[HN Gopher] Did the early medieval era ever take place?
___________________________________________________________________
Did the early medieval era ever take place?
Author : memorable
Score : 260 points
Date : 2022-07-06 05:37 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jonn.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (jonn.substack.com)
| AlphaGeekZulu wrote:
| [...]You can buy a copy from all good bookshops, and also a bad
| one.[...]
|
| This is brilliant!
| charles_f wrote:
| > It only works if you focus solely on western Europe, where the
| decline of Rome left a nasty gap in the records. Elsewhere - in
| Tang China, Abbasid Persia and in the rest of the Islamic world,
| which only developed in the seventh century - history continued
| apace.
|
| Sounds to me like Europe moved at a relativistically faster speed
| than the rest of the world which accounts for the missing time.
| People in the 1500s just didn't have the tools to explain it yet.
| vintermann wrote:
| > no conspiracy theory has yet emerged arguing that the Empire
| never really fell at all
|
| The author needs to become familiar with the works of Philip K.
| Dick. Maybe more of a religious epiphany than a conspiracy
| theory, but he's famous for saying "the Empire never ended".
| permo-w wrote:
| well it is true that there is a central power in Rome, set up
| by Romans, exerting huge influence across the world. whether
| it's accurate to describe it as an empire is another matter
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It's not as overt as it used to be - and I don't think it's a
| singular empire anymore either - but there are still Powers
| That Be everywhere, vying for control and influence across
| multiple dimensions - military supremacy, economy,
| information, etc.
| indigochill wrote:
| But that's been going on since at least ancient Egypt so we
| might as well say the Egyptian Empire never ended if that's
| your standard.
| throwaway_4747 wrote:
| Well technically not the Egyptians, but they were a huge
| part of it in their culture. All one needs to do is look
| into Mystery Babylon and the Illumined ones. Very deep
| rabbit hole and is very interesting to learn about.
| vintermann wrote:
| I think Philip K. Dick would have been quite OK with the
| suggestion that the Empire which never ended was also the
| Egyptian one.
| brundolf wrote:
| I have to think part of what makes conspiracy theories take off
| is that they're _fun_. This one was so much fun to think about,
| that we could 've been so wrong about something so big, that it
| was right under our noses
|
| Not unlike creepypasta; injecting some mystery and wonder into
| what can otherwise be a bland, even bleak world, where it feels
| like everything's been explained away already
| verisimi wrote:
| > What if those authorities were wrong? What if they were lying,
| even? Can we be sure? Can we ever truly know?
|
| > Well: yes, we can. The Phantom Time Hypothesis is nonsense.
|
| Hmm. I disagree that we can know. We might hypothesise that this
| is the case, we might evaluate some evidence to better than other
| evidence. But "knowing" is hard - we can only know very few
| things.
|
| In my view, we can only say we know those facts in the world that
| we have personally experienced. The rest is hearsay. If you read
| something from a book, or even several books, or even a TV
| program, none of those can confirm the truth of a fact.
| retrac wrote:
| Slightly related, correlating different ancient calendars that
| weren't ever explicitly lined up at the time in historical
| records is a delightful, if esoteric topic. While there may not
| be any missing time from recent European history, it's a lot
| hazier if you go even further back.
|
| For example, Mesopotamia laid dead for 3000 years before being
| rediscovered. Their civilizations were long gone when the Greeks
| and Romans started leaving written texts. Akkad and Sumeria were
| rediscovered anew in the early 20th century, even more completely
| anew than Ancient Egypt had been a century before that. Along
| with that came uncertainty of the dates and calendars. Even
| today, we are still not sure of the dating of Old Babylon, let
| alone the first cities of Sumeria another thousand years before
| that. Today there are three competing interpretations, attempts
| to to align the day-by-day written records (often not overlapping
| from varying locations) with a constant chronology. Was Hammurabi
| born in 1810 BC, 1760 BC, 1830 BC? We have exact dates given for
| when he did things. But we don't know what those refer to!
| Similar ambiguities exist for Ancient Egypt. [1]
|
| That's not the case with the Mayan long calendar! They were
| diligent astronomers, more so than the Babylonians, if we go by
| what records they left of observed events. The body of evidence
| over the last ~30 years has mounted to become nearly irrefutable.
| There's only one possible concordance that fits, and it fits the
| date exactly. To the point it's safe to say it's historical fact
| that Pakal the Great was born 9.8.9.13.0 8 Ahaw 13 Pop (19 March
| 603 AD), acceded to the throne 9.9.2.4.8 5 Lamat 1 Mol (26 July
| 615) and died 9.12.11.5.18 6 Etz'nab 11 Yax (26 August 683).
