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Comment by altho123 | Hacker News Reader

>Unusually weak? They will not want to feed you. Unusually strong? They will send you to fight an impossible war. Unusually clever? They will accuse you of witchcraft and burn you at the stake. Yes, there were some exceptions (for example, "freaks" kept as curiosities by the kings), but the general rule for the vast majority of the population was: don't be weird, or get killed.

To me that sounds like a very post-romantic interpretation of the past, where everything that happened before now, the enlightened times, was savage,cruel and retrograde. It's my understanding that things were a lot more subtle than that and that's a very simplistic approximation. I don't think Da Vinci, Vauban Euclid or Grosseteste were burnt to the stake, not even Galileo was.

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Well be weird and be careful. Easier said than done. Because yes most people would rather want to bring you down to their level than try to rise up to yours e.g. Jesus Christ. Because of fear, doubt, and insecurity that they can not stand alone or that you standing alone is a threat to theirs.

Keep the weird in the art. People don't mind as much if the weird is bounded by 4 corners and a frame; they secretly want to view it.

I think this is a narrow take, a bit like suggesting that women weren't historically discriminated against and putting forward Cleopatra as an example.

Surely, rich and noble eccentrics have existed in the past with several notable examples. But to point at exceptions and then suggests that this proves that no underlying trend is present seems like incorrect reasoning.

I think the burden of proof would be on the one making the claim than in the past (so I guess from now to 6000 years ago ? In which region ? Which circumstances ?) being weird would result in having you killed. To my knowledge this is a common take in popular culture, but I don't think we have much evidence that this was the case. Modern medievalists know tend to say that the Spanish inquisition resulted in between 3000-5000 over it's 350 years of existence. That's about 14 a year on average. For comparison, since 1819, the state of Texas executed 1,349 people.

I think we might just end up in an argument about what constitutes "weird", or an argument about how good record keeping for killings over the last 6000 years have been. Although I think we could agree that Texas keeps better records about such things compared to villages in the dark ages. Even then, no record of why a violent act was committed likely would have mentioned "weird" and might only mention a dispute between neighbors, or an individual targeted by a mob. Then we might argue over per-capita or some other nit-picky thing.

At any rate, it appears the Witch Trials of 1400-1775 saw ~40k-60k people killed [1]. And in modern times, it is reported for example that ~20k people have been put to death in Tanzania for witchcraft [2].

While poking around Google and Wikipedia for this, it appears that in more stable societies the prevalence of these kinds of mass hysteria are low. However there appears to be sufficient evidence that during times of severe economic hardship, standard societal protections falter. In those circumstances, anyone deemed a burden or an omen of bad luck was at risk.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_the_early_mode... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_witch_hunts#Tanzania

I think you illustrated the issue with the argument very well. Saying "Weird people in the past were put to death" doesn't make sense because it's too broad both space and time wise. If you look at the article about the witch trial, the peak of the trials, where most of the executions were carried, was between 1560 to 1630, and was mainly in Germany and Scotland, while executions were few in Spain, Italy and France. It's an incredibly narrow band, and then there is the argument that the people convicted of witchcraft were just people deemed weird. While I'm sure that was the case for some of them, it was also a convenient way to appropriate the neighbor's land or get rid of political ennemies

>However there appears to be sufficient evidence that during times of severe economic hardship, standard societal protections falter. In those circumstances, anyone deemed a burden or an omen of bad luck was at risk.

I don't think there is sufficient evidence of that. First of all, being deemed a burden is very different than being weird and shouldn't be bundled together. Second, there has been a lot of periods of severe economic hardship in the past that didn't result in the execution of weird people. It seems like a loose legal system was more to blame than economic crisis. From the article you linked :

The witch trials that occurred there were symptomatic of a weak legal system and "witches were most likely to be tried and convicted in regions where magistrates departed from established legal statutes"

In other words, if you let a bunch of villagers to handle everything themselves with no repercussions they'll start doing stuff like that, but I see no evidence than "weirdness" was a factor in the article, and in the west that was pretty much solved by the 18th century when countries starting having a strong central structure

Galileo may not have been burnt at the stake, but he was placed on house arrest for the rest of his life for his beliefs.

Sure, where he was free to pursue his researches. Not saying it was right, but hardly what the article claims.

Dean Radin talked about psi genes that witches may have had in an interview with Rogan. When someone is acting truly unpredictably then normies are afraid.

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