It's disappointing to see the myth of the "Christian Dark Ages" still repeated so often.
It's true that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire led to a regression in social order. To blame this complex collapse entirely on Christianity is overly simplistic. There's obviously some casualties during this period of upheaval (like the Palimpsest you mentioned), but if anything the early Christian monasteries deserve some credit for preserving knowledge during this period of tremendous upheaval.
Many have also pointed out how Eurocentric this view is. Mathematics and science continued to flourish in Arabic and Chinese places of learning as well. Algebra, modern astronomy, and the printing press did not pop out of the aether the moment Europeans decided to start printing Greek gods again.
To me the difference is, there seems to have been way more freedom of thought in the pre christian societies. Polytheism is (usually) more open to new ideas than religios dogma of one god. This is for me what dark times means, and the age of enlightenment when it was possible again to dare to think in new directions and not be afraid of the inquisition anymore.
How to do real research, when you have to align every insight with some old book or face the stake? Only very restricted, in secrecy and not in open exchange.
So also in non christian societies people were killed for having the wrong ideas, but comparing greece or early rome with the christian empires, it seems obvious to me why progress was slowed down for so long.
Consider why the Roman public, commoners in particular but not exclusively, were so ready to abandon the religious beliefs of their forefathers and throw it all away, even defacing the old temples, to adopt some jewish desert hippie's promise of simple salvation. Perhaps you'd like to think this conversion of Rome was all by the sword, but in reality the early christian converts chose despite very credible threats of state violence, and the state itself only converted when the critical mass of common christians could no longer be denied or ignored.
Rome's culture and traditional was fundamentally broken; it no longer served the needs of the Roman people, and if Christianity hadn't popped up, it would have been some other system of reform instead. The status quo was unstable, rapidly deteriorating. You may idealize the religious tolerance of their polytheism, but what that matter if it isn't actually serving the spiritual needs of the people?
" You may idealize the religious tolerance of their polytheism, but what that matter if it isn't actually serving the spiritual needs of the people?"
Rome in the end was a decadent, but brutal empire full of slaves. And to a slave christian salvation sounds great.
But before there was a empire with emperors taking up the idea of becoming gods themself, there was a republic. And also after it became an empire, they did not have a institution like the inquisition shaping thought and banning heresy baked into their system.
This is the fundamental difference that I see.
In medieval times being expelled from the church was pretty much a death sentence. In roman and greek times for most of its existence not really.
The demise of the Roman Republic was an inevitability. It could have been Sulla rather than Caesar, and if not Caesar it could have been another, but one way or the other the situation was fundamentally unstable and the public was deeply discontent. Would be reformers like the Gracchi were finding enormous popular traction only to get assassinated.
Also, the Roman Republic were prolific slavers too. I say this because you speak of the Empire and slavery but then go into a "But the Republic.." This isn't Star Wars, you can't divide it into good guys and bad guys, the Republic and Empire were both imperial sons of bitches who conquered territory and took civilians as slaves. The demand for reform that would eventually motivate mass conversions to Christianity was already well established before Caesar was even born.
I’m not sure there necessarily was that much progress before that, though? With some exceptions ancient societies were highly stagnant especially technologically in contrast to high-late medieval Europe.
Also plague, climate change and demographic collapse kind of directly kickstarted the dark ages.
> Polytheism is (usually) more open to new ideas than religios dogma of one god.
This is a modern view with hindsight bias. In the ancient world, the existence of many gods did not imply peaceful co-existance, but very heated rivalry and politics.
Ironically pagan authors of late antiquity were the "conservatives" in our modern sense. Pagan literally means "farmer" - it might have similar implications to how we would call someone a "redneck" today. At the time, they were opposed to foreign gods and new influences on their traditional and respectable Pantheon.
If anything Rome was a little too open to foreign dieties. Titus performed the right of Evocatio at the siege of Jerusalem, a custom where the god(s) of their foes were enticed to abandon their current patrons in return for a home and worship on Rome.
Eh, even those polytheistic societies had their own inquisitions. Socrates was executed for defying the gods, and lots of Christians and Jews were persecuted because they refused to accept that the emperor was a god.
There were many attention grabbing things (Cold War escalation, civil unrest, etc.) in the world when Feynman wrote those papers. I can't find the exact clip, but I remember seeing an interview where an older Feynman reflected on that time. He described a sense of hopelessness and impending doom hanging over him for years after his involvement with the Manhattan Project. Here's a similar quote to that effect[1]:
...I can't understand it anymore but I felt very strongly then. I'd sat in a restaurant in New York, for example and I looked at the buildings and how far away, I would think, you know, how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth. How far down there was down to 34th Street? All these buildings, all smashed, and so on. And I got a very strange feeling. I would go along and I would see people building a bridge. Or, they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things, it's so useless?
