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sixes_and_sevens comments on Open thread, Oct. 6 - Oct. 12, 2014 - Less Wrong
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Here's a fun game: concepts, ideas, institutions and features of the world we (let's say 21st Century Westerners) think of as obvious, but aren't necessarily so. Extra points for particularly visceral or captivating cases.
For example: at some point in human history, the idea of a false identity or alias wouldn't have even made sense, because everyone you met would be either known to you or a novel outsider. These days, anyone familiar with, say, Batman, understands the concept of an assumed identity, it's that endemic in our culture. But there presumably must have been a time when you would have had to go to great lengths to explain to someone what an assumed identity was.
A few examples:
Accurate timekeeping and strict schedules (a very famous example). Although sundials and water clocks were known since antiquity, they weren't very accurate and the length of an hour varied with the length of the day. It was rare for an average person to have a strict schedule. Even in monasteries and churches schedules probably could not be very strict, as although clocks did strike hours usually they weren't very accurate (13th-14th century mechanical clocks had no faces at all, and it wasn't until late 17th century when they became precise enough to justify regular use of minute hands) and they would likely regularly be reset at local high noon each day. In fact, it was only after the invention of pendulum clock by Christiaan Huygens in 1656 that timekeeping became accurate and independent of the length of the day, however, as late as 1773, towns were content to order clocks without minute hands as they saw no need for them. In 1840 railway time was invented. It was "the first recorded occasion when different local times were synchronised and a single standard time applied. Railway time was progressively taken up by all railway companies in Great Britain over the following two to three years.". According to wikipedia, 98% of Great Britain's public clocks were using GMT by 1855. After the industrial revolution and invention of the light bulb, most people have schedules which depend on the official time rather than Sun's position in the sky.
Historian Roger Ekirch argues that before the industrial revolution the segmented sleep was the dominant form of human slumber in Western civilization and it is a myth that we need eight hours of uninterrupted sleep each night.
Concepts/analogies/metaphors/models that depend on having certain technologies to be understood. Possible examples: the clockwork universe, human mind as a computer. Although in some cases it is not clear whether a certain technology was necessary to inspire the creation of the philosophical concept, or was it simply a very nice example that helped to elucidate an already existing idea.
Historian David Wootton argues that until mid-19th century and the discovery of germ theory physicians did more harm than good to their patients. Nowadays most people expect positive results when they go to the doctor.
Many other inventions changed the landscape of ideas and what is taken for granted (ability to communicate over long distances, ability to store fresh food safely in the fridge (according to a documentary I watched, this was one of the main factors that enabled the growth of cities), large ships, accurate maps with no uncharted territories, etc.).
It think this question is very broad, perhaps too broad.
This raises two questions:
1) Why, despite this, doctor was in general respected and well-paid profession?
2) What would have happened if use of statistics in medicine became widespread before germ theory. Could it lead to ban on medicine?
The faith-healing preacher, the witch-doctor, and the traditional healer are respected professions in the cultures where they occur. The Hippocratic physician was basically the traditional healer of Western civilization. He offered interventions that might kill, might cure, and were certainly impressive.
(It's worth noting that surgery was not within the traditional province of physicians. The original Hippocratic oath forbids physicians from doing surgery since they were not trained in it.)
That's not a new idea!
Lewis Thomas ("The Youngest Science") dates net benefit to well past 1900.
Your first link seems to say that Wootton dates it to antiseptic surgery. But that's just one good thing, which needn't balance many bad things. I've heard that the bad doctors did increased in the 19th century. For example, Lewis Thomas says that homeopathy was a reaction to the increase in the harm of 19th century drugs. Your second link seems to say that Wootton isn't talking about net effects, but of doctors doing any good at all. That's a pretty strong claim.
I don't know about that -- the Odyssey, for example, doesn't have any trouble with the idea of a false identity...
Technically you are correct, of course, I don't know if the concept of false identity would have made sense to a paleolithic tribe, and if it did we can always go earlier until it wouldn't. But at this stage, a LOT of contemporary concepts would disappear.
