My own line of reasoning is that the speed of progress of technological advancement is dependent on the amount of people who can dedicate their lives to doing stuff other than trying to gather enough food and shelter to survive. So for the longest of times basically everyone had to just try to survive and maybe have an idea or two every now and then. Low human population and no-one able to dedicate themselves to innovation means extremely low innovation rate. But those rare times something really useful was developed and passed on to the next generation led to freeing more people to be able to dedicate themselves to innovation and thus increasing the amount of people one human can support with their work effort. This is a positive feedback loop so it has exponentially grown to today where one person’s work can support multiple people making theoretically most of humanity free to advance technology.
Your don’t need to only rely on reason for that.
It’s quite obvious it’s true when looking at history.
“Idle hands are the devil’s playthings” is a really stupid saying, unless one truly does think of the devil as the Lightbringer.
Honestly the more one reads into history, the more one realises just how progress stifling Christianity has been. (Or Abrahamic monotheism in the first place.)
When the people around modern day Greece started having extra fish and wine so some of the ppl could take it easy and just chilax, they basically came up with the central ideas that are still central to our modern society. Democracy, morality, freedom, etc.
you know how sometimes you’re trying to solve a puzzle but you’re stuck at the very beginning? You can spend hours looking at the puzzle and get nowhere. But then you spot it! the one step or the one logical conclusion you needed to advance, and you start blasting through the puzzle
it’s that
That most people spend most of their time passively reading celebrity news on tiny black rectangle tells you everything you need to know about the rate of human progress.
But without eleytic rectangle humans are bored… so why no electric rectangle before?
Because for most of it, we were living our lives, planting the trees that gave us food, protecting the animals we ate from other predators, and just living off the land. We spread over the entire world and shaped the land to better suit us
We weren’t primitive, for millennia we turned most of the world into a paradise built for us, then tore it down in a few centuries and are now flirting with extinction
That is a lovely picture you are painting but there is certainly no evidence we “built a paradise” for ourselves. There would still be famine, struggle for resources, war and uncountable problems in the daily struggle for survival.
It’s not as simple as “past good, present bad”.
There was always struggle over territory. Generally non lethal, just like predators facing off
There was no war. War requires agriculture - an army cannot march or camp without food constantly being shipped in
Famine also is usually due to agriculture - monocultures and short-sighted management of the environment.
There were hard times. Droughts happened, sickness happened, people were not always very cool to each other. These things weren’t done on institutional scale, because the only institutions were meetings between groups occasionally sending representatives
The more I learn about ancient history, the more I realize we fucked everything up societally. Technology is great, and yes we have a lot less mothers dying in childbirth… Except we didn’t for most of recorded history (and we’re backsliding), because literal childbirth in the woods was better than delivery in a hospital until a century ago
Well it would appear you have chosen to redefine war that way. War is generally defined as a state of armed conflict between different countries or different groups. Tribal groups have historically waged small scale wars without large scale agricultural or significant logistical supply lines. Semi nomadic herdsman tribes of the steppes have a rich history of tribal warfare as do nomadic native Americans.
If your points are true then human populations would have exploded at the dawn of the human race due to food abundance and lack of war or any form of lethal encounter. If everything was better back then, why have population exploded and lifespans increasing over the last century.
Famines can be caused by monocultures and short sighted management. Absolutely! However ancient humans did struggle every day and did spend most of their waking hours gathering, preparing, hunting and cooking food whilst avoiding predators and aggressors.
If we “fucked everything up” then why do we have humans in developed countries living longer on average than at any other time in history.
I hate plenty of how the modern world has worked out. We have almost countless problems to deal with but there was no “paradise” back then. Plague, mental illness, cancer, rape, theft and violence cannot all be blamed on agriculture and “institutions”. Take infection for example. An infected cut or a tooth absess could kill you back then. I would have been deaf by now due to an ear infection. Members of my family would have died from breast cancer, Type 1 diabetes and epilepsy. Any of us could have drank tainted drinking water and died.
Your last point is confusing. You say we have a lot less mothers dying in childbirth, then you say we didn’t for most of recorded history up until a century ago. But we don’t live a century ago. We live now. Childbirth is safer now. Therefore your point doesn’t really go anywhere. Childbirth in the woods is dangerous, a million things can go wrong. Backsliding? Source required. Show me any evidence that a surgery or childbirth or even drinking water is safer on average back then.
I would be interested in where you get your sources for some of these claims. Ie. Childbirth one and the lack of lethal encounters in ancient peoples. Its a nice idea that there is some nicer world we could all go back to if we destroyed civilization. Reality is unfortunately more complicated.
It is very likely that there has always been war. Those have been documented even between chimpanzees and those fights absolutely were lethal. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War
“something doesn’t add up”
yes it does. that’s exactly what it is you’re describing. all of it adding up. as always people struggle with exponential growth because it’s not very intuitive.
my favorite way to demonstrate the unintuitive nature of exponential growth is this question:
there’s a pond, and a lily pad on it. the number of lily pads double every day on the pond. so on day 1 there’s one, day 2 there’s two, and on day 3 there’s four… etc.
if it takes 120 days for the pond to get completely covered in lily pads, what day was only half of it covered?
!the answer is 119.!<
I don’t disagree with your explanation of exponential growth or how it does answer for the speed at which we went from, say the magnifying glass to the hubble space telescope.
However, the exponential growth alone model does have a floor: it presumes that there was some kind of push, drive or want for progress. Like, as if there was a destination we’re supposed to end up at and its just a case of how long it took to get there. It excludes the idea that people might not have wanted to.
People didn’t want to toil all day in someone else’s farm. In smaller numbers, on good land, people didn’t have to do very much to get the food they needed. Its only when farming became developed and consistent enough that those living there had the numbers to go kill the people who lived on the good land.
Once we’d been, for all intense and purpose, domesticated by grain, “progress” was inevitable.
Another example would be the industrial revolution. People ask why it was so much faster here in the UK than France. It wasn’t because of a desire for progress. Its that French people had a natural aversion to being worked for 12 hours a day in hell-like factories and workhouses. I mean, British people did too but they had mostly just been kicked off the common land they had lived on for centuries. So, they had no other place to go and begging and not having a job for more than three days was made illegal, punishable by being sent to to workhouses. At one points, they had more British soldiers fighting the riots at home than they had fighting napoleon.
my comment referred to knowledge more than anything. the more you know, the more you have to go from to learn new things. incredibly simplistic summary for very complex phenomena, but I wasn’t going to go through the entire human history. there are breaking points and regression stages, but generally speaking it makes sense that the more you progress, the faster you can progress further. you have more tools.
The standard story is “One Grain of Rice” https://jwilson.coe.uga.edu/EMT668/EMAT6680.F99/Martin/instructional unit/day4.exponential/excel/grainofrice.html
You’ve deleted your response to me but it’s still in my inbox… and it’s hilariously pretentious and pedantic. I understand why you’ve deleted it.
I recognized that this user is willing to share information and provided the standard teaching method on exponential growth; in the event they need to explain it again. I suppose critical thinking and social skills are characteristics of bots these days…
that is purposeful. it wouldn’t make much of a point if it took 10 days.
I mean sure it would? That’s rhe whole point is that exponential growth quickly reaches massive quantities. Like literally after 120 days I doubt that many lilypads would fit on earth.