“One of the reasons we are attracted to the Colosseum is because of the incredible violence that went on here. The question it poses is, how could such an advanced culture have staged such bloody spectacles? The Colosseum is a snapshot in stone, a physical embodiment of the culture of Rome.”
The obvious question is “what’s so contradictory about being an advanced culture and staging bloody spectacles”? Especially given the large ground that is covered by the term “advanced culture”.
Well, it is one of the things that was drilled into us all life long that there is a progress in history from barbaric behavior to “nice” (or, properly, ethical, compassionate) behavior.
But beyond that there is indeed a process of increasing cooperation. There is usually peace inside nations and empires, i.e. they don’t allow their constitutent tribes, if they still exist, to fight each other. While this increasing cooperation is largely about banding together to fight someone else, still it creates a certain progress in morals. Thucydides wrote that the ancestors of Greeks did not know the idea of peace. They just pirated on each other all the time. Peace was invented through military alliance: teamed up against some other polis and then realized it is not nice to pirate on your ally. So through banding up to fight someone else, internal cooperation and peace is acheived. And you cannot have an advanced culture without it. There is no economic progress with a deep division of labor, meaning trade, meaning peace within the empire. And this success of cooperation permeates then religion and philosophy and people’s values.
Sorry, I think I dumped a bit of an unedited train of thought on you. I’ll try to organize better. So advanced means rich, rich means division of labor, div. of labor means trade, trade means peace inside the empire, means a value system that values cooperation and peace increasingly, then the whole thing gets justified by philosophy, art and religion which ingraines the values even more, and then they should be shocked by bloody spectacles.
The “bloody spectacles” that the article refers to are animals, not people, being killed. There is a cursory mention that the animals fought people, but the article is clearly about the animals.
The kind of cooperation in advanced cultures that you’re talking about involves people cooperating with other people, not with animals.
Culture is relative and I see lots of reasons this could have been beneficial to the society at that time.
One can imagine alternative versions of Rome with or without the bloody spectacles, and with various possible levels of prosperity, happiness, or whatever you count as a benefit to society. Which versions are the counterfactuals against which you are comparing the actual history?
I think there’s an underlying assumption here that an advanced culture should be similar to our own.
Let’s reverse the question: “How did a culture that stages such bloody spectacles manage to achieve so much?”. Rome didn’t become advanced and then start with gladiator games; those were around in some form for a long time. Is it that big a shock that Rome managed to get far without abandoning those games?
I think there’s an underlying assumption here that an advanced culture should be similar to our own.
I think the underlying assumption is much worse: that any advanced culture must be squeamish about things which the author finds squeamish, barbaric, and uncouth.
I think it is not just squeamishness, I think it is the idea that without a strongly pro-cooperation value system, how the eff does one achieve the level of cooperation to have a wide division of labor and trade and thus actually get rich and advanced?
Yes, they stem from the human sacrifice of captives at the funerals of big guys, really old. Downright sacred, originally, not just a spectacle.
Your proposal sounds good. If I interpret it properly: cultures have old traditions that live on despite maybe even contradicting their own values. I.e. if they had to invent it at that, they would not, because it contradicts the values, but being a tradition, it carries on.
For example today we would not invent cars or at least would not allow civilian car ownership. We have a safety oriented culture and proposing that every chump should be allowed to drive two tons of steel with 180 km/h top speed and easily wiping out a bus stop full of people if he falls asleep or killing a whole family in another car, if it was proposed today it would be shot down as a CRAZY dangerous idea. It would be seen as far worse than civilian gun ownership because with a gun you don’t kill five people by mistake. But as it is an old tradition, so lives on despite contradicting accepted values. But if we had to invent it now, we would be horrified.
This is true, if I interpret it correctly (trade-off: expect utility gained > expected utility loss from violating values and risking ostracism) but how is it relevant here?
Contradiction is all well and good, but I think you can do better; can you name three examples of new technologies invented in the last 50 years and freely available to all civilian Americans each of which technologies causes up to 30,000 deaths and 2 million injuries annually?
