This sort of content is <i>intensely</i> frustrating. OP is a software engineer and entrepreneur. There are actual people who actually study this stuff for a living. They are called historians and they work extremely hard for minimal pay in a field with few jobs and crushing hours.<p>Then some random startup person comes in and writes a blog post with a sentence like<p>> But there’s also another option if we don’t take it for granted that people in the past were really that different from us.<p>Like... this is the sort of sentence that makes people tear their hair out and scream into the void. It is like somebody coming to you and saying "wait... maybe we can... just hear me out... write a program in text and edit it over time to build software."<p>My wife is a professor of history and has done work on some of the questions raised in this blog post. Usually I show her these things because I know it'll be fun to rage at them together. But this one I chose not to show her because I do not believe that I have ever seen online writing that is more dismissive of her profession than this. Like, and I cannot express this clear enough, OP is just <i>making shit up</i> about a field of study that is centuries old and involves professionals who work 60+ hour weeks for shit pay because they are so invested in these topics.
I feel like the author barely learned anything from that experience. One can imagine the irony of reading writings by a devout Christian who gets surprised by sophistication of heretics like Aristotle and Avicenna yet still keeps his absolute conviction in his own beliefs without any doubt or self-reflection as if it is something self-evident.<p>Have the author ever tried to understand what is science and engineering, and how they are justified? Does he believe in human rights? Have he ever thought where his ethical system originates? The author seems to firmly believe that he lives in “the end of history”; so the biggest insight he could come up with is that scriptures are kind of self-help books and prayers are kind of exercises that treat anxiety.
I remember the first time I genuinely lost my "modern techno hubris", I was about 25 years old.<p>I was in the throes of lamenting the peak oil situation after watching the doco The End of Suburbia and reading The Long Emergency. I was at the tail end of a mechatronic engineering degree and thought it was just my luck that, after having found something I really enjoyed, it was all about to become obsolete as we devolved into picking through rubbish tips for food scraps.<p>I became interested in permaculture and went to visit a farm on the outskirts of Sydney to see how it worked. While talking to the guy there about the land, I all of a sudden realised how information rich this environment was, and how similar the task of managing it was to any other creative or engineering endeavour.<p>I realised that the people who stood in that spot 60,000 years ago and worked with the land to sustain themselves were "doing engineering" as much as I could ever hope to.<p>It was a tremendous relief to know that I could get the same thrill from engineering a landscape as I could from engineering a microcontroller, and it gave me a respect for Indigenous Technical Knowledge. I thought about how much ITK must have been lost during colonisation, and how we might regain it.
It’s funny to see someone, after realizing that humans in the past are just as intelligent as the ones today, interpret all past human beliefs through his own worldview rather than seriously considering that his worldview may be the one that is flawed rather than the most intelligent humans of the past. Believing that people in pre industrial societies had post industrial beliefs and were only pretending flies in the face of mountains of evidence both historical and anthropological.
Talking to a religious believer today will dispel this kind of thinking quickly. People really do believe in gods! Literally! And they'll die for those beliefs. It was even more true back when we didn't understand what the sun was or why it rose every morning and set every night.
There is a lot more on the role of gods and magic in the book "The Secret of our Success" [1]. I'm not sure if all of the studies in there have been replicated, but it's certainly food for thought. One theory is that divination functioned as a kind of RNG for those cases when picking something at random was better than relying on your own bias, such as when and on which flank to attack an opposing army - where being unpredictable is a feature.<p>Another example from the book is that certain types of shark were taboo to pregnant women in ancient Polynesia; no-one could explain why except for things like "it would upset the gods otherwise". But it turns out that said animals' meat actually contain chemicals that are indeed bad to consume when you're pregnant.<p>I can also recommend Brett Deveraux' "Practical Polytheism" series [2]. One of his key quotes is "It is safe to assume that people in the past believed their religion." (Actually, I can recommend all of acoup.blog to HN readers, including the latest post on ChatGPT, but that's going off topic.)<p>[1] <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Our-Success-Evolution-Domesticating/dp/0691166854" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Our-Success-Evolution-Domestic...</a>
[2] <a href="https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polytheism-part-i-knowledge/" rel="nofollow">https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polythei...</a>
I've had similar revelations to culturally held beliefs which look like rituals.<p>Some Hindu communities don't allow families to enter a temple if someone in your close family has passed away for 14 days. They couldn't explain contagious diseases then, but realised that if it can kill you, something would show up within 14 days and it's better if you don't enter community spaces.<p>Reframing these rituals as explanations that could be given at time is a good way to look at the world.
People went to the Moon and praised their god there, it doesn’t seem like that much of a stretch that humans in the past could be both competent and religious.
> For most of my life I had assumed that all the people that had lived before our modern times were dumb. Really dumb. Borderline braindead.<p>What education institution is responsible for this?
I can definitely relate to the notion that really good ideas come from somewhere outside oneself. This happens to me sometimes with musical ideas. If I consciously try to come up with a melody, it will never sound any good - whereas any good musical ideas I've had, just sort of appear fully formed - from somewhere...
For context, I assume the author is referring to the Oseberg Ship: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oseberg_Ship" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oseberg_Ship</a><p>It's rather humbling to walk into its display room and I urge anyone visiting Oslo to check it out.
