[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.

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[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.