Same with Issac Newton. One had to be the first to write that stuff down.
We read portions of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics in Ethics 101, and I felt this way about everything we went through. Yes, demonstrating admirable traits will lead to a virtuous life. That’s almost true by definition. Oh, but you still might not achieve a happy life even if you’re a good person? Well, that’s because you also need to be lucky! Oh, and generosity is apparently 2 different virtues for some reason.
I’m sure he had other works, but reading his “insights” made me wonder how this could be the guy everyone wouldn’t shut up about. We also studied the stoics, epicurians, nihilism and existentialism, Kantian ethics, consequentialism, the role of divinity, and probably other topics I can’t remember. Literally all of them were much more interesting than Aristotle’s eudaimonia ramblings, so I was quite annoyed that he took up almost half the class and made everything else rushed.
I feel the same way about Seinfeld or Shakespeare. They’re boring because people haven’t shut up about them and everything is made out of derivative works inspired by them. Seinfeld invented the modern sitcom format and editing (they weren’t the first they were the first to be massively popular doing all of it together)
Aristotle also believed that women were defective men, that some people are naturally destined to be slaves, and rejected atomic theory.
I feel like you can change this absolutely imbecilic image to “the hole left by everyone just accepted Aristotle’s idea that you can just think everything from first principles and don’t have to do any experimentation” and it’d actually be somewhat accurate.
I don’t know when shitting on the Greek civilization became a thing, but the irony that this trend comes from the same country that voted for Trump twice and made Idiocracy a tame historical documentary is not lost on me.
deleted by creator
I hear the same about the conceptualization of zero as a numeral that operations can be performed on (a crucial turning point in human thinking) which is also laughable. It simply was not compatible with the Greek understanding of mathematics which emphasized the discrete and trigonometric but fit very well into the more abstract view towards math on the Indian subcontinent. There’s a reason why human discovery has global roots.
- Hey dude, you know you had two goats? Well, I took one
- Whatever I still have one goat left
- Hey dude, you know you had one single goat? Well, I took it
- Wtf, that doesn’t make sense
👆 real dialogues recorded by actual ancient Greeks
Simple rule of thumb. If it has no real world use case in your avg dudes day to day.
It ain’t getting discovered.
Now you also need to have that avg dude be someone of note, power and reach so that the discovery actually goes somewhere and doesn’t just die with him.
The more esoteric and rarer those two things line up.
True that it takes a degree of imagination. We can draw a fairly direct line from Brahmagupta, Al-Khwarizmi, Fibonacci, Piero della Francesca, to Leonardo da Vinci describing the East to West transfer of zero and the decimal place value system.
It often comes down to what a culture considers “useful”.
The relation between mass & energy seems very intuitive, I’ve known it for most of my life!
Wdym humanity just recently learned that??(It’s a cognitive bias when you internalise some information you just learned, & suddenly get the feeling that all who don’t know it are kinda dumb, like that
intoinfo wasn’t gifted to you by chance/random experience.)like that into wasn’t gifted to you by chance/random experience.
This sounds like you think purposefully learning things isn’t a thing.
Do you mean that things you don’t remember purposefully learning, are more easily consciously forgotten, even when internalised?
Because we are often somewhat bad at saying where we specifically picked up a bit of information, unless we have very good context like having studied for a test on a specific subject or smth.
Sorry, I don’t think I understood your reply.
(What’s is the difference between learning something on purpose or not?)It’s not about forgetting where you got the info from, it’s forgetting that others (other brainholes besides your own) don’t/might not know it.
It’s just a characteristic of human(?) psychology, we all have it (it’s not applicable/the bias doesn’t kick in constantly, but it’s there, you can’t really function without it).
Information asymmetry isn’t that intuitive to us, the languages/communication itself (memetics) heavily implies that - you just can’t always explain everything from scratch, from inventing a form of communication to everything in the universe, etc just to tell someone to eg boil some water.A basic example of this might be a child opening a tin box with cookies pictured on it only to find a sewing kit, then another child walking into the room, not seeing the opened box they don’t know it doesn’t contain cookies so they check. The first child usually thinks that the other one is stupid af bcs “it is known that there are no cookies in that box, duh, everyone knows that” (even forgetting that it’s a reasonable assumption that there should be cookies in it). Children up to 4 (or 7?) can really struggle with that but can comprehend if explained to them (sooner or later we usually do learn it & try our best to compensate for it).
