[DavidHm]

It's a pretty typical mistake.

We are just as smart as our predecessors. We just have a much higher population, a higher % of them are well educated, and we have an enormous body of historical knowledge (as well as easy ways for anyone to access it).

"On the shoulder of giants" etc.

[henrik_w]

The "On the shoulder of giants"-quote made me think of this:

"It has been said that the great scientific disciplines are examples of giants standing on the shoulders of other giants. It has also been said that the software industry is an example of midgets standing on the toes of other midgets." -Alan Cooper

[elihu]

The version I'm familiar with, though I don't know the original source, is "if we have seen less far than other men, it is because we have stood in the footprints of giants."

[timthorn]

It's from Newton, who it is thought was aiming a barb at Hooke.

[BitwiseFool]

There's so much about programming that I just don't know because someone else abstracted it away from my responsibility.

[11thEarlOfMar]

If you haven't, learn to program in assembly. Everything else is built on top of that.

[thomasahle]

If you look, you'll find that there're plenty of levels below assembly.

[IgorPartola]

Let me get my magnetized needle.

[emiliobumachar]

You're generally right, but missing an important detail: nutrition.

We are not smarter than the subset of our predecessors who had the privilege of developing without ever starving.

[erikpukinskis]

There is evidence that overeating can lead to cognitive impairments so I’m not sure at a population level we’re ant better off.

[rsanek]

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

[cma]

Hopefully a rise in atmospheric CO2 doesn't start counteracting improvements in nutrition.

[sradman]

> We just have a much higher population, a higher % of them are well educated, and we have an enormous body of historical knowledge

Specialization and trade accelerated with the Industrial Revolution as well; Adam Smith’s division of labour combined with man’s propensity to truck, barter, and exchange.

[miohtama]

We are actually getting stupider because of the raise of CO2 consentration in air.

https://thinkprogress.org/exclusive-elevated-co2-levels-dire...

[mleonhard]

That study looks extremely well done.

A couple of other studies showed no effects of elevated CO2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23161403

[gridlockd]

A more reasonable interpretation of that data would be that we're getting stupider because we spend more time indoors without proper ventilation.

Even if we doubled yearly increases in ppm we'd be a century away from a measurable impact on human cognition for outdoor air.

[tantalor]

See "Flynn effect"

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

[galaxyLogic]

Most interestingly "Research suggests that there is an ongoing reversed Flynn effect, i.e. a decline in IQ scores, in Norway, Denmark, Australia, Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, France and German-speaking countries,[4] a development which appears to have started in the 1990s.[5][6][7][8]"

[stareatgoats]

> It's a pretty typical mistake.

It's an even more typical mistake to believe that our time is the pinnacle in all respects (because of all the cool gadgets that we have). But we are not the pinnacle in all respects; perhaps the largest danger is that we are delegating all multifaceted work (which ultimately is what produces skill) to automation and/or extreme specialists, so that we can push the enjoyment button (or take the enjoyment pill) in solitude without end.

We are on a path to an 'Idiocracy' type of society which would likely have been an abomination to generations past if they were to see it.

[rendall]

I disagree. As humans, we have a tendency to be pessimistic, but we are in aggregate enjoying unprecedented peace and prosperity, have done for an unprecedented length of time, and data point to that continuing. The leisure that many of us enjoy is a byproduct of that trend.

[bnegreve]

> As humans, we have a tendency to be pessimistic

Maybe, but it is not because we tend to be overly pessimistic in general, that serious problems cannot happen to us. Entire civilizations have diapered in the past, so we should remain vigilant.

After all, another bias that humans have, is a strong tendency to believe that what is true now, will remain true forever.

[rendall]

Very, very, very true. The light of civilization is a flickering candle in the darkness

I often think about the city-states along the Silk Road: healthy, peaceful, cultured, unprecedented prosperity for their time. All defeated when the hordes of Genghis Kahn rode by, many utterly destroyed

The Empire of Mali. The Kingdom of Lithuania. Macedon. Tyre. Babylon. Carthage. Samarkand. Assyria. All once mighty, all gone, perhaps a place-name remains, if that

[rendall]

>> The Kingdom of Lithuania

For anyone still paying attention, I should have written "The Grand Duchy of Lithuania", which was a powerful state for hundreds of years in the Middle Ages

The Kingdom of Lithuania, while also powerful, lasted about 2 years

[InitialLastName]

> The Empire of Mali. The Kingdom of Lithuania. Macedon. Tyre. Babylon. Carthage. Samarkand. Assyria. All once mighty, all gone, perhaps a place-name remains, if that

Aside from perhaps Macedon and Carthage (indirectly via Rome) most of those don't even warrant a mention in the high school history curriculum (in the US, at least).