As to your game, I think you need to limit it in some way, otherwise too much stuff (from women's rights to telecommunications) qualifies.
That time is clearly before the Arthurian cycle, which contains several instances of knights taking someone else's armour and being taken for that person - most famously, Kay the Seneschal and Lancelot. Arguably also before the period in which Greek myths were composed; Zeus occasionally disguises himself as someone's husband for purposes of seduction. In the Bible, Jacob disguises himself as his brother Esau to obtain their father's blessing, although admittedly the deception hinges on their father being blind. Mistaken identity seems to be a fairly old concept, then.
Low infant mortality. In many time periods, you could expect to witness as many (more?) deaths before adulthood as deaths from old age.
Tentatively: that tolerance and intolerance of strangers should be a matter of law rather than local impulse.
What do you mean?
Strangers may not have been the best choice of word, but what I meant is that how people who were in more or less outgroups were treated wasn't so much a matter of public policy. They might be accepted. They might be murdered sporadically. There was no affirmative action, no Jim Crow laws. There were pogroms, but no holocaust.
So, basically, that people-not-from-my-tribe should not be "outlaws" (in the original sense of "outside of the law")? Essentially, you are talking about the idea of law which covers everyone regardless of who/what they are?
Not just that-- instead of just having relations between people shake out under a neutral law, it's assumed that the government can achieve something better than neutrality.
In the general case, what is "better than neutrality"?
I don't know whether there is anything better than neutrality, but a great many people seem to think there is.
The ideal existed since antiquity, but — as today — wasn't consistently practiced.
"Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt." — Exodus 22:21
"The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God." — Leviticus 19:34
"And I charged your judges at that time, 'Hear the disputes between your people and judge fairly, whether the case is between two Israelites or between an Israelite and a foreigner residing among you.'" — Deuteronomy 1:16
(All quotations NIV.)
The classical world also had related norms of xenia and hospitium.
The concept of adolescence:
With the trend towards an expectation of college education, we will need an extended concept to include the early twenties.
Edit: "Emerging adulthood is a phase of the life span between adolescence and full-fledged adulthood, proposed by Jeffrey Arnett in a 2000 article in the American Psychologist."
Leadership for limited time periods.
They already had it back in at least ancient Greece.
Excluding the concept of "leadership until you get killed".
Conversely, they also wouldn't be able to understand the modern totalitarian state.
Sustained, non-trivial economic growth.
(I am less sure about DeLong's remark, which I've excised, that before the Industrial Revolution, living standards were kept firmly in check by the Malthusian trap. The basic conclusion that pre-industrial economic growth was glacial nonetheless stands.)
The idea that melodies, or at least an approximation accurate to within a few cents, can be embedded into a harmonic context. Yet in western art music, it took centuries for this to go from technically achievable but unthinkable to experimental to routine.
Medieval sacred music was a special case in many ways. We have some records (albeit comparatively scant ones) of secular/folk music from pre-Renaissance times, and it was a lot more tonally structured (a more meaningful term than "harmonic") than that.
I'd believe that; my knowledge of music history isn't that great and seeing teleology where there isn't any is an easy mistake.
I guess what I'm saying, speaking very vaguely, is that melodies existing within their own tonal contexts are as old as bone flutes, and their theory goes back at least as far as Pythagoras. And most folk music traditions cooked up their own favorite scale system, which you can just stay in and make music as long as you want to. For that matter, notes in these scale systems can be played as chords and a lot of the combinations make musical sense (often with nicer consonance than is possible with notes that have to respect even temperament).
What western art music and its audience co-evolved into (not necessarily uniquely among music traditions?) was a state where something like the first few bars of the Schubert String Quintet can function. The first violin plays a note twice, with the harmonic context changing under it, driving the melody forward, driving the harmony forward, etc. I should probably have said a non-static harmonic context to be more clear.
Homosexual identity. Over much of human history men and woman did engage in homosexual activity but they didn't made it a matter of personal identity.