More nuanced cases are ofc when it gets tricky to correct the bias (you just don’t have the data or the time to account for all of it, perhaps even a cultural hurdle as ppl might take offence to you over-explaining something they think they already know), eg at work giving tasks to someone less/differently experienced than you.
I think it’s a subset of wiki/Curse_of_knowledge, but I’m no psychology expert so I’m not sure (might be classified differently, wiki/Cognitive_bias).
Yes, I understand the bias.
You just worded it as if all the information in your head is in there by accident, and you can’t actually influence the amount.
You very much can, obviously.
But that doesn’t remove the bias… again, obviously.
I’m still not sure I follow the reasoning, but maybe: I meant that bcs of the unimaginable randomness of cases and impossible vastness of data. You absolutely don’t have free access to all the data (you don’t know what I keep in my tin box at home). You can purposely (or not) only access the data that is by chance accessible to you.
So within this context I find it weird differentiating between purposely vs accidentally (if that is the opposite?) acquiring knowledge bcs even if you pick up a book you chose it’s still very much random & nothing in comparison to all the data in existence (and the comparison was between overlapping experiences of different people, so another dimension of random selection).
That’s why I was presenting it as random (but active or passive learning - it makes no difference to that point, so that’s why I didn’t initially get what you were saying).Ofc you have experts in their fields, they gathered knowledge “on purpose” to that end - and yet when I hire such an expert, first day on the job that idiot doesn’t even know where their desk is.
You can’t follow the sentence “the way you worded that implied that all the information you have was ‘gifted’ by ‘random chance’”?
Lots of people enjoy general knowledge. There’s even quite a few games and TV-shows based on it. You’d argue that everyone who did well in those, or say, Trivial Pursuit, are better by chance because they were “gifted” something instead of having had worked for it?
There are people addicted to generalised trivia and facts and then there are people who don’t understand the difference between amperes and volts, despite that being taught in pretty much all basic education in at least the developed world.
But no, the kids getting A’s didn’t work for anything, they were just gifted?
Just like
This girl was also probably gifted her massive arms. I mean, there’s so many other things she could possibly be doing with her arms, so it’s just random that she’d get larger ones on purpose. It was a random “gift” from… God?
And this isn’t even about the context. Again, the way you worded it excluded experts as well. But you just have to move the goalposts instead of saying “yeah, you’re right, it does imply that, I could’ve worded that better”. No, instead you’re like “I didn’t mean experts, obviously!” Why not? (Do you notice btw how I’m asking you things instead of telling them? Wish there was like a name for this style of rhetoric. Can someone perhaps think of one?)
You misunderstood me.
I wasn’t talking about learning at all.
I never said anything against the human activity of learning. I feel like I triggered you on something personal, for which I’m sorry.Being in the vicinity of information --> gifted the chance to absorb/learn/remember it.
The girl was gifted (by which I mean randomised circumstances) the chance to put in the effort for those gains, yet she still can’t lift a mountain, much less the galaxy. She wouldn’t have the same gains if she was in a famine, or without arms, or a snail.
Again, that is not diminishing her efforts, attitude, results in any way, bcs we understand the context of human lives individually (ie she’s amazing).Trivia nerds won’t know what random number I’m thinking of. Or what is dark matter. Or which human pooped the largest poop in 1000BC.
Learning is fun, it has a lot of positive synergies with basically everything, and we tend to rightfully cherish knowledgeable ppl more. And we don’t think knowledgeable ppl are dumb bcs they don’t know things they were never privy to learn. I’m still not sure why would you assume my standing to the opposite, but I think we already cleared that isn’t the case.
I didn’t move any goalposts (that’s just you trying to win something I think - I did include experts) & I think most understood me correctly. But you just wanted to argue (my use of the word gift) like a master debater & extended my simple point into wannabe “this guy doesn’t appreciate ppl’s efforts & thinks learning is fake”.
