We’ve seen drastic differences between different societies and different species in this respect, so there clearly is some kind of property here
Is there?
Writing, agriculture, animal husbandry, similar styles of architecture and most modern inventions from flight to nuclear energy to antibiotics seem to have been developed in a convergent way given some environmental factors.
But I guess it boils down to a question of studying history, which ultimately has no good data and is only good for overfitting bias. So I guess it may be that there’s no way to actually argue against or for either of the positions here, now that I think about it.
So thanks for your answer, it cleared a few things up for me, I think, when constructing this reply.
But I guess it boils down to a question of studying history, which ultimately has no good data and is only good for overfitting bias.
What a weird statement. Of course history rules out 99.9% of hypotheses about how the world came to be. We can quibble over the remaining hypotheses, but obvious ones like “the world is 10000 years old” and “human populations levels reached 10 billion at some point in the past” are all easily falsified. Yes, there is some subjectivity in history, but overall, it still reduces the hypothesis space by many many orders of magnitude.
We know that many thousands of years of history never had anything like the speed of technological development as we had in the 20th century. There was clearly something that changed during that time. And population is not sufficient, since we had relatively stable population levels for many thousands of years before the beginning of the industrial revolution, and again before the beginning of agriculture.
What a weird statement. Of course history rules out 99.9% of hypotheses about how the world came to be. We can quibble over the remaining hypotheses, but obvious ones like “the world is 10000 years old” and “human populations levels reached 10 billion at some point in the past” are all easily falsified. Yes, there is some subjectivity in history, but overall, it still reduces the hypothesis space by many many orders of magnitude.
I will note that the 10,000 years-old thing is hardly ruled out by “history”, more so by geology or physics, but point taken, even very little data and bad models of reality can lead to ruling out a lot of things with very high certainty.
We know that many thousands of years of history never had anything like the speed of technological development as we had in the 20th century. There was clearly something that changed during that time. And population is not sufficient, since we had relatively stable population levels for many thousands of years before the beginning of the industrial revolution, and again before the beginning of agriculture.
This is however the kind of area where I always find history doesn’t provide enough evidence, which is not to say this would help my point or harm yours. Just to say that I don’t have enough certainty that statements like the above have any meaning, and in order to claim what I’d have wanted (what I was asking the question about) I would have to make a similar claim regarding history.
In brief I’d want to argue with the above statement by pointing out:
Ongoing process since the ancient Greeks, with some interruptions. But most of the “important stuff” was figured out a long time ago (I’m fine living with Greek architecture, crop selection, heating, medicine and even logic and mathematics).
“Progress” bringing about issues that we solve and call “progress”, i.e. smallpox and the bubonic plague up until we “progressed” to cities that could make them problematic. On the whole there’s no indication lifespan or happiness has greatly increased, the increases in lifespan exist, but once you take away “locked up in a nursing home” as “life” and exclude “death of kids <1 year” (or, alternatively, if you want to claim kids <1 year are as precious as a fully developed conscious human, once you include abortions into our own death statistics)… we haven’t made a lot of “progress” really.
A “cause” being attributed to the burst of technology in some niches in the 20th century, instead of it just being viewed as “random chance”, i.e. the random chance of making the correct 2 or 3 breakthroughs at the same time.
And those 3 points are completely different threads that would dismantle the idea you present, but I’m just bringing them up as potential threads that would dismantle your idea. Overall I hold very little faith in them besides (3), I think your view of history is more correct. But there’s no experiment I can run to find out, no way I can collect further data, nothing stopping me from overfitting a model to agree with some subconscious bias I have.
In day to day life, if I believe something (e.g. neural networks are the best abstractions for generic machine learning) and I’m face with an issue (e.g. loads of customers are getting bad accuracy from my NN based solution) I can at least hope to be open minded enough to try other things and see that I might have been wrong (e.g. gradient tree boosting might be a better abstraction than NNs in many cases) or, failing to find a better working hypothesis that provides experimental evidence, I can know I don’t know (e.g. go bankrupt and never get investor money again because I squanderd it away).