I wonder whether we can distinguish between these two hypotheses:
I have the impression that until recently most cultures have either (1) regarded same-sex sex as abominable and shameful, or (2) regarded it as a perfectly normal activity for anyone (at least in certain circumstances). In case 1, a few percent of (what we would now call) homosexual people would be best advised to try to avoid being noticed. In case 2, they might be lost in the noise. In neither case is it clear that we'd expect to see much written about (what we would now call) actually homosexual people.
(I am vastly ignorant of history, and would not be very surprised to find that the impression reported in the previous paragraph is wrong.)
Eric Raymond has a fairly good description of historical attitudes towards homosexuality here.
Edit: here is the key paragraph:
ESR's not basing his "analysis" on anywhere near enough evidence. His claim that he is working from "primary sources" is laughable at best.
And your criticism of his analysis is based on...
Would be improved by more explicit comment on what for you would count as enough evidence and using primary sources.
(That isn't a coded way of saying you're wrong.)
There are plenty of comprehensive histories of queerness. ESR just won't read or believe any of them.
Yes, primary sources screen out secondary sources.
And what sources do you have?
We do have writing about people who engage in homosexual activity.
Today being homosexual doesn't mean "having sex with people of the same sex or even enjoying having sex with people of the same sex". It's something much more abstract.
In the middle of the 20st century we seeing a bunch of gay people speaking their own language with Polari. That's something very strange from many view points of history and given today's situation of Polari, I don't think it will take that much time till we'll also find it strange. At the height of Polari, homosexual activity was illegal.
Sure. What did I say that suggested I thought or expected otherwise?
You put that in quotation marks as if I said it or something like it; I didn't. Of course there is more to being homosexual than having same-sex sex; at the very least homosexuality as understood nowadays involves (1) romantic love as well as sex and (2) a sustained preference for same-sex partners. I'm not sure whether that's all you're saying, or whether you're also saying that (e.g.) there's a whole lot of history and culture too. If the latter: I agree that there is, but I wouldn't regard that as strictly part of "homosexual identity", exactly, nor would I say it seems "obvious" in the same kind of way as the mere existence of homosexuality does (even though maybe in fact until recently there wasn't any such phenomenon).
Yes, I agree that that's a peculiar phenomenon. I think it's part of the transition from "abominable, shameful and illegal" to "accepted and normal", via "accepted and normal within a somewhat cohesive albeit marginal group".
I'm not sure whether any of what you wrote is intended as support for the claim that until recently no one regarded homosexuality as a matter of personal identity (as opposed to the weaker claim that until recently people didn't record instances of homosexuality being regarded as a matter of personal identity). If it is, I'm afraid I'm not seeing how it works. This may indicate that I'm misunderstanding exactly what meaning the term "homosexual identity" has in your original comment.
Being homosexual is today about making a choice to identify as homosexual.
I have a sustained preference to wear glaces but wearing glasses isn't part of my self identity. I don't think of myself as a glass wearer.
So. Imagine someone -- let's say a man -- who is in a long-term romantic and sexual relationship with another man, who has never felt romantically or sexually attracted to women but often has to men, but for whom "identifying as homosexual" is exactly as major a part of his life as "identifying as heterosexual" is for most heterosexual people.
Would you say that that person is, or isn't, homosexual?
I ask because it's still not clear to me which of two things you're saying is now regarded as "obvious" but formerly was largely unknown: (1) homosexual orientation -- i.e., people regarding themselves, and being regarded, as primarily attracted to others of the same sex; (2) some stronger notion of homosexual "identity" that involves (e.g.) that identity being a central part of how one consciously identifies oneself, a label that one wears with pride, etc.
I think #1 is certainly widely regarded as "obvious" now and may well have been extremely rare in the past, though for the reasons I've given above I am not yet fully convinced that it was extremely rare in the past. I think #2 is certainly a thing that happens now but I'm not sure it's regarded as "obvious" in the same way (and suspect that if "homosexual identity" is a bigger thing than "heterosexual identity" it's largely because that's what often happens with persecuted minorities, and that if -- as currently seems likely -- society moves further in the direction of treating homosexuality as no weirder or worse than lefthandedness then "homosexual identity" will become less of a big deal). So #2 may be a transient thing.
