this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2024
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[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (2 children)

My own line of reasoning is that the speed of progress of technological advancement is dependent on the amount of people who can dedicate their lives to doing stuff other than trying to gather enough food and shelter to survive. So for the longest of times basically everyone had to just try to survive and maybe have an idea or two every now and then. Low human population and no-one able to dedicate themselves to innovation means extremely low innovation rate. But those rare times something really useful was developed and passed on to the next generation led to freeing more people to be able to dedicate themselves to innovation and thus increasing the amount of people one human can support with their work effort. This is a positive feedback loop so it has exponentially grown to today where one person's work can support multiple people making theoretically most of humanity free to advance technology.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

I think that's a generally accepted idea.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Your don't need to only rely on reason for that.

It's quite obvious it's true when looking at history.

"Idle hands are the devil's playthings" is a really stupid saying, unless one truly does think of the devil as the Lightbringer.

Honestly the more one reads into history, the more one realises just how progress stifling Christianity has been. (Or Abrahamic monotheism in the first place.)

When the people around modern day Greece started having extra fish and wine so some of the ppl could take it easy and just chilax, they basically came up with the central ideas that are still central to our modern society. Democracy, morality, freedom, etc.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 months ago

you know how sometimes you're trying to solve a puzzle but you're stuck at the very beginning? You can spend hours looking at the puzzle and get nowhere. But then you spot it! the one step or the one logical conclusion you needed to advance, and you start blasting through the puzzle

it's that

[–] [email protected] 46 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That most people spend most of their time passively reading celebrity news on tiny black rectangle tells you everything you need to know about the rate of human progress.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

But without eleytic rectangle humans are bored... so why no electric rectangle before?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

What are TVs, Alex?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Because for most of it, we were living our lives, planting the trees that gave us food, protecting the animals we ate from other predators, and just living off the land. We spread over the entire world and shaped the land to better suit us

We weren't primitive, for millennia we turned most of the world into a paradise built for us, then tore it down in a few centuries and are now flirting with extinction

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

We've never lived in paradise. It has always been a hard struggle not to die all this time. That struggle is easier than ever but still a struggle.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 months ago (2 children)

That is a lovely picture you are painting but there is certainly no evidence we "built a paradise" for ourselves. There would still be famine, struggle for resources, war and uncountable problems in the daily struggle for survival.

It's not as simple as "past good, present bad".

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

There was always struggle over territory. Generally non lethal, just like predators facing off

There was no war. War requires agriculture - an army cannot march or camp without food constantly being shipped in

Famine also is usually due to agriculture - monocultures and short-sighted management of the environment.

There were hard times. Droughts happened, sickness happened, people were not always very cool to each other. These things weren't done on institutional scale, because the only institutions were meetings between groups occasionally sending representatives

The more I learn about ancient history, the more I realize we fucked everything up societally. Technology is great, and yes we have a lot less mothers dying in childbirth... Except we didn't for most of recorded history (and we're backsliding), because literal childbirth in the woods was better than delivery in a hospital until a century ago

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Well it would appear you have chosen to redefine war that way. War is generally defined as a state of armed conflict between different countries or different groups. Tribal groups have historically waged small scale wars without large scale agricultural or significant logistical supply lines. Semi nomadic herdsman tribes of the steppes have a rich history of tribal warfare as do nomadic native Americans.

If your points are true then human populations would have exploded at the dawn of the human race due to food abundance and lack of war or any form of lethal encounter. If everything was better back then, why have population exploded and lifespans increasing over the last century.

Famines can be caused by monocultures and short sighted management. Absolutely! However ancient humans did struggle every day and did spend most of their waking hours gathering, preparing, hunting and cooking food whilst avoiding predators and aggressors.

If we "fucked everything up" then why do we have humans in developed countries living longer on average than at any other time in history.

I hate plenty of how the modern world has worked out. We have almost countless problems to deal with but there was no "paradise" back then. Plague, mental illness, cancer, rape, theft and violence cannot all be blamed on agriculture and "institutions". Take infection for example. An infected cut or a tooth absess could kill you back then. I would have been deaf by now due to an ear infection. Members of my family would have died from breast cancer, Type 1 diabetes and epilepsy. Any of us could have drank tainted drinking water and died.

Your last point is confusing. You say we have a lot less mothers dying in childbirth, then you say we didn't for most of recorded history up until a century ago. But we don't live a century ago. We live now. Childbirth is safer now. Therefore your point doesn't really go anywhere. Childbirth in the woods is dangerous, a million things can go wrong. Backsliding? Source required. Show me any evidence that a surgery or childbirth or even drinking water is safer on average back then.

I would be interested in where you get your sources for some of these claims. Ie. Childbirth one and the lack of lethal encounters in ancient peoples. Its a nice idea that there is some nicer world we could all go back to if we destroyed civilization. Reality is unfortunately more complicated.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It is very likely that there has always been war. Those have been documented even between chimpanzees and those fights absolutely were lethal. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

This was very interesting. I have not heard of this before. A good example to not get too caught up in this "nature is perfect" thinking.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Also, elimination of most megafauna by overhunting, etc

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