[card_zero]

I don't understand the downvote, it's like "nooo, their ideas were exactly as good as the ones we have today, humans don't learn over time, how dare you imply we used to be stupider, it's sacrilege".

So I object to this weird article of faith every time it comes up, we can't have been exactly as sensible and exactly as clever in the past as we are today, it doesn't make any sense to say that. But it's somehow become right-on to say that it's so, as if denying it is a prejudice like timeism or something. It obviously matters to some world view, equality maybe?

[NikolaNovak]

We have access to different data points today. But the way I read the original post is that human mind as such did not meaningful change. If you took a Roman or Egyptian embryo from 5k years ago and incubated it today, you'd have a modern human. The fact that many people back then had crazy ideas, is orthogonal to the biological argument at hand - and that's before we look at amount of people with crazy ideas today, many of which are largely the same.

Basically I think we have to pick a lane on whether we are talking biology, vs culture, vs knowledge and accumulated data.

[card_zero]

Yes, but I don't know why we'd be talking about biology in the first place, unless everybody's going around assessing everybody else a biologically stupid or smart. (If so, where do they think the smart ones get their good ideas from, are those ideas supposed to be inborn? Or exuded from a strong and genetically healthy idea-gland?)

[NikolaNovak]

>>"assessing everybody else a biologically stupid or smart"

Again, welcome to reality, meet some racists. They make the majority of population :O

More seriously and in the spirit of HN: Because a lot of people, per the original post, assume ancient people were fundamentally, biologically, less intelligent. Couple of reasons:

1. We teach people about evolution and Neanderthals etc, but it's hard for most of us to grasp the time scales. People conflate "Egyptians 5 thousand years ago" and "australopithecus 5 million years ago".

2. As many many people do today, we also conflate circumstances with inherent - like we've seen several times in this very thread, because people 5k years ago they didn't have technology or knowledge of today, there's subconscious assumption they weren't fundamentally as intelligent as capable.

Original post had a simple and specific claim: Egyptians 5k years ago were biologically equivalent to humans today and their intelligence was just as high. Raise them in modern society and you'd get the same bell curve.

That claim alone is mind blowing to many.

[thewebguyd]

I didn't downvote you.

But, I'm not saying that humans haven't learned anything, but that cognitively we haven't changed. A roman citizen has the exact same brain capacity to reason and adapt as we do today. There is zero separation from ancient human vs. modern human in that aspect.

You are conflating collective knowledge with individual human intelligence. That roman looking at bird entrails to predict the future was using the exact same pattern-recognition ability we use today to look at data visualizations, or trend graphs.

You could go back in time, steal an ancient roman baby, and raise them in today's year and they would be no different from you or I.

[bjt]

I agree with the "steal an ancient roman baby" premise. The "roman citizen" example is not as strong. Cognitive ability is not just genetics. The grown-up roman would be missing a lot of advantages during their upbringing that weren't available back then. Also, limiting it to just "citizens" means limiting it to their upper class.

Compared to Roman times, we've had pretty big advances in nutrition, healthcare, education, and widespread middle class wealth. It's not unreasonable to infer that these would have an impact on cognitive ability similar to the effect they've had on life expectancy.

That being said, there's definitely a present-ist bias, as the McSweeney's article does a good job mocking. I do believe their best thinkers were as good as our best thinkers.

[constantius]

Life expectancy didn't change that much, what changed is infant mortality.

And for cognitive ability: plenty of firsthand accounts from Enlightenment thinkers about thesuperior reasoning abilities of average members of hunter-gatherer/American Indian tribes compared to the typical European at the time, and they arguably already had better access to nutrition/education/healthcare.

Cognitive ability is for sure related to some extent to these factors, but actual practice of reasoning (through public debates, leisure time, storytelling) seems to have been much more influential on the actual realisation of cognitive potential, and I'm not sure there'd be a stark difference between a typical human today, or even a typical Westerner, vs a typical Roman citizen.

[jleyank]

Plato begs to differ re: philosophy. Ancient people could memorize staggeringly more than folks today. They probably also paid (far) more attention to their surroundings. Like Rangers in D&D, they could read blades of grass and state what/when walked by...