That’s just mean.Here, have some inspirational quotes (with maybe the general use of the word gift that is lacking in this convo):
I never said anything against the human activity of learning
Honestly seeing this level of “rhetoric” is just… well I’m just bored arguing kids/idiots like you. You can’t actually stand behind your words, so you try to make it personal.
No, you haven’t “triggered” anything by wording your comment poorly, but like I said, instead of just saying “oh right you are, that wording does indeed have that implication, I’ll word it better” you’re going all out on these pathetic ad hominems. Which is a term I’m 85% sure you’re gonna misuse due to fundamentally misunderstanding it.
Being in the vicinity of information --> gifted the chance to absorb/learn/remember it.
Hahaha dude you do crack me up. You’ve never heard of willfull ignorance, or can’t imagine it’s opposite? I pity you.
Trivia nerds won’t know what random number I’m thinking of.
Yeah uhm does that mean that they don’t exist and/or have a much larger grasp of a million different little things than someone who’s wasted their life thinking information just randomly spawns into you, so they didn’t bother actively learning anything.
But you just wanted to argue (my use of the word gift) like a master debater & extended my simple point into wannabe *"this guy doesn’t appreciate ppl’s efforts & thinks learning is fake
That’s known as a strawman my little silly-billy. And it’s just like I said. You literally can not say “my mistake, I could’ve worded that better” you’ve made this be some sort of contest.
It’s really not. If it were, you wouldn’t stand a chance with, again, that childish level of rhetoric.
I think I’ve deeply triggered your traumas of getting beat hard in all the quizzes you’ve ever taken (I don’t think you’re really the type to play Trivial Pursuit, lolololol.) And that’s okay. Learning is good. Like learning to handle your personal emotions and feelings of inferiority.
Which is what you’re having a complex about here, because I’m just pointing out your original wording did in fact imply that you think all information we have was “gifted by random chance”.
Being mean doesn’t equate to an ad hominem, by the way. Neither do insults. They’re not synonyms, which you’d know if you had ever spent any time actually learning about them. But you didn’t. Perhaps you thought “random chance” would just plop it in your head one day? RUAHAHAHA :D
In the UK our £2 coins have “Standing on the shoulders of giants” written around the rim, to remind us all that no, you wouldn’t have thought of that, you berk.
There’s also the case of, you arnt rich, noble, and from the ruling class that gives your words enough weight to even be considered less remembered at all.
A great deal many things have been discovered and forgotten and rediscovered. Because the first few times they weren’t discovered by a rich enough noble with the power and wealth to spread the knowledge or even get people to listen in the first place.
In ye olden times. It took more then just being smart, you also had to be rich as FUCK or have extremely good connections if not rich as fuck. And in many cases you needed both.
Else you would be ignored, and die with any discovery or advancements you invented in your life.
That’s a pretty exaggerated account, there were and are plenty of poor ass philosophers and writers and scientists and mathematicians.
In a rich man’s house there is nowhere to spit but his face
But this is about philosophy, not society.
deleted by creator
No you wouldn’t. All this stuff may seem obvious now but it only does so because somebody figured it out before.
I would, too! I would have invented math! All of it!
I mean a lot of what Socrates and Plato wrote and taught are just self justifications for the ancient Greek ruling class.
That delusion is so common that I suspect it must have a name, but I don’t know what it is.
But the better a solution appears, the more a person who sees the solution believes it to be obvious, and therefore also believes that, had they tried to solve the problem, they’d have come up with this “obvious” solution straight away with no effort.
Meanwhile, the person who actually solved the problem could only come up with the perfect simple solution after a lifetime of study in the area to the point that you’d call them an expert or master, and after agonizing for a long time over this particular problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias
“Hindsight bias, also known as the knew-it-all-along phenomenon or creeping determinism, is the common tendency for people to perceive past events as having been more predictable than they were.”
It’s a kind of cognitive bias that assumes things that are obvious to us would be inevitably found without uncertainty, or trial and error.
