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katydee comments on New vs. Business-as-Usual Future - Less Wrong
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Just think of the amount of energy available to an average person in the Roman Empire, compared to contemporary average person.
The modern period is nothing like anything else in the past.
Why?
I used to believe this, but I found myself astonished and dismayed by the extent to which the writings of the ancients dealt with the same concepts that we consider relevant today. In point of fact it doesn't seem to be the case that the human experience has meaningfully changed very much, despite modern access to energy, medicine, etc.
Certainly it is the case that the human experience is longer now, and less likely to end abruptly thanks to illness and the like, but it does not seem qualitatively different.
All so called "qualitative differences" are subjective. You are the one who draw the line and declare it to be the threshold for a qualitative change. The line tells us more about you than about the world.
Given that most ancients were illiterate, the ancients whose writings you've read aren't an unbiased sample of all ancients.
I don't think anyone made any claims about unbiased samples...
If I were to say "I don't think the human experience has changed much because when I read Benjamin Franklin, I feel like I'm reading myself," I'm implicitly assuming that Franklin and I have representative experiences for our times. My experience might be more typical now than Franklin's was then; similarly, the Roman urbanite who reads very similarly to the American urbanite can mask the significant change in urbanization.
Well, kinda, but once you explicitly state this, the problems start to appear. Historical age is only one of many possible dimensions of differences between people. You start asking "representative of what?" Is your "human experience" closer to Ben Franklin's or to a contemporary sheep herder's in Mali?
Or consider a 2x2 table of four people: you, now; a Roman urbanite, say, around 0 A.D.; a sheep herder in West Africa now; and a sheep herder in West Africa around 0 A.D. How do similarities of experience play out?
Most people aren't writers, period, so you're never comparing the ancients to an unbiased sample of any population either.
Again, what are your metrics for sameness?