see our own face like other people do (unless, I guess, you have an eye pop out in some kind of accident, but I guess at that point this is not the kind of thing you would consider).

You also can't hear your own voice like other people do, because what you hear when you are speaking mostly come from the vibrations in your bones rather than from sound waves going through the air.

And unlike with mirrors, something we always had, be it just a pond of water, the ability to hear your own voice like others hear it came with recording devices, and is therefore very recent (19th century).

You can hear your own voice as an echo, though it is somewhat distorted in a similar way as one's reflection is warped in a pool of water. Amphitheaters are an ancient building technique which utilize acoustic properties to reflect sound toward distant listeners, but I'm not familiar with structures built to reflect sound back toward the speaker specifically, though I imagine that such a structure could be built. Naturally occurring echo chambers exist in the environment, as well.

High recommended book which looks at the histroy of ideas, which gives you a good idea of what people thought of themselves through history:

Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/408204.Ideas

"we can understand what they valued so much that they were willing to sacrifice long hours or scarce resources to get it."

well, those long hours must have been boring as hell. I don't think they felt it was a great sacrifice

Am I the only one who thought this was referring to how people felt about the general zeitgeist? Like, how Romans viewed everyone outside Rome as barbarian, etc. Not in the literal sense like, mirrors. Nice HN switcheroo.

Yeah that was my original interpretation of the title too! Perhaps something like:

How did early humans understand their situation and what did they think the 'world' was like, and what did they think they should do with their lives?! I find it fascinating to think how that longing to know what it's all about has changed so much for humans over time.

Mirrors are still heaps interesting though, as is reflection/refraction/light-transport in general I'd say! But it wasn't about what I expected when I read it.

Yeah, I thought it was a more avant-garde question, like Greek philosophical literature.

It turns out the title has a literal meaning."

Wild how mirrors across cultures weren't just tools but often spiritual objects, tied to gods, beauty, protection, or truth

I often find it very spiritual to look deeply into my own eyes. It's like a viewport into my soul.

Other times I'm just removing a bit of spinach from my teeth.

I assume that it was the same for ancient mirror users.

ancient, and some current peoples, view themselves through the lense of truth, verrifiable, self evidentiary truth starting with physical existance and that this is shared, and a complete understanding of what it is to be human, which may or may not, be shared

In the water? Since they didn't have mirrors..

I need to get to the Met.

sigh

https://www.penn.museum/sites/journal/8987/

https://archive.is/DkRLv

And now we’ve built LLMs - the biggest mirror of them all. The Internet and smartphones gave us countless ways to look at ourselves and see how others see us. And then LLMs helped us gaze at the sum of all that and even confront reflections of our own thoughts.

Yeah, TFA ended just before it got to the really interesting part of how self-reflection itself is fundamental to the development of concisousness. Mirror-like technologies don't just show us our own appearance. They help us understand how we relate to the world around us.

It reminds me of Kieślowski's movie Camera Buff (1979), where the main character in iconic scene points the camera at himself and realizes that the act of making movies reflects not only his subjects, but also on who he is in relation them.

Yeah, I'd would love to read article on all that.

This person never actually reflected on the article they generated.

I'm not sure if it was AI generated, but I see what you did there with "reflected".

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