[Eisenstein]

> I don’t understand how people underestimate it so badly when we have so much history we are taught that demonstrates it.

It is the tendency to think that people in the past were dumb, and we aren't. Like, there always has to be some explanation involved when we learn that people did something unintuitive in the past -- people learned how to make beer by accidentally leaving leftover bread in liquid and then drank it when they were starving. Maybe? Or maybe they figured out that things ferment and played with it until it worked, like we would have done it? Why does it always have to be an accident?

People may have had less access to information and technology, but that didn't make them any dumber than we are now.

[RajT88]

> People may have had less access to information and technology, but that didn't make them any dumber than we are now.

There's probably an aspect to people confusing "knowledge" with "brainpower". People in the past were just as good at figuring stuff out as we are today.

We have the advantage of Millenia of stuff figured out and documented. So we know on average more about how the universe works than people in the distant past.

[abakker]

I’d say it: we know that some people currently know more, but, the average person mostly knows something about what is known, rather than knowing it directly.

[WalterBright]

> People in the past were just as good at figuring stuff out as we are today.

I seriously doubt that. My experience in college was not to learn facts and formulae, but to learn how to learn. I.e. training the mind.

It's similar to athletes. The worst Olympic athlete today would blow away the best from a century ago. That's not because people are inherently stronger today, but because we know how to train much better.

[Eisenstein]

But again, that is access to knowledge. How good would your college education have been if there was no library or textbooks?

If you took the athletes today without their support team and sent them back in time two years before an Olympics event to compete on their own, I don't think it would be as big of a blowout as you suggest.

[WalterBright]

Interesting that you mention textbooks. Most of my STEM classes in college did not have a textbook, or recommended a book that was kinda irrelevant to the direction the classes took.

BTW, the discovery of the Scientific Method was a great leap forward in how to discover more knowledge.

[kelseyfrog]

Kind of makes you wonder if there are other epistemological generators even more powerful than science waiting to be discovered.

[Eisenstein]

> Most of my STEM classes in college did not have a textbook, or recommended a book that was kinda irrelevant to the direction the classes took.

So you went through classes with no written material? You listened to lecture, took notes, and then did assignments and passed tests with no documents to study?

> BTW, the discovery of the Scientific Method was a great leap forward in how to discover more knowledge.

The scientific method is a set of protocols that are followed in order to formalize evidence and prediction. Putting it into a set of words is important, but not required. Humans managed to sail across oceans and build wonders just fine without it.

[nradov]

Humans made gradual progress before the scientific method but it was slow and kind of random. If you look at the historical pace of innovation it tremendously accelerated after the scientific method became widespread.

[WalterBright]

> So you went through classes with no written material? You listened to lecture, took notes, and then did assignments and passed tests with no documents to study?

That's right.

I learned to never miss a lecture, and take copious notes. I also never missed a retch session. And still sometimes I needed help from a patient classmate.

The fun thing about the notes was when reviewing them, I'd recall the verbal part of the lecture. This helped a great deal.

Sadly, the passage of decades has silenced that voice, and I have a hard time understanding the notes today. I've wished many times I'd have had the foresight to bring a cassette recorder to lecture and record them. Too bad all those lectures are lost to time. But nobody recorded lectures in those days, and it never occurred to me.

[sethherr]

It would be a huge blowout. We didn’t know how to train or eat and athletes smoked and drank substantially more. Meanwhile, the gear evolutions make significant difference.

But take distance running - prior to 1954, nobody had done a sub 4 minute mile. After that was known to be possible multiple people sub 4 minute miled in the following decade. If you sent a top runner back a hundred years they would be able to run a sub 4 minute mile, even with 1920s equipment - and the world record in 1923 was 4:10

[kaffekaka]

As far as I know the progression into sub 4 minute miles was quite linear and not some kind of sudden breach once everybody understood it was at all possible.

The story of a sudden breach is perhaps more attractive though.

[sethherr]

From wikipedia's 4 minute mile article - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-minute_mile

> The four-minute barrier was first broken on 6 May 1954 at Oxford University's Iffley Road Track, by British athlete Roger Bannister

> On 21 June 1954, at an international meet at Turku, Finland, Australia's John Landy became the second man, after Bannister, to achieve a sub-four-minute mile.

In 1955 Laszlo Tabori was the third person to break the 4 minute barrier. Then, in 1956, three runners broke the four-minute barrier in a single race.

This matches what I described, multiple people attained it once it was understood to be possible. It was linear up to the 4 minute mark, but the point is that records that used to be impossible are now humdrum once achieved.

[yread]

> even with 1920s equipment

Are you sure about that? Can you post a result where someone ran with leather shoes on asphalt?

[hilux]

Zola Budd, a woman, ran a barefoot mile in 4:17.57, which is about 10 seconds slower than the current women's WR.

The men's mile WR is about 24 seconds faster than the women's. Presumably plenty of barefoot African dudes could run a mile a lot faster than Budd did.

With the exception of the new "energy return" shoes, there's no evidence that shoes help runners run faster - probably the opposite.

[Vegenoid]

I think that it depends on what you mean by “people”. My hypothesis is that the average person today is better at learning than in the past, for the reasons you stated, but that there have been people as good at learning as the best today for quite a while. It seems hard to refute this when considering some of the great minds of the past, and the incredible discoveries they were able to make with far less tools and collaborators with which to make them.

I also don’t think that brainpower/learning ability correspond as directly to training regimen as physical ability. We also don’t have as clear of an idea for what the “best” ways to increase learning ability are as for fitness. And of course our methods to quantify intelligence are much less objective than for fitness - partly because we separate fitness ability into different domains in a way that we tend not to for intelligence.