[rmah]

I've seen the high school world history books of my nieces and nephews and all of those (except maybe lithuania), were at least mentioned in US schools. Other civilizations ranging from the maya to the khmer were also included. By necessity, none of them are examined in depth but they all got at least a few pages.

The simple fact is that pre-industrial history has had literally thousands of different thriving civilizations around the world. It's simply not possible to even briefly cover anything but a fraction of the more "important" in a non-university setting.

[nytgop77]

history starts at 1700 when columbus discovered indians?

[mensetmanusman]

Peace from violence between sons sent off to die for no reason. Sure.

Peace from violent thoughts leading to depression and anxiety which are at all time highs, no.

[inglor_cz]

Not to be negative, but 1871-1914 was fairly peaceful in Europe and North America as well.

There were Balkan wars and there were Indian wars, but the vast majority of Western population never served in combat.

And people started thinking that this is how it is going to be forever.

[rocketmaster1]

That period only seems peaceful because the French had just been massively humiliated in the Franco-Prussian War [1] in 1870 and the powder keg had just been reset. The people of France were itching to go to war with Prussia/Germany to reclaim Alsace and Lorraine. Which created a massive arms race till WW1. Also, while Japan isn't in Europe, the Russo-Japanese war did happen in 1904 in that period resulting in a major loss of trust in the Russian monarchy and the subsequent 1905 Russian Revolution. The Europeans were still sending troops to aid in the subjugation of Africa (Boer wars, Anglo-Zulu wars etc) even then.

However, I do agree with you that people then thought that world peace was achieved. The 1910 book "The Great Illusion" [2] ironically argued European war was unlikely to start due to the great economic costs of destroying trade between nations. It got the consequences right at least.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Prussian_War [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion

[jcranmer]

> The people of France were itching to go to war with Prussia/Germany to reclaim Alsace and Lorraine. Which created a massive arms race till WW1.

Eh... not really. Anger at the loss of Alsace-Lorraine peaked in the immediate aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, when France couldn't do anything, but by the 1880s and 1890s, France had resigned itself to the loss. The massive divisions in French society under the Third Republic meant that it was in no position to do anything to reclaim it. A parallel might well be drawn to Finland's position today over Karelia: they'd certainly like it back, but they're not about to fight for it. It wasn't until World War I broke out that restoration of Alsace-Lorraine to French rule really became feasible, and hence it became a major war aim, but it wasn't a factor until after war had already broken out.

The arms race in question is the naval arms race between Britain and Germany, which itself subsided in 1912 because Germany couldn't afford to keep up.

[andrepd]

Less work is a good thing.

[stareatgoats]

Less mindless and debilitating work is a good thing, but to replace work that challenges human capabilities in all its aspects with leisure and enjoyment is probably not a good thing.

If for example reasoning was automated (we're not there yet, but it is on the horizon) then human capacity for nuance would likely diminish further, to the extent where concepts and ideas might only placed in a 'good' or 'bad' category without capacity for further analysis ...

[Tokelin]

I would like to reply to just the first sentence of your post. While I agree that just being leisurely and seeking enjoyment rarely leads to long lasting meaningful experiences, I do not believe we humans are striving to replace all work with those activities. There are many examples of people who have the possibility to do nothing but enjoy themselves and they still push their capabilities and try to find new challenges. Leisure is nice, but only leisure gets boring.

[TeMPOraL]

The work is the problem, or should I say, jobs - not the activities. The problem is with people being forced to spend most of their lives fighting for survival. In the past it was toiling in the fields 3/4 of the year to have anything to eat. Today it's toiling in factories and offices to have money to pay for the house, food and medical care. The less time is spent on that, for the same level of quality-of-life, the better.

[lopmotr]

While I agree in principle, I don't think many humans are capable of what you want. Without a desperate need to work, most people don't seem to bother doing much even it that would give them great satisfaction. Just look at almost every unemployed person who has a place to live and food to eat but nothing to do all day. Why aren't they spending their plentiful time on high quality of life activities?

This might be hard to imagine if you're well educated, already working, and in your 20's and the world seems full of excitement and opportunity but you're held back by the annoying need to pay your bills. If you didn't have to work, you might start a business or spend all day on your side project or whatever. But most people aren't in that position. Often, their only sense of fulfillment comes from their work no matter how unpleasant it is, and they only work because they have to to survive.