> For most of my life I had assumed that all the people that had lived before our modern times were dumb. Really dumb. Borderline braindead.<p>It's an extreme strawperson argument. That's not what I think and thought of pre-modern people, nor does it match anything I've read.<p>They were biologically the same species as us. However, there was almost universal illiteracy and belief in things like causing sick people to bleed, witches, alchemy; embrace of extreme cruetly; disasterous (by modern standards) outcomes for lifespan, health, survival of children, justice, freedom, prosperity, famine, war, etc. etc.<p>We're not so perfect. The trick is to learn about humanity - about ourselves - from them, and look closely in the mirror for our own cruetly, etc. How many people die from lack of healthcare, for example?
Lost me when he started talking about gods. Five minutes reading about modern religious practices would dispel his notation that religion was mostly pragmatical.<p>My neighbor burns sages to remove evil spirits from her house. She fully believes this is real.
I broke a 10 year spell of entrepreneurial failure with vase breathing, kaballah and rituals. I am an atheist. But there is something about the idea about the aether containing ideas which you can pluck from. Einstein and company were fond of it too. The mind is like a radio and all that. Point being, this year I had $4 million profits / taxable income. Pure rationality just wasn't enough.
A few years back, I committed myself to learning how to machine metal. Bought a mid-60's lathe and tore it down to the bits to clean and restore it.<p>Someone told me to buy How To Run a Lathe (<a href="https://idoc.pub/documents/how-to-run-a-lathepdf-x4e6k0o189n3" rel="nofollow">https://idoc.pub/documents/how-to-run-a-lathepdf-x4e6k0o189n...</a>) First print was in the early 1910's, and the intro described how the magic of a lathe is that a less-precise tool can be used to make a more precise tool...how you could start with a hand powered lathe between two trees and end up with a machine that could hold half-a-thousandth of an inch in a surprisingly small number of iterations.<p>Also, the Gingery series (<a href="https://kk.org/thetechnium/bootstrapping-t/" rel="nofollow">https://kk.org/thetechnium/bootstrapping-t/</a>) showed how you could bootstrap a machine shop with scrap aluminum and charcoal.<p>We've been smart apes for thousands of years.
...or, you know, some kind of spiritual world is real, and people of the past, being less distracted with stuff, were better attuned to it. Like most people can't see the starry skies anymore (direct and obvious evidence that it doesn't exist!) and yet, you know, it's there.<p>I guess you put the line somewhere between considering other people's beliefs and "duh".
> And sometimes it is better to have a truly random decision than to continue to follow the predictable inclinations of one’s established prejudices. Surely, the enemy will not be able to predict a shaman’s completely random decision.<p>Our individual brains do this too.<p>Belief grabs hold of one viewpoint, because it looks like the best for a moment, because things will go better for us if agree with our group, because it makes us feel better, because we want other people to believe it for our own reasons, because we are too tired to care, ...<p>Then it discards future alternatives, saving wasted cognition rethinking over and over.<p>Our brains don't care what the <i>truth</i> is, they care that we operate well. And there are so many good reasons to believe something that isn't true.<p>Many people have a hard time grasping that their feelings of overwhelming certainty, have virtually nothing to do with actual certainty. And that is the way our DNA builds us!<p>Constantly integrating new idea's is costly. Fatiguing. Ideology is so cognitively efficient. And our certainty feels so good!
"Usually, when you visit a museum everything is kind of broken, so nothing is really that impressive"<p>"Writer on entrepreneurship, creativity, and marketing with over 10,000 email subscribers"<p>O woe to vikings, woe to us.
> Now that my frame “people in the past were dumb” was broken, suddenly hundreds of unanswered questions entered my mind.<p>> Most importantly, I started to wonder “what’s up with all these gods people used to believe in?”<p>I mean, a lot of people still believe in gods. I don't think you necessarily have to think people in the past were dumber than they are now, or had different cognitive needs than they do now, to explain gods.<p>(Jesus really was a mushroom though)
tl;dr:<p>Tech founder newsletter guy saw a boat and was absolutely <i>ethered</i> by the idea that he had single-handedly manifested the concept that there were smart people before now. The sheer weight of the this beautiful satori inspired a post of heretofore unimaginable power
Ughh, max-width of 540 <i>pixels</i>? This is even worse than most. I really wish sites would stop this madness. This site renders as a tiny vertical sliver down my browser window with 4X that width as whitespace. Blog authors, please stop doing this!
Looking at all the architecture around me would suggest that people all had an IQ of 170 one and half century ago, whereas our current average is 80. You can't end admiring the people who built these beautiful (but also ironic and meaningful) houses.
It reads like he just discovered Graham Hancock.
I do agree that the ancient peoples were not dumb, in fact as smart as we are today.<p>So we should really think about why they decided on certain cultural traditions.
How can anyone think that people before modern times did not know anything about science, practically “brain dead” as the article states (CRINGE) when Einstein died almost a century ago?<p>The Dunning-Kruger makes my head hurt.
Do reverse psychology i.e. how do you keep people from doing bad things?<p>Religions/societies around the world have different ways to maintain the order.<p>Hindu religion propose incarnation belief.. they say if you do bad stuff in this life, the bad stuff will happen to you in your next life and of course you won't be able to remember your previous life. It's a perfect theory because it's unfalsifiable.<p>And it works in India.<p>Of course you don't necessarily need to believe in such theories to know that you shouldn't do be doing bad stuff anyway but hey most people aren't that smart hence the unfalsifiable theory :)
There's a much simpler explanation. That those in positions of power don't believe, and those who are not do. Which makes shamans a very effective way to manipulate your followers.<p>Is there actually an element of randomness? Of course not. Any successful shaman knows that if you don't say what the guy in power wants you to, that you're going to wake up dead, and some other shaman is going to be doing your job.