Our times are certainly challenging, but I hope we can muster the strength and focus to keep building as others did in the past.
I'm totally on board with this, and I've heard that quote too. But I think the OP was talking more about how our "distraction environment" today prevents us from having even 5 minutes of continued focus, unless we go through herculean efforts. Thus limiting our ability to do deep thinking, create deep work and make deep choices.
But for sure there were many EPIC distractions of a more general nature in that time.
In addition to all of the craziness going on in the world at the time his wife was hospitalized and dying of tuberculosis while he was working on the Manhattan project.
There's a certain category of people who cope with stress by becoming absorbed in work so that they can shut everything else out. Those people likely do their best work because of the tragedies surrounding them.
Yeah but we're worse today. On top of all the impending doom we have vastly superior weapons of mass distraction in our hands and every computer/phone screen. Our attention spans have decreased.
I feel like a lot of people in this thread are missing the point of the potatoes with no salt or oil.
The entire idea is that this diet is incredibly boring and will make a well-balanced vegan diet seem for more appealing by comparison. This way, the author's new diet will seem more exciting and interesting than if they jumped straight from steak and ice cream to rice and beans.
A diet of pure potatoes is obviously unsustainable and unhealthy, but this is only temporary. (IMO the keto diet that I've seen other commenters pushing is also unsustainable, but whatever works for people.)
Based on the article, we don't even fully understand the mechanism behind the disease. Hard to do gene therapy when you aren't sure what genes are to blame.
There could be epigenetic or environmental factors to blame for a disease.
But even so, assuming this is a genetic issue, proposing gene therapy in this case is putting the cart before the horse. It's like if you had a memory leak or segfault in a 3.4 billion line codebase, but the issue was only reported a few times (out of 7+ billion active users) and you can't replicate it. Obviously, a patch for this issue would be nice, but first you need to find out what's causing the issue.
I guess I'm a member of this "No-Code" generation?
My friends and I were playing Minecraft when we were 12 years old, and we're entering the workforce now.
I share the skepticism from other commenters in this thread.
Maybe it's just anecdata, but I don't see my peers using super high level GUI replacements for data analysis.
My friends in marketing, engineering, biotechnology, and using the same tools as the millennials before us: Excel / Google Sheets.
In fact, most learned how to use those tools on the job or in college, not from their earlier education.
> Whereas just a few years ago, a store manager might... put their sales data into Excel and then let it linger there for the occasional perusal, this new generation is prepared to connect multiple online tools to build an online storefront (through no-code tools like Shopify or Squarespace), calculate basic LTV scores using a no-code data platform and prioritize their best customers with marketing outreach through basic email delivery services.
I have seen people using Squarespace, but again, I've seen older millennials pick up such software just as readily.
My friends that are fluent in data analysis acquired their proficiency through traditional, code-heavy approaches (R, Python, a good dose of command-line interfaces).
I guess my point is that, if you want to fill this "missing productivity gap in the global economy", mere exposure to Minecraft and website builders is not a substitute for a comprehensive C.S. curriculum.
> It would be really nice if these teams focused on creating an interoperable standard for chat instead of trying to lock in users. Basic protocols like chat should be decentralized, and will probably end up being so.
Have you heard of Matrix? Because it sounds like you're describing Matrix almost perfectly.
Yes of course, Matrix too. In fact i am waiting for them to make it easy to integrate existing user base to switch to them. Matrix will probably be the ultimate replacement to discord, because it lends itself naturally to the case of a medium sized game-based community.
We are self-hosted, I'd _hate_ to think of the costs of hosting this service through AWS or similar who charges for ingress / egress.
We have 5gbps of bandwidth and 12TB of storage that I've dedicated to the service (costing me ~£30/mo, so a fairly trivial sum).
I'm hoping that if we ever exceed 12TB / 5gbps, others will similarly host their own versions of the application. I've heard of half a dozen people already who have just decided to host their own.
Yeah, pretty much. Some of the storage & networking is stolen from other projects of mine which lowers the cost significantly. Almost all of my servers for home projects come with 4TB hard drives which I never use anywhere near the full capacity of.
It's true that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire led to a regression in social order. To blame this complex collapse entirely on Christianity is overly simplistic. There's obviously some casualties during this period of upheaval (like the Palimpsest you mentioned), but if anything the early Christian monasteries deserve some credit for preserving knowledge during this period of tremendous upheaval.
Many have also pointed out how Eurocentric this view is. Mathematics and science continued to flourish in Arabic and Chinese places of learning as well. Algebra, modern astronomy, and the printing press did not pop out of the aether the moment Europeans decided to start printing Greek gods again.
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