[coldtea]

And I call your recency bias and raise a "things have always been the same" bias.

Whether exponential or not, we've had more culture-defininging technological, lifestyle, and moral changes in the past 200 years than in the previous 3000.

[ranko]

I'm not sure that I agree, given that those 3,000 years encompass the beginnings of (amongst other things) Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, as well as the development of printing, explosives, and algebra.

[coldtea]

Christianity unfolded over 2000 years. It took around 500-600 years to dominate Europe, it wasn't some huge sudden shift.

Algebra didn't matter much (as far as life changing applications) for most of the time after its invention until around the industrial age. Then we had a huge math explosion, and a huge science explosion, physics, chemistry, etc plus practical applications as advanced as sending people to the moon.

Explosives and printing are part of the exponential curve we talk about. We went from knives, swords, arrows (used for millennia) to crude explosives to nuclear weapons and rockets between 500 years or so.

Same for printing. We went from stone carving, papyri, hand copying and limited literacy for millennia, to the printing press, mandatory mass education, and onwards to computers, and the internet, and now whole world knowledge reachable in one's pocket wherever they are in the span of 400 years or so.

Every day life in most of the world wasn't much different between 500 B.C and 1800 B.C. Ancient Rome, or Medieval Paris, could as well be Ancient Babylon. In villages life was almost entirely the same. The slow cultural changes (the introduction of Christianity, the change in rulers, etc) didn't change or affect much of everyday life.

[Cougher]

This is a pretty bizarre take on my post.