With the study of history I don’t see how I can go through that process, I feel a siren call that says “I like this model of the world”, and I can fit historical evidence to it without much issue. And I have no way to properly weighting the evidence and ultimately no experimental proof that could increase or decrease my confidence in a significant way. No “skin in the game”, besides wanting to get a warm fuzzy feeling from my historical models.
But again, I think this is not to say that certain hyptohesis (e.g. the Greek invented a vaccum based steam engine) can’t be certainly discounted, and I think that in of itself can be quite useful, you are correct there.
Is there?
Writing, agriculture, animal husbandry, similar styles of architecture and most modern inventions from flight to nuclear energy to antibiotics seem to have been developed in a convergent way given some environmental factors.
But I guess it boils down to a question of studying history, which ultimately has no good data and is only good for overfitting bias. So I guess it may be that there’s no way to actually argue against or for either of the positions here, now that I think about it.
So thanks for your answer, it cleared a few things up for me, I think, when constructing this reply.
What a weird statement. Of course history rules out 99.9% of hypotheses about how the world came to be. We can quibble over the remaining hypotheses, but obvious ones like “the world is 10000 years old” and “human populations levels reached 10 billion at some point in the past” are all easily falsified. Yes, there is some subjectivity in history, but overall, it still reduces the hypothesis space by many many orders of magnitude.
We know that many thousands of years of history never had anything like the speed of technological development as we had in the 20th century. There was clearly something that changed during that time. And population is not sufficient, since we had relatively stable population levels for many thousands of years before the beginning of the industrial revolution, and again before the beginning of agriculture.
I will note that the 10,000 years-old thing is hardly ruled out by “history”, more so by geology or physics, but point taken, even very little data and bad models of reality can lead to ruling out a lot of things with very high certainty.
This is however the kind of area where I always find history doesn’t provide enough evidence, which is not to say this would help my point or harm yours. Just to say that I don’t have enough certainty that statements like the above have any meaning, and in order to claim what I’d have wanted (what I was asking the question about) I would have to make a similar claim regarding history.
In brief I’d want to argue with the above statement by pointing out:
Ongoing process since the ancient Greeks, with some interruptions. But most of the “important stuff” was figured out a long time ago (I’m fine living with Greek architecture, crop selection, heating, medicine and even logic and mathematics).
“Progress” bringing about issues that we solve and call “progress”, i.e. smallpox and the bubonic plague up until we “progressed” to cities that could make them problematic. On the whole there’s no indication lifespan or happiness has greatly increased, the increases in lifespan exist, but once you take away “locked up in a nursing home” as “life” and exclude “death of kids <1 year” (or, alternatively, if you want to claim kids <1 year are as precious as a fully developed conscious human, once you include abortions into our own death statistics)… we haven’t made a lot of “progress” really.
A “cause” being attributed to the burst of technology in some niches in the 20th century, instead of it just being viewed as “random chance”, i.e. the random chance of making the correct 2 or 3 breakthroughs at the same time.
And those 3 points are completely different threads that would dismantle the idea you present, but I’m just bringing them up as potential threads that would dismantle your idea. Overall I hold very little faith in them besides (3), I think your view of history is more correct. But there’s no experiment I can run to find out, no way I can collect further data, nothing stopping me from overfitting a model to agree with some subconscious bias I have.
In day to day life, if I believe something (e.g. neural networks are the best abstractions for generic machine learning) and I’m face with an issue (e.g. loads of customers are getting bad accuracy from my NN based solution) I can at least hope to be open minded enough to try other things and see that I might have been wrong (e.g. gradient tree boosting might be a better abstraction than NNs in many cases) or, failing to find a better working hypothesis that provides experimental evidence, I can know I don’t know (e.g. go bankrupt and never get investor money again because I squanderd it away).
With the study of history I don’t see how I can go through that process, I feel a siren call that says “I like this model of the world”, and I can fit historical evidence to it without much issue. And I have no way to properly weighting the evidence and ultimately no experimental proof that could increase or decrease my confidence in a significant way. No “skin in the game”, besides wanting to get a warm fuzzy feeling from my historical models.
But again, I think this is not to say that certain hyptohesis (e.g. the Greek invented a vaccum based steam engine) can’t be certainly discounted, and I think that in of itself can be quite useful, you are correct there.