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fubarobfusco comments on Rationality Quotes November 2012 - Less Wrong
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How would we compare these hypotheses?
*10. The ancients achieved less science because they cared less than we do about the actual goals science was useful for. (Later generations cared even less and forgot most of what was already known by the ancients.)
*11. The ancients achieved less science due to lack of research funding models. All funding was private and rich people were patrons to artists, not scientists.
I think that we can dismiss 2. because they did make precision devices when they wanted to (see the Antikythera Mechanism). If this had been the limiting factor they should have been able to reach at least the level we had in the nineteenth century.
8. The ancients achieved a lot of science, but it wasn't applied much to create technology because they had access to cheap slave labor.
Export-oriented slavery in the Americas was actually fairly technically dynamic, so if this is really the explanation I suspect it's because slave societies lack a mass consumer base.
9. Scientific advancement requires that in each generation, your culture acquires more knowledge about the world than it loses — and there are a lot of ways for a culture to lose knowledge; among them mortality, library fires, Alzheimer's, censorship, tech bubbles, faddish beliefs or cults, pareidolia, political propaganda, shame, anti-epistemology, language change, revolt of the masses, economic collapse rendering high-tech/high-knowledge trades untenable, superstitiogenesis¹, the madness of crowds, and other noise. In the absence of really good schooling, literacy, anti-censorship memes, skepticism memes, and economic resilience, the noise is likely to dominate the signal, driving cultures back towards subsistence and ignorant superstition — a condition in which beliefs are no more correlated with reality than is needed to keep you alive from day to day. However, the difference is basically quantitative (how much is preserved?) rather than qualitative (some cultures Have It and others Don't).
10. It's just too hard to maintain the technology base for scientific advancement with 1% literacy; there's just too much chance of losing it due to correlated death of the literate class — plagues; king decides to kill all the scribes and burn the books; barbarians invade and do the same; etc.
¹ any process by which new superstitions are created
I hoped the footnote would exemplify some such processes...
I guess that several of those had a non-negligible impact.