You do realize that that’s one thousandth the scale of what gwern is describing, right? (That may not be quite fair, as phone-distracted drivers fall in the “drivers” category instead of the “phone” category, but order of magnitude is important!)
“It is impossible to say whether 2 million distracted pedestrians are really injured each year. But I think it is safe to say that the numbers we have are much lower than what is really happening,” Nasar said.
More importantly, I’m disputing that it makes sense to judge by the numbers today.
More importantly, I’m disputing that it makes sense to judge by the numbers today.
It certainly isn’t a perfect measure—but it seems like a decent one. I’d suggest correcting for some measure of how common the technology is. If there was something that only 10% of people have, but those 10% are getting killed at the same fraction per year as automobile drivers, I’d think it is still notable, though it wouldn’t precisely meet gwern’s criteria. If there were a technology which much less than 10% of the population has, then I’d be skeptical that it was unrestricted, at least in practice.
Frankly, there aren’t very many technologies added over that period (besides the various flavors of electronic computation/communications/entertainment) that have that been so widely available. Microwave ovens—and I don’t see many accidents from them. Perhaps home power tools? Forbes cites 37,000 emergency room visits per year from power nailers. They count another 37,000 from riding lawnmowers, but less than 100 killed.
They don’t have to have predicted contemporary accident rates a century ago for automobiles to have been banned or restricted at some point since—none of that data is remotely new or surprising, after all—yet here we are with near-unrestricted cars.
Their culture may have been “advanced” but it was based on Violence as a primary ideal. Rome conquered its foreign enemies, assassinated its unpopular politicians and slaughtered for mass entertainment. This may be a simplification of an entire culture but the fact is the Roman Empire considered death and murder to be integral to their society.
“One of the reasons we are attracted to the Colosseum is because of the incredible violence that went on here. The question it poses is, how could such an advanced culture have staged such bloody spectacles? The Colosseum is a snapshot in stone, a physical embodiment of the culture of Rome.”
-- Gary Glassman (quoted in Colosseum killing machine reconstructed after more than 1,500 years
Emphasis mine: I’m not surprised. Culture is relative and I see lots of reasons this could have been beneficial to the society at that time.
The obvious question is “what’s so contradictory about being an advanced culture and staging bloody spectacles”? Especially given the large ground that is covered by the term “advanced culture”.
Well, it is one of the things that was drilled into us all life long that there is a progress in history from barbaric behavior to “nice” (or, properly, ethical, compassionate) behavior.
But beyond that there is indeed a process of increasing cooperation. There is usually peace inside nations and empires, i.e. they don’t allow their constitutent tribes, if they still exist, to fight each other. While this increasing cooperation is largely about banding together to fight someone else, still it creates a certain progress in morals. Thucydides wrote that the ancestors of Greeks did not know the idea of peace. They just pirated on each other all the time. Peace was invented through military alliance: teamed up against some other polis and then realized it is not nice to pirate on your ally. So through banding up to fight someone else, internal cooperation and peace is acheived. And you cannot have an advanced culture without it. There is no economic progress with a deep division of labor, meaning trade, meaning peace within the empire. And this success of cooperation permeates then religion and philosophy and people’s values.
Sorry, I think I dumped a bit of an unedited train of thought on you. I’ll try to organize better. So advanced means rich, rich means division of labor, div. of labor means trade, trade means peace inside the empire, means a value system that values cooperation and peace increasingly, then the whole thing gets justified by philosophy, art and religion which ingraines the values even more, and then they should be shocked by bloody spectacles.
The “bloody spectacles” that the article refers to are animals, not people, being killed. There is a cursory mention that the animals fought people, but the article is clearly about the animals.
The kind of cooperation in advanced cultures that you’re talking about involves people cooperating with other people, not with animals.
One can imagine alternative versions of Rome with or without the bloody spectacles, and with various possible levels of prosperity, happiness, or whatever you count as a benefit to society. Which versions are the counterfactuals against which you are comparing the actual history?
I think there’s an underlying assumption here that an advanced culture should be similar to our own.