Incidentally, I see my comments here are getting some downvotes. If whoever's making them would like to tell me why, there's a better chance of fixing whatever (if anything) is broken; on rereading what I wrote, I don't see anything obviously stupid or objectionable in it.
I'm not talking about whether or not the person is homosexual but as whether the person identifies as homosexual.
Of course heterosexual identity mirrors homosexuality identity. Those are two sides of the same coin. Heterosexual is a word invented in the 20st century.
It also comes with some baggage that considers male to male physical intimacy like hand holding abnormal while that kind of physical intimacy between friends was perfectly normal before the 19st century.
In the 19st century males started to stop engaging in actions such as hand holding with male friends to signal that they aren't homosexual. There's frequently latent homophobia that get's triggered via male to male physical intimacy.
In the contact improvisation scene most people don't have that. Male to male physical intimacy is perfectly fine in that scene. There you have people who value authentic expression instead of playing out roles.
Authentic expression, or just different roles? I'm fairly sure that if I was involved in contact improvisation, it would be the latter for me. That is, these are the customs I see here, so while I am here, I will adopt these customs.
It seems to me that authentic expression is not in opposition to roles, but is orthogonal to them, just as in speech, truthfulness is orthogonal to the language being spoken.
The contact scene does value authenticity very much. If you simply go there, you might start out with trying to copy a role but you would be doing things wrong.
Authenticity is also not something that's easily faked if you dance with people with good physical perception. Being authentic changes the presence that you have.
But what you said was: "Being homosexual is today about making a choice to identify as homosexual." and that's what I was asking about. Did you actually mean "Identifying as homosexual is today about making a choice to identify as homosexual"? 'Cos if so, it's probably true but doesn't seem very interesting.
It seems to me that the idea of homosexual identity and the idea of homosexual orientation should be expected to have opposite effects on how much men with an insecure sense of their own masculinity would worry about physical contact with other men.
Empirically, it does indeed seem that the emergence of both those things has come along with a new reluctance on men's part to engage in nonsexual physical intimacy with other men; I suggest it's the idea of homosexual orientation, not the idea of some stronger sort of homosexual identity, that's more likely a cause.
(Does anyone have good estimates of (1) when men started being reluctant to engage in physical contact with other men, (2) when the idea of homosexual orientation first emerged, and (3) when the stronger notion of homosexual identity first emerged? According to the OED, the English word "homosexual" seems first to have appeared in 1892, in an English translation of Krafft-Ebing. According to Wikipedia, K-E's use of the term (in German) is anticipated by a an anti-anti-sodomy pamphlet in 1869. Of course the word and the concept may have different histories.)
On this topic, "Love Stories" by Jonathan Katz is an informative source of western social developments around sexual orientation in the 19th century. There's a particular focus on Walt Whitman (I think it was developed from a paper or lecture on the guy), but with plenty of focus on wider social mores and changes therein.
(1) I believe the turn of the century is when it started shifting in a big way in the United states, but this is a particularly finicky thing to measure and really contingent on geography. In the 1880s, it was still routine for a male visitor to a house to share his bed with other male residents in most places in the US. I am pretty sure it was unusual in by World War 2.
(2)The word was invented by what we would now think of as pro-gay activists in mid 19th century Germany, with the specific goal of creating a concept to describe people with innate, enduring preferences for both sexual and romantic couplings with the same sex. (There was also a fair bit of conflation with what we would now call transgenderism or intersex individuals, with homosexual men having a 'feminized seed'.) The concept didn't really cross the language barrier or the Atlantic ocean until about the last decade of the 19th century.