[HeyLaughingBoy]

A lot of this is simply due to environment that they live in.

When I was in nautical school, I was taught to always be aware of sea state regardless of where I was/what I was doing so I'd get in the habit of always knowing what the sea was doing.

Now I live on a farm. We are always very aware of the weather and instinctively comparing what we see around us to what the forecasts say.

When I lived in a city, I was barely aware of even if it was supposed to rain later or not. Going from your climate-controlled house to your climate-controlled car, to your climate-controlled job, you simply don't notice those things except superficially.

[pseudalopex]

> Life expectancy didn't change that much, what changed is infant mortality.

Life expectancy means at birth commonly. Life expectancy changed because infant and child mortality changed.

[card_zero]

Well no, not even as good. For instance, your comment invokes the idea of prejudice, and the value of being unprejudiced. Did Romans know about that, and consider it important? Maybe, I couldn't say offhand, but my point is that they might not have had some valuable idea like that. I think we can say with certainty that they must have lacked some idea of great value to thinking. That makes the ancients all worse at thinking, all of them. This doesn't of course mean that their best ideas were bad though!

[bryanrasmussen]

They certainly understood the value of being unprejudiced, indeed many of the ideas of how to think that permeate Western Civilization came from the Ancient Greek and Roman civilizations.

>I think we can say with certainty that they must have lacked some idea of great value to thinking.

I believe there is one idea that they lacked which is that of the Scientific Method, and perhaps some others that helped ignite the Industrial Revolution.

However

>That makes the ancients all worse at thinking, all of them.

No, that does not follow at all. For that to follow you would have to show that those ideas were more valuable to the process of thinking than all the others that they did have.

Furthermore there has been sufficient argument already put forth here in this thread that their abilities at memorization and rhetoric provided a better ground for thinking than a lot of modern people possess, you would have to show that these ideas they did not possess are of so much greater value that they essentially negate the things in which they show superior skills.

You might suppose that to do this all you would need to do is to point around at the highly technological world we live in, but this would be seem to be a categorical error because we are discussing their ability to think not their technological levels. You could make the argument that the superior technology is the output of the process of thought, but I don't think an HN post will be sufficient to make that argument.

Finally assuming the Scientific Method was so superior an idea that it made the Ancients worse at thinking it would actually only make them worse at thinking than people who reasonably understand and apply the Scientific Method in their daily lives, which one look at the news should tell you is not that many people.

[card_zero]

> For that to follow you would have to show that those ideas were more valuable to the process of thinking than all the others that they did have.

OK, good logic. But that implies could be still very valuable ideas of the ancients which are now lost. I suppose that's what classicism was all about. But we've been through classicism already a couple of times (starting in the renaissance). It seems likely we caught up with most of the powerful ideas of the ancient world.

I'm picking up a "bring back the seven liberal arts!" vibe from your comment, and it has a certain something going for it as an idea, I must admit. Even so ...

[pseudalopex]

Seneca wrote slaves and free men were equal essentially. The Torah said foreigners should be treated as natives.

You lacked the idea of begging the question seemingly.

[card_zero]

I don't flaming care about the specifics! I keep picking bad examples, examples are hard, you should argue my side and do the examples for me.

[jleyank]

Same religions. Same political structures. Same engineering - we've only recently duplicated their concrete, and man, could they build roads and aqueducts. Yeah, they had a dodgy number system, but they had military and political organizations that lasted 1000+ years. They had worldwide trade, and unified far more territory than anybody today.

[card_zero]

Yes, of course that's right. But I thought you were the one conflating collective knowledge with individual human intelligence, when you said "behaviorally". Behaviors being due to ideas, not nature (I don't much rate nature's effect on smarts anyway).

Maybe I need to spell this distinction out next time it comes up, which will be the next ancient history thread, probably. I guess the endless repetition of "they were just as smart as we were you know!" is in order to counteract an unstated idea that the ancients were some other species, like orangutans in bronze armor, I don't know. Maybe it's common to vaguely think that about them? But this gratuitous counter-point should be on a strictly genetic basis, or else you'd be accidentally denying that ideas improve.