[nradov]

In swimming, high school girls today routinely go faster than the best male Olympic athletes from 1924. In most sports, technique and equipment has improved along with training.

[WalterBright]

Initial technological progress was agonizingly slow. Presuming that man then was just as smart as today, why would that be so?

I suspect it is because the thought of what might be possible just never entered their minds.

For example, Edison invented the idea of the invention development laboratory. Very, very recently. The Wright Bros were the first to come up with the idea of a research and development laboratory - just over a century ago.

[Eisenstein]

More likely it was because the systems didn't exist that incentivized figuring out solutions to the problems which technology solves. Agriculture, animal husbandry, arts, warfare, engineering were all very sophisticated, limited by the materials science available (firearms, for instance, need very strong metals not to explode).

The scientists that existed before the industrial age in the West were upper class, bored and educated men who did it for their own amusement.

It wasn't until the abandonment of the economic system which worked on the assumption that international economics was zero sum and capitalism (and imperialism) took hold that the incentive structure for creating novel technologies could exist.

This is all recollection based on various histories I have consumed and may not be entirely correct, but I'm pretty sure the idea is solid.

[WalterBright]

> More likely it was because the systems didn't exist that incentivized figuring out solutions to the problems which technology solves.

That is partially true. There is no incentive, for example, for slaves to make any improvements. I cannot think of any technology developed by slaves. That meant the few people in power were not enough to think of much new stuff.

You could say free markets were the greatest invention, because it incentivized everyone to be a creator.

The evolution of guns is an interesting topic. So is the evolution of sailing ships. The latter occurred over thousands of years. Very very slow!

You might want to investigate James Burke's "Connections" book and series. It's an entertaining overview of the history of invention.

[Eisenstein]

> That is partially true. There is no incentive, for example, for slaves to make any improvements. I cannot think of any technology developed by slaves. That meant the few people in power were not enough to think of much new stuff.

You can't think of any technology developed by slaves because they wouldn't get credit for it. I am sure all sorts of useful things have been invented by slaves, but if you yourself are property I don't know how you expect credit for your intellectual property.

> You could say free markets were the greatest invention, because it incentivized everyone to be a creator.

The free markets are about efficient allocation and exploitation of resources. People are incentivized to create things that help with that. The byproduct of such efficiency is free time and access to those resources.

> The latter occurred over thousands of years. Very very slow!

Well, it isn't exactly easy to invent a lightbulb when you don't have access to vacuum pumps, transparent glass, filaments, and electric generators. I'm sure if you had a hunk of ore and a hearth you would be making machined parts within a fortnight but our ancestors had to wait for crucial inventions and materials science advances before they move from sails to steam.

[WalterBright]

> You can't think of any technology developed by slaves because they wouldn't get credit for it.

Can you think of any in the US Confederacy? Any at all? The cotton gin comes to mind, but that was invented by Eli Whitney in the north.

Can you imagine this?

slave: "Boss, how about if we do it this way, we can be more productive?"

boss: "shut up and do what I told you to."

Slaves had every incentive to do as little as possible, not improve production.

[Eisenstein]

If you can't come up with a scenario where a slave would improve their life by innovating the tools and objects they had available to them, or a scenario in which a master is not a one dimensional caricature, or a scenario where a slave is not a stupid pack animal that can only follow orders, then the burden is not on history to convince you otherwise.

[drewcoo]

> I cannot think of any technology developed by slaves.

No thinking needed. A quick search turns this up:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/with-patents-or-wi...

[WalterBright]

It does indeed mention 3 inventions by slaves, and then a number of inventions by free men. For some perspective, here's an accounting of the number of patents by year:

https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/h_counts.h...

[Eisenstein]

The whole point is that such evidence would not exist in the first place, so 3 examples are actually statistically significant and indicate that there are a whole lot more than that.

[card_zero]

I am tickled by a theory I heard that a lot of ancient creativity went into preventing change. Like that's the original value of creativity, maintaining stability by stopping other people from innovating.

[WalterBright]

I've heard that, too. Innovation happened in societies that had a much more flexible social structure.

[Cthulhu_]

Wasn't Da Vinci also a researcher running an innovation lab in the modern day definitions of the phrase, or is that the popular video game adaptation version of him?

Going back further, the Islamic world had a lot of science going on which is often ignored or omitted by the western world when it comes to discussing the origins of science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_in_the_medieval_Islami...

[jyounker]

> Why does it always have to be an accident?

Because that's a surprisingly common way for things to be discovered.

Saccharine? Somebody working in a lab didn't clean their hands well, licked their fingers, and discovered it was sweet.

Aspartame? Somebody working in a lab didn't clean their hands well, licked their fingers, and discovered it was sweet.

I think this is true of basically every major artificial sweetener except invert sugar.

[rob74]

Same as the famous discovery of Penicillin in a petri dish contaminated with a mold that killed off the bacteria?

...but now I'm starting to wonder how many people working in a lab didn't clean their hands well, licked their fingers, and died, because they had accidentally discovered a toxin?

[Cthulhu_]

Dying is still a valuable scientific outcome, but few people become famous for it except maybe Marie Curie.

[Eisenstein]

Except it happened to be in a petri dish and it happened to be observed at the time by a scientist. Total accident!

[bregma]

Serendipity favours the prepared mind. That's all.

[sdwr]

The funny thing is that, if anything, we are the dumb ones in this scenario.

They figured it out through reasoning and trial and error and raw experience, while for us it's apparently impossible to learn anything we don't already know the answer for.