Historical projections of population place the global population at roughly 162 million people. Let’s say only .1% of the population was capable of this sort of thing. Although I think it’s low and while these early Greek philosophers were certainly smart the key to their success was wealth and the ability to focus on their “craft”. But I’ll really lowball human intelligence
Anyway, at .1% of people that means roughly 162,000 thousand people would be capable. The number of those with resources to actually dedicate the time even smaller.
Today the world population is over 8 billion, but we’ll use 8 billion. So at .1% that gives us 8 million people alive today that would be capable.
I really underestimated human intelligence, but the point is the same. We have so so many people alive today that there is certainly quite a few people capable of doing these sorts of things
That seems like a fair percentage estimate. What you’re leaving out is society. The ancient Greeks, even the 99.9% dummies, were excited about philosophy and learning. Today, Joe Rogan is one of the most popular podcasts in the world and you can’t throw a stick without hitting a dozen grifters proudly parroting logical fallacies while people clap. So yeah, there might be eight million people out there, but their thoughtful blog probably gets a dozen hits a month. Their world changing lecture was cancelled for being woke. Their exciting revelation they add to the conversation get overshadowed by someone yelling how great “Oh! My Balls!” was last night.
Bringing up Joe Rogan, but ignoring the estimated 1% of the global population with PhDs is a choice.
If we just counted phds that becomes 800 million people, but truthfully I think most capable of a masters would stand a good chance of doing this work.
Human intelligence is often underestimated by cynics imo
1% of the global population with PhDs is a choice.
If we just counted phds that becomes 800 million people
Ouch. And to follow that up with “intelligence is often underestimated by cynics imo”. Simply brutal. I hate to be the one to break this too you, but having a PhD doesn’t necessarily mean a person is smart. Even if it did, that 1% is sort of entirely making my above point about society.
Considering that alone suggests a rate 10 times higher than they suggested yeah.
But also don’t assume education is equally distributed. Wealthy nations have higher percentages of the population with PhDs. Also let’s not forget the economic factors. Many fields you at most need a masters degree for job reasons. There are a lot of capable people that stopped there to get a job
“Einstein is such an idiot. I learned about general relativity in middle school”
Teaching “common sense” is so hard because kids get so offended that you think they are stupid.
Too bad I don’t get to sit around and think all day so I can discuss with others who sit around and think all day.
Have you tried being born wealthy? Hope this helps!
That was Plato and Socrates’s secret
Plato, but Socrates worked as a stone mason.
Well, a society with a vast management/“thinker” class (the rest, including bureaucrats, being slaves) should produce some thinkening shit.
Not as much as a society with universal individual’s needs guaranteed (the tech back then just wasn’t there), but more than a society with overwhelming oligarchy/feudalism rule where only a random few are allowed to think.
Oh, that’s where I messed up. I took the thickener, not the thinkener.
(lmao) Is it really “messing up” when you end up thicc?
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
“Socrates was the wisest man in Athens.”
Dude, the population of Athens and it’s surrounding territory at the time was about 200k-250k people, a very sizable portion of which were foreigners who probably had a different primary language, and even more of which were slaves (like 1/3 to 1/2 of the entire population). Would be like talking about the wisest person in Dayton, Ohio 2500 years later in every philosophy textbook in the world becuase he realized it was better to say “I dunno” than to talk out of your ass.
If Plato is accurate then I don’t know if he didn’t talk out of his ass.
Much like another wise man.
It wasn’t that he didn’t know things. He specifically showed you how you didn’t know things you thought you did. That’s quiet different.
It’s literally still called “the Socratic method”. And it made the ancient Athenians so mad at Socrates they executed him.
If you manage to have things named after you a few thousand years from now by saying “I dunno”, I’ll raise my hat to you.
The socratic method, which, as the name suggests, he did, is about asking probing questions to expose gaps or contradictions in their knowledge which reveal their ignorance. Both to themselves and oftentimes to other’s, as well. He didn’t stump them with his own knowledge. He only asked questions until they stumped themselves.