(3)The oldest real example I can think of is Plato's symposium, the myth of Aristophanes. This myth (purporting to explain the origins of romantic love) describes an ur-human race with two faces, four arms, four legs, etc. Some of these had two male or two female, and some had one of each. The gods, being wrathful blokes, cut these ur-humans down the middle, and the two halves are reborn and spend their lives looking for the rest of their body- literally, their 'other half'. Those with originally all-male or all-female bodies look for the match among members of the same sex, providing a mythological basis for a positive identity much like modern homosexuality. (Note that ancient Greeks in general didn't seem to take this view as a consensus, often outlawing homosexuality between adult men even as they endorsed homosexual pederasty.)
That's a much more major part of certain heterosexual people's life than of others, and I'm not sure where the median is (assuming you mean “most” literally).
Agreed. (I agree it varies, and I too am not sure where the median is.) But I take it that if ChristianKI is arguing #2 rather than #1 then he sees "homosexual identity" as a bigger thing than "heterosexual identity" in some sense, and my wording was intended to invite him to consider someone for whom that isn't so. I can't nail down the details because I don't know in exactly what sense Christian (conditional on his intending #2 not #1) does consider homosexual identity a bigger thing than heterosexual identity.
Um, those kinds of low status with shades of criminality subcultures have had separate dialects for quite a long time.
Note: I found the above link as the first link from Wikipedia's article on Polari.
Obvious notion that shouldn't be obvious: Getting what you want.
If you've had a good education, lived in an affluent society all your life, and learned useful social skills, the notion that goals are achievable will sound ridiculously redundant to you, barely worth pointing out in words.
Hypothesis: Poor societies do not develop game theories.
Are you talking about a sense of entitlement to what one wants, or the broader notion of goals as achievable future world-states that one can work towards?
I meant only the latter, but having the latter in your head may lead to the former.
I'm not sure which way this bears on that, but one of the ancient Greeks, I forget who, seeing ten thousand men prepared for battle, reflected that here also were gathered as many dreams and desires, and pondered how few of them would ever be achieved.
Could you expand on this? And are we using the definition of 'game theory': Strategies whose values depend on strategies of other people?
Societies conditioned to hopelessness by daily material frustration do not conceive of a systematized method for satisfying their needs.* They invent gods to plead with, and may backstab each other to ascend in power, but they will not develop an entire theory, involving other-modeling, based on the concept that goals are achievable by careful planning and effort.
*This puts me in a chicken-and-egg situation: What came first, mass-scale agriculture or plant breeding?
Machiavelli's "The Prince" is very illustrative in that regard. He spends a few pages arguing that men can indeed control his own fate instead of just being at whim to the grace of God.
Interestingly, the answer seems to be "plant breeding". Evidence of selective breeding of bottle gourd plants predates the Neolithic Revolution, for example.
In the New World, too, it wasn't uncommon for people to selectively propagate plants without cultivating them; but it's hard to say whether that predates agriculture on this side of the Atlantic.
But the satisfaction of our non-social needs in a modern environment depend much much less on other people's strategies. Today, you can obtain all your non-social needs with hardly any social interaction; living alone, working from home, buying groceries from strangers; ignoring news and local trends.
In the past, meeting non-social needs required more social support, and could be thwarted more easily by the whims of others. Think of living in a band or tribe level society!
I agree that certain sorts of planning are more modern, but these new forms seem to require less sophisticated social understanding than old method. Compare: Investing in a retirement fund, and investing in connections with the next generation because you need them to feed you in your old age.
I am not sure about that -- subsistence farming is pretty self-sufficient. Individual, separated homesteads were the norm in several cultures/time periods and given how you don't count trading with others as social interaction, someone living with his family on a distant farm (without any telecommunications) probably had much less "social support" than a modern nerd spending his time on the 'net.
The family still counts as support from other people.
The stereotype of a person who can actually manage alone is a trapper.
Do you mean someone who hunts animals with traps, or a monk of the Order of La Trappe?
Someone who hunts animals with traps.
It's more complicated than that. Checking out at the grocery store is low on social modeling. Trade in a barter economy is more social. "Trade" in the sort of gift economy that characterized most previous societies is really really social.
What time periods are we talking? My model of most historic farming practices still involves things like extended families living in same area for long periods of time ("clans"), reliance on "group work" for things like harvesting, and the common presence of a relatively close village. In many place, like ancient China, you had very nuanced communal farming systems, centered around shared access to irrigation.
