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SanguineEmpiricist comments on Open Thread, May 4 - May 10, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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When studying history I sometimes find the hardest thing for me is wrapping my brain around how people actually thought back then. I'm so ingrained with modern Western science-based thinking that it's really hard for me to envision how people outside that box actually think. Can anyone suggest some books or articles that explain the differences in modes of thought between us modern educated Westerners and other cultures / time periods?
Edit 1: I think what I'm looking for is something like the following book, just on current vs. past cultures and/or cultures other than just Asian vs. Western:
Richard Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why.
Edit 2: As some commenters have alluded to, a lot of what confuses me about past cultures would probably also apply to non-scientific cultures today.
I have an anecdote related to the understanding of historical mindsets.
Firstly, I have spent the majority my evenings the last ten years either inside buildings or along well lit streets in cities. I.e. my description of the night sky would basically go: "it's mostly black, sometimes cloudy". Whenever I have read about celestial navigation, I've thought: "That's clever, but how did they figure out they could do that?"
Come last winter, I took part in a cabin trip. The air was very dry, and the sky was cloudless. When we arrived in the evening, more than an hour's drive from the city, it was pitch dark (you couldn't see your feet). What struck me -- the way a brick strikes one's face -- when carrying stuff from the car to the cabin (walking back and forth, turning around, etc.) was this: "Of course humans have looked at the stars since forever. The stars (and moon and planets) are the only things anyone can look at at night. My eyes are drawn to them whether I want to or not."
And: "When I turn around, the stars stay the same. Of course people could navigate by looking at them --- they should navigate by looking at them!"
And: "Of course the ancients believed the stars were stuck to a celestial sphere. To my eye, the stars appear equally distant, and they appear fixed relative to each other. So when the earth rotates, it is the celestial sphere that turns. This is a model that corresponds to my observations."
Edit to include:
This is an instance of Scott Alexander's "What universal human experience do you lack?". When I put myself in a situation which the ancients would have shared, I gained an increased appreciation of their mindset.
It's often important to appreciate that the ancients may not have been actively stupider than us, but in fact just had much less information and much less computing power to work things out with. Huge portions of human history, including much the present day, have to get filed under, "Well, they were doing their best!"
On the other hand we know a lot about mineral and vitamin deficiencies and their effects on IQ nowadays so in many cases whole cultures were on average actively stupider than us. Perhaps an explanation of the Great Man theory of history is that for a long time history was dominated by the few who happened to be lucky enough to avoid any severe nutritional deficits.