eirenicon comments on The Great Brain is Located Externally - Less Wrong

25 Post author: Alicorn 25 June 2009 10:29PM

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Comment author: conchis 28 June 2009 01:44:08PM *  3 points [-]

IAWYC but,

  1. I suspect you're caricaturing the (lack of) knowledge of a random historical peasant somewhat. It's easy to come up with a list of things that we know that they wouldn't, because we usually know what we know. There are probably many things that an historical peasant knows that we don't, but it's harder to come up with examples, because often we don't know what we don't know. All things considered, I'd still say we know more, but not necessarily by as much as might be suggested by a naive reading of your comment.

  2. FWIW, a random historical peasant is about 50% likely to be female.

Comment author: eirenicon 30 June 2009 06:53:31PM 1 point [-]
  1. FWIW, a random historical peasant is about 50% likely to be female.

I don't know how reliable this source is but it suggests that the sex ratio in medieval Europe, at least, was skewed toward men, and offers some compelling reasons for it.