Perhaps more importantly, in the absence of a strong impersonal state, all disputes would be settled in ways that required great demands on social modeling, rather than the straightforward appeal to a justice system.
I am not defending polymathwannabe's position, I do not support his assertion. My point is, rather, that I am not sure that all the traditional societies required more of social skills / participation than the modern one.
There are a whole bunch of factors at play here. For example, on the one hand in the modern society an individual is, generally speaking, more powerful in the sense of being able to achieve more by himself and that makes his need for social support less. On the other hand, traditional societies were simpler in many ways and required less cooperation and coordination than the contemporary interlinked and interdependent world.
And, of course, all ages had their social butterflies and their hermits. People differ both in their need for social interaction and in the kinds they prefer and that has always been so.
Although I raised a challenge to the original claim, I'm genuinely curious about this, and I don't feel strongly that I either agree or disagree with it. I don't mean to claim all traditional or modern societies will have any particular pattern.
I agree with your second paragraph.
I think my current best try is something like: Coordination and cooperation are qualitatively different on different scales. Working on an assembly line (or designing an assembly line, or making business deals regarding an assembly line) is, in one sense, participating in a complex and massive coordination project. But it doesn't make sense to compare this to the sort of social coordination that happens in interpersonal relationships, whose relative survival importance has generally declined.
To bring this back to the OP, my question is : Is the challenge of interpersonal coordination (or zero-sum status competition) sufficient for people to "conceive of a systematized method for satisfying their needs" that resembles the sort of thinking that we apply today?
Well, if we go to the OP, I think the claim is just not true. To give an obvious example, some early civilizations utilized massive and complicated irrigation systems. Such systems are clearly a "systematized method of satisfying their needs" which requires "careful planning and effort". I am not sure what does it have to do with interpersonal coordination. Societies have been able to organize masses of people in service of a single goal for a very long time (Stonehenge, the Pyramids, etc.)
Of course, some societies did fail at this and you can still find a few of them hunting for bush meat in the jungle.
Given these examples, it might be interesting to add to this thread with examples of ideas assumed to be new that are in fact old.
The way you raise your children is very important for their life outcomes (common, recent, obvious, and wrong).
Wisdom literature of antiquity contains the same idea.
How about the right to life: if you were deformed, Spartans would have thrown you down a cliff.
I've also read, but I'm not able presently to confirm it, that in some Thai society children did not stay with the couple that generated them, they were instead put in the hands of a community of elders which would educate them.
In the modern evaluation of historic infanticide practices, we should remember the astronomically high infant mortality rate.
Or perhaps the other way around? :)
Do you mean that we should be careful not to count cases of natural infant mortality as infanticide; or that the high infant mortality rate changes the moral calculus of infanticide; or something else?
I meant "evaluation" only in the limited sense of "understanding the mental states of someone else". I bring this up for the boring reason that people seem to forget this (most prominently in the butchered interpretation of life-expectancy at birth as being life expectancy at 18, which has only become a good approximation in modern times)
See also modern attitudes toward abortion. In various points in history both would have been considered equally acceptable (at least taking herbs believe to help induce miscariges) or equally abhorrent.
Now the Netherlands allows to "abort" a newborn with a birth defect that would make survival impossible. We've gone full circle.
I find it very worrisome that popular culture has turned to glorifying the Spartans. Screw the Spartans.
Modern culture also loves Game of Thrones where leadership is determined by who can kill the most other people.
I wouldn't worry about it. People are capable of distinguishing something as "cool" while still not really wanting to emulate a given society.
I've been thinking about Game of Thrones lately, trying to figure out why it fails to win my interest, and one of my hypotheses is that it focuses too much on the power struggle itself. In a monarchy, the stories I find the least interesting are those of the royal people themselves. I prefer the approach of e.g. The Pillars of the Earth, which dedicates far more attention to the lives of ordinary people and how the consequences of royal decisions affect their everyday lives.
300 was just a soft porn movie.