[usgroup]

Certainly nothing a bit of extra theology and geometry won’t fix.

[pjc50]

This has really brought out the eugenicists, it seems?

But you're absolutely right; we get to use the infrastructure, explicit (written) knowledge, tacit knowledge of our society, social structures, institutions, legal systems, property distribution, and peacemaking of our predecessors.

[raducu]

Our brains decreased by a golf ball size in the past couple thousand years.

It is much easier for stupid people to survive today.

[imtringued]

Well, that's true in the sense that it is easier for everyone to survive today. That includes both the smart and the stupid.

[pjc50]

[citation needed]

[raducu]

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1102.5604v1.pdf

[mbank]

Intro of the movie "Idiocracy" sums it up pretty good ;)

[simias]

It is well known that Sperm Whales have long ago figured out how to unify quantum physics and general relativity. They could tell us small-brained humans but apparently they enjoy watching us struggle.

[raducu]

Brain size does correlate with intelligence WITHIN a species.

[felipemnoa]

Neural density seems to be what matters.

[raducu]

Yeah, people seem to be getting denser by the year.

[amelius]

We work harder than our predecessors (8+ hours workday, 5 days a week, both men and women), so I'd say we aren't really as smart as them.

[nom]

We work harder? Seriously?

Most of the time in human history people were struggling to even stay alive. You had to work until you got enough food to feed your family, or you'd die. Live was not great, it was very stressful and inefficient (but people were used to it). This is still the case in most of the world, although overall not as bad as it once was, it is improving constantly.

We're the lucky ones who can sustain ourselve with 8 hours of work, food is cheap and abundant, we can afford luxury items like iphones even if a 300$ android smartphone would do the same job.

No, at average, people are not working harder now, because we don't have to. We managed to improve efficiency so much already and quality of life continues to rise.

[ajuc]

It's funny - you're both right.

Peasants (over 90% of the society) were usually working less hours but much harder than we do. And they were living in much worse conditions of course.

Farming (especially without modern technology) is very cyclical, most of the time you have too much labour and too little land/food. Then for a few months you have too few people to do everything that needs to be done.

And there was no easy way for vast majority of people to store surplus for more than a few years. And there was a real possibility of starvation if a few factors independent of you happen at the same time.

So the whole society and economy was structured around these constraints - that's why it doesn't follow our intuitions. It made no sense to increase gains by 10% if you had to increase risk by 1% to do that. It made no sense to work harder if you have enough and it's gonna spoil anyway. You're just risking injury to throw it all away later.

There was a great series of articles about it: https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...

[joshocar]

Hunter gatherer societies are theorized to have spent the majority of their time not working, which is partly why were evolved such a complex social dynamic. Hunters would patrol their territory and hunt, with mixed results on the hunting, and gatherers would spend a few hours gathering food. It didn't take much work to sustain their tribes.

[pratik661]

I wonder how much that depended on the population density of a particular place vs its "carrying capacity". I imagine that our hunter gatherer ancestors who lived with more competing groups fighting over diminishing herds probably spent more time/risk defending their turf.

[Fricken]

We haven't improved efficiency at all, it takes far more resources to keep a person going today than it did in the 14th century. It takes a couple decades of education before a person can even begin to enter the workforce. Raising kids was once an investment, now people can barely afford to raise 1 or 2.

Our inefficient stuff is made by people in foreign countries working in factories whose lives really aren't any better than middle ages Europe.

Also, People like farming and hard physical labour. In the suburbs every household has a little miniature hobby farm that yields a useless crop, and people farm it for fun over and above their regular job. When people don't have to do any hard labour as part of their job, they go to a gym and pay money for the privelege of moving heavy things around even though it serves no practical purpose.

All this inefficiency is destroying the planet, which is the dumbest thing of all.

[throwaway0a5e]

>We haven't improved efficiency at all, it takes far more resources to keep a person going today than it did in the 14th century.

We very much have. We couldn't support our population with 14th century levels of efficiency. We wouldn't have enough farm land, fresh water, etc, etc.

[simoom22]

He might mean energy efficiency. We just have access to way more energy these days, and we've been slurping that milkshake hard.

[inglor_cz]

"Our inefficient stuff is made by people in foreign countries working in factories whose lives really aren't any better than middle ages Europe."