Let’s reverse the question: “How did a culture that stages such bloody spectacles manage to achieve so much?”. Rome didn’t become advanced and then start with gladiator games; those were around in some form for a long time. Is it that big a shock that Rome managed to get far without abandoning those games?
It was similar to ours. They just didn’t have CGI, so they had to do bloody spectacles the hard way.
I think the underlying assumption is much worse: that any advanced culture must be squeamish about things which the author finds squeamish, barbaric, and uncouth.
I think it is not just squeamishness, I think it is the idea that without a strongly pro-cooperation value system, how the eff does one achieve the level of cooperation to have a wide division of labor and trade and thus actually get rich and advanced?
I see no contradiction at all between having a “strongly pro-cooperation value system” and having bloody spectacles in the arena.
Humans still are great fans of bloody spectacles, it’s just that nowadays it’s easier to produce fake ones on screens.
Yes, they stem from the human sacrifice of captives at the funerals of big guys, really old. Downright sacred, originally, not just a spectacle.
Your proposal sounds good. If I interpret it properly: cultures have old traditions that live on despite maybe even contradicting their own values. I.e. if they had to invent it at that, they would not, because it contradicts the values, but being a tradition, it carries on.
For example today we would not invent cars or at least would not allow civilian car ownership. We have a safety oriented culture and proposing that every chump should be allowed to drive two tons of steel with 180 km/h top speed and easily wiping out a bus stop full of people if he falls asleep or killing a whole family in another car, if it was proposed today it would be shot down as a CRAZY dangerous idea. It would be seen as far worse than civilian gun ownership because with a gun you don’t kill five people by mistake. But as it is an old tradition, so lives on despite contradicting accepted values. But if we had to invent it now, we would be horrified.
Saying “values” and “culture” doesn’t generate correct predictions in an environment where people can spot trade-offs that work in their favor.
This is true, if I interpret it correctly (trade-off: expect utility gained > expected utility loss from violating values and risking ostracism) but how is it relevant here?
Err… no.
http://nypost.com/2011/12/16/hey-they-still-let-us-drive/
Yeah… NY Post is not really the bastion of thoughtful analyses and deep reflection.
As opposed to what, the NYT?
Contradiction is all well and good, but I think you can do better; can you name three examples of new technologies invented in the last 50 years and freely available to all civilian Americans each of which technologies causes up to 30,000 deaths and 2 million injuries annually?
High fructose corn syrup and its ilk have been rather devastating.
Et tu, Brute, want to look at only one side of the cost-benefit analysis?
I only thought of one possible example immediately—but are you asserting that people predicted those numbers when we invented cars?
You do realize that that’s one thousandth the scale of what gwern is describing, right? (That may not be quite fair, as phone-distracted drivers fall in the “drivers” category instead of the “phone” category, but order of magnitude is important!)
More importantly, I’m disputing that it makes sense to judge by the numbers today.
It certainly isn’t a perfect measure—but it seems like a decent one. I’d suggest correcting for some measure of how common the technology is. If there was something that only 10% of people have, but those 10% are getting killed at the same fraction per year as automobile drivers, I’d think it is still notable, though it wouldn’t precisely meet gwern’s criteria. If there were a technology which much less than 10% of the population has, then I’d be skeptical that it was unrestricted, at least in practice.
Frankly, there aren’t very many technologies added over that period (besides the various flavors of electronic computation/communications/entertainment) that have that been so widely available. Microwave ovens—and I don’t see many accidents from them. Perhaps home power tools? Forbes cites 37,000 emergency room visits per year from power nailers. They count another 37,000 from riding lawnmowers, but less than 100 killed.
They don’t have to have predicted contemporary accident rates a century ago for automobiles to have been banned or restricted at some point since—none of that data is remotely new or surprising, after all—yet here we are with near-unrestricted cars.
Their culture may have been “advanced” but it was based on Violence as a primary ideal. Rome conquered its foreign enemies, assassinated its unpopular politicians and slaughtered for mass entertainment. This may be a simplification of an entire culture but the fact is the Roman Empire considered death and murder to be integral to their society.
So, is this a rationality quote or a fail-at-rationality quote?