[lelanthran]

> Humans have been thinking long before writing was invented.

And look how poorly they did it until they invented writing.

> Why is code special?

You don't get better at thinking without doing. With code the "doing" part is writing.

In your view, it is reasonable to expect HS students to thoroughly read a book on trigonometry and then ace the exam? We know, from experience, that only by doing problems does the student actually learn. We also know that when you stop doing problems the facility atrophys.

Why is code different?

[satvikpendem]

> And look how poorly they did it until they invented writing.

How can you know how poorly they did it?

[lelanthran]

> How can you know how poorly they did it?

Their lack of progress. Humans existed in the same basic form for around 100k years before they finally invented agriculture, which led to some improvements, and then rapid progress once writing was invented.

[jacomoRodriguez]

Improvements or just new ways to be occupied and more work? It seems life without agriculture and the like was way simpler and chilled.

[ioseph]

Until winter.

[satvikpendem]

Humans have been storing food for winter for hundreds of thousands of years before agriculture and the invention of writing, you think they all died off or something? People whose crops failed instead were more heavily affected in winter than hunter gatherers.

[ioseph]

Of course, but the surpluses made possible by agriculture meant occasional starvation became a much rarer event

[disgruntledphd2]

> then rapid progress once writing was invented.

While I mostly agree with this notion, given that all of our understanding of human progress historically comes from writing, there's a selection effect happening here.

Like, why do we talk about the Dark Ages? Because there was less writing, so obviously things were terrible.

[lelanthran]

> While I mostly agree with this notion, given that all of our understanding of human progress historically comes from writing, there's a selection effect happening here.

There's a bit of a selection bias there, because writing itself is used as a measurement of progress.

But, ignoring writing as a measurement of progress, we can pretty much see that for about 100k years the only tech were primitive tools.

Even after the domestication of wolves (about 40k years ago) there were no visible improvement in tech. After agriculture (10k-12k years ago, maybe?), there's visible progress in tech (tools), but not by much, and visible improvement in societies (also, not by much).

Enter writing - those civilisations that had more advanced writing progressed rapidly, and those that did not barely progressed at all, tech-wise.

Because not all civilisations progressed at the same rate, we can see quite clearly that writing is highly correlated[1] with progress.

---------------------

[1] While correlation does not imply causation, as the data mounts it lends more and more weight to the causation bit.

[mewpmewp2]

If writing is a natural tech you unlock on an already exponential curve it would always correlate with progress. And so many thousands of other tech.

[lelanthran]

> If writing is a natural tech you unlock on an already exponential curve it would always correlate with progress.

That's a big "If". The observation we have is that civilisations that never invented writing simply died out with no tech-tree advancement; and this happened for 100k years at least.

We've got 100k years of "no writing, no tech". We've got around 5k years of "with writing came tech".

The actual tech to write was there for much of the 100k years (cave art), but without writing, the tech never improved.

[palmotea]

>> And look how poorly they did it until they invented writing.

> How can you know how poorly they did it?

You could probably get some sense by comparing illiterate people to literate people.

[fuzztester]

>>Humans have been thinking long before writing was invented.

>And look how poorly they did it until they invented writing.

Yeah, look how poorly they did it until they invented writing.

[peers into the dim ancient past]

Sorry, my time-machine spectacles are on leave or on strike today.

And congrats on being a multi-millen(ium)arian, and a mind reader, who could both 1) exist so far back in the past, and 2) be able to know the thoughts of people who didn't write them down, because they didn't know writing.

/s