He found that wisdom was found in humility. “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” That is what I paraphrased as “I dunno”. Understanding that you do not and cannot know all things is a core principle of his idea of wisdom and his methodology.
“Only tasked questions”
Yeah and Einstein “only wrote some equations”?
The point is the questions he asked, just like the point is that E=mc^2 really isn’t as simple as it seems, but has a world of theory behind it.
Socrates knew to ask the right questions.
I’ll go further, i reckon i couldve done better than “featherless biped” as the definition of a human.
Honestly they mustve said so much bollocks that people were too embaressed to write down or copy and it was lost to time.
If I recall correctly, “fatherless biped” was an attempt to define a human in the simplest, most basic form, and as short as possible.
I guess they just forgot about gorillas and other primates. Are they classified as bipedal? I mean they don’t HAVE to use their arms to move around. It’s just more efficient for them…
Of course, I wouldn’t have plucked a chicken and presented it ad a fatherless biped, either… So what do I know lmao
At the time, in Greece they thought of apes as monkeys without tails. They also had no reason to think those creatures were particularly bipedal. Or that there was any particular relation to humans. Aristotle was describing Baboons, which walk on all 4s. To Plato, a bird might be the only other creature that walked on two legs. It also has pink skin for what that’s worth.
It’s easy to forget that the foundation of knowledge we have is so incredibly vast it would be incomprehensible to the ancient Greeks. We learn in elementary school things that people wouldn’t work out for centuries.
Imagine telling Diogenes that dolphins are foxes that learned to swim. Or that the giant skulls they keep finding aren’t one eyed giants, but the skulls of ancient hairy elephants.
Plato was alive when Greek philosophers decided the earth was round, and it would be a few hundred years before somebody would make the first real calculation of its size.
I doubt Diogenes would care abt the foxes being dolphins so much as how u explained it. If u brought a series of dolphin to fox fossil records he’d accept it but if u come in waving ur hands abt and mumbling something abt dolphins and foxes he’d think ur as insane as him.
Their relationship to humans is irrelevant to being able to walk around just fine on two legs.
My last point was apes fit the “featherles biped” just as much as a plucked chicken, and just as much as we do.
It really just depends on how much knowledge they had of the existence of various primates and how they walk around. I’ve just seen enough monkeys and apes walking on two legs to consider them a child’s understanding of “featherless biped”
My favorite bit of trivia about how much/little we knew about things, we technically discovered steam power thousands of years ago, but only relatively recently in human history figured out how to use it to do things.
Plato was alive when Greek philosophers decided the earth was round, and it would be a few hundred years before somebody would make the first real calculation of its size.
Closer to 150 than “a few hundred”, don’t mind me, just nitpicking a little.
I think geological time, planetary formation & the Big Bang etc would probably be harder to explain and for the greeks to accept than evolution, even though it requires pretty much geological timeframes as well.
I guess they just forgot about gorillas
We often take for granted how much information we have about the animal kingdom. Gorillas are native to central Africa; it is highly unlikely Plato ever even met somebody who had seen one. What makes Greek philosophy impressive is how much they were able to accurately describe given the incredibly limited slice of what is now “common knowledge” available to them, and how durable the methods they employed have proven when provided better priors.
I could also had put 3 sticks of the same size on one axis and 4 on another and see that between the ends you can fit 5 sticks.
Wat
a^2 + b^2 = c^2
Oooohhhhh
I guess you wouldn’t have figured it out on your own, lol.
I’m the 11th guy
I admit I am old, but can anybody explain this meme format with an expressionless person making a selfie with a statement at the top? And do I need to be as conventionally attractive as this young man here or do looks not matter?
It makes me feel old too, lol. I think some people make them with streamers or content creators (maybe?) or just because they need an image, since people are more likely to share something funny if it’s not just text. It’s a little weird, but whatever.
I think you just discovered looksmaxing
I could have easily discovered that either.
Just keep asking why to everything. My nephew was basically Socrates.
I think that if I were intelligentsia in a different period of human development I would go and try to discover something. But that’s only because I’m in academia now so as long as I have the prerequisite material conditions my personal impulse for obtaining new knowledge would drive me