Life expectancy in the most typical manufacturing hotspots is actually better than Western standards of 1900. Even poorer countries today have much better healthcare than Queen Victoria used to have. Middle Ages is right out in this comparison.

[Axsuul]

These are gross generalizations.

> It takes a couple decades of education before a person can even begin to enter the workforce.

This obviously depends on profession. On the contrary, you no longer need to go to college or trade school since everything is online. Seriously, it's amazing how proficient some of these children can get just from YouTube videos.

> Raising kids was once an investment, now people can barely afford to raise 1 or 2.

Hey at least you have a choice now. Before, raising lots of children was almost a necessity in order to help around the farm. Now things are so efficient that you really don't need to raise children at all.

> Our inefficient stuff is made by people in foreign countries working in factories whose lives really aren't any better than middle ages Europe.

Can you provide evidence on this?

> People like farming and hard physical labour

Most people would probably disagree with you on this. There is a big difference between occasional hard labor and doing hard labor every single day. It takes an enormous toll on the body.

> When people don't have to do any hard labour as part of their job, they go to a gym and pay money for the privelege of moving heavy things around even though it serves no practical purpose.

Isn't the purpose to be healthy or look better?

[gowld]

Your confusing hardness of work with grimness of life. No one was working 200hrs/week to make polio vaccines from themselves.

[BerislavLopac]

As opposed to 12 hours a day (depending on daylight), 6 days a week, both men (in the fields) and women (at home, without the luxury of washing machines and vacuum cleaners). Yeah, we certainly work harder...

[watwut]

For women "at home" often means bulk of animal care, home production of goods (crafts basically) and other similar farm-like work. And having jobs in cleaning, sewing and what not. It is not like every one of them had living husband or every husband earned a lot.

Good case are miners areas - men work hard like 12 hours a day under ground and die young. Women have to earn for themselves and for kids once they are dead however possible.

[refurb]

Interesting video on the Time Ghost channel. It wasn’t until industrialization that idea of “men work, women stay home” came about. In an agrarian society, the entire family worked. Yes, there was division of labor between men and women, but it was more like “men plow the field” and “women pick the crops”. Even with newborns, the women were out working with the kids strapped to their backs.

[dd36]

Good point. Children are animals.

[watwut]

Milking cows, goats, general care about chicken and what not was typical female work in traditional villages. Also, field/garden work that do not require that much physical strength was done by women too.

1950 middle class household is not all there is to be about how historical families existed. Most of the time, the amount of work to do was basically infinite. And the more "anyone" could do, the better. That includes 6-7 years old kids who were already expected to be useful. (Here the kids started to work at 5, they would pasture gooses, which is super easy but was to large extend unsupervised).

Also, origin of kindergarten are German cities where both parents worked 12 hours a day in factory and small kids were left to own devices whole day. Obviously we are talking about poorer people here, but poor were large part of society.

Also, asshole.

[strken]

Modern farmers in rich countries will pull 16+ hour days 7 days a week during harvest. Admittedly they're in tractor cabs listening to the radio rather than running around with a scythe, but the hours are long and the work's boring.

[bserge]

The video doesn't show all the people doing all the work, likely from dawn till dusk. It was all man- and animal-powered.

Construction, for example, is incredibly hard work even with modern tools, and they had none of those.

That we can live comfortably with all the modern amenities on 40 hours a week, which for many is just sitting in a chair, typing text, is really good. I'm not bashing office workers here, btw.

Could definitely work less, maybe the push for shorter work days will gain traction.

[elric]

That statement feels wrong but I have no data to back up my gut feeling. Only a handful of generations ago even something as menial as doing your own laundry was hard work. Maybe we spend more time in offices, but if anything, I suspect we work a lot less hard in general.

[lbriner]

It depends what you mean by work. I read an article a few months back which was saying that the addition of "modern" technology washing machines and the like doesn't give you more free time, it gives you the opportunity for doing more things so you feel more busy and tired because you are doing more things in the same amount of time!

[gowld]

For most of human history most people didn't "do" laundry.

[elric]

Maybe if you count prehistory when people wore animal skins or walked around in their own fur. But as long as there's been fabric, there's been laundry. The documented history of laundry goes back to at least ancient Rome, where fullones (usually male slaves) did laundry. In the early middle ages women started to take care their household's washing needs.

[watwut]

You ... don't know much about lifestyle of men and women in the past, do you?

With exception of very rich people in few periods (idle aristocracy, middle class 1950 household), majority of people needed to work a lot. That includes both women and men.