= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
army1987 comments on New vs. Business-as-Usual Future - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (42)
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.