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_ancient_Near...
| kennywinker wrote:
| One thing I know about conspiracies is it's exceedingly hard to
| talk about them without spreading them. To that effect, I now
| believe the early medieval period is a hoax.
| throwaway378037 wrote:
| I'm not saying it was a hoax. But have you ever actually SEEN
| an "early medieval period"? Thought not.
| kennywinker wrote:
| Clearly invented by big theme restaurant to sell more dinner
| theatre.
| rendall wrote:
| Those of us in the know call this powerful, shadowy cabal
| Big Theme Resta.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Cable Guy flashbacks.
| [deleted]
| wrp wrote:
| I sense an effect in need of a name: _Any discussion of a
| conspiracy theory, no matter how critical, only serves to
| spread belief in it._
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's called the Winkler effect after the great conspiracy
| spreader of the 21st century, Kenny Winkler.
|
| See wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winkler_Effect
| whitesilhouette wrote:
| Page does not exist?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Definitely not getting a 404.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| A memetic hazard?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Conspiracy theories are a conspiracy to keep people
| distracted from the TRUTH.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| This, but unironically. For example, "antisemitism is the
| socialism of fools"[1]. People believing antisemitic
| conspiracy theories that purport to explain why their lives
| suck is very good at preventing them from learning about
| the actual political economy of why their lives suck.
| Everyone knowing the actual processes that create class
| oppression would make it possible to change things. So
| conspiracy theories are actually very useful for
| maintaining the status quo.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_is_the_soci
| alism_...
| Tepix wrote:
| I believe that your theory is true and thus we're doomed to
| spread conspiracy theories ad nauseam.
| abirch wrote:
| Yes, I can't get the conspiracy theory that Michael Jordan
| was betting on basketball games, got caught, but suspending
| him out would have hurt basketball so he played baseball to
| serve out his sentence.
|
| It doesn't make sense as he should have been banned outright
| but the theory has infected my brain.
| dietrichepp wrote:
| The "phantom time hypothesis" is a central point in one of the
| better Twilight Zone (1985--or 1688, depending on who you
| believe) episodes, called Paladin of the Lost Hour. Written by
| Harlan Ellison, starring Danny Kaye and Glynn Turman. In this
| story, precisely one hour was lost during the switch to the
| Gregorian calendar.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paladin_of_the_Lost_Hour
|
| You can find it on YouTube.
| verisimi wrote:
| You found the lost hour on YT? Well done!!
| drewzero1 wrote:
| I've had lots of lost hours on YouTube, but not many of them
| (directly) involved the twilight zone.
| JPLeRouzic wrote:
| A few years ago I took biology courses at the local university.
| One emeritus professor told us that nothing happened in medicine
| between antiquity and the 1500' when smart guys (from his French
| hometown) taught the world the marvels of anatomy.
|
| I asked what he thought of what happened in the Arabic and
| Iranian regions during that time, he replied: _Nothing
| significant_.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine_in_the_medieval_Islam...
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| >I asked what he thought of what happened in the Arabic and
| Iranian regions during that time, he replied: Nothing
| significant.
|
| >https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine_in_the_medieval_Islam..
| .
|
| I mean... based on that article alone, that seems to be
| substantially true, if overly harsh? Half of it are
| "discoveries" which were lost or disregarded and had to be "re-
| discovered", and IMO those are not discoveries at all since
| they change or affect nothing. The Book of Optics seems to be
| the only notable exception in that contributions section.
| ineedasername wrote:
| There is a difference to be made between specific discoveries
| and overall progress as a world civilization.
|
| It seems strange to say that nothing was discovered simply
| because it didn't have a lasting impact. It may be accurate
| to say the Western world hadn't discovered it, or learned of
| that discover by others, or that the discovery was lost, but
| not that it wasn't actually discovered.
|
| It's the pinnacle of "Not Invented Here"
|
| Discovery and influence or impact simply aren't the same
| things.
| gilleain wrote:
| How were they lost or rediscovered?
|
| "Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (Latinized: Rhazes) (born 865)
| was one of the most versatile scientists of the Islamic
| Golden Age ... Many of his books were translated into Latin,
| and he remained one of the undisputed authorities in European
| medicine well into the 17th century."
|
| "Ibn Sina, more commonly known in west as Avicenna was a
| Persian polymath and physician of the tenth and eleventh
| centuries. He was known for his scientific works, but
| especially his writing on medicine."
|
| "Ibn Butlan, ... was an Arab physician who was active in
| Baghdad during the Islamic Golden Age.[64] He is known as an
| author of the Taqwim al-Sihhah (The Maintenance of Health
| tqwym lSH@), in the West, best known under its Latinized
| translation, Tacuinum Sanitatis (sometimes Taccuinum
| Sanitatis)."
|
| More than this, a lot of the scholarship in the Islamic world
| preserved discoveries by the Greeks:
|
| "Galen is one of the most famous scholars and physicians of
| classical antiquity. Today, the original texts of some of his
| works, and details of his biography, are lost, and are only
| known to us because they were translated into Arabic"
|
| Or did the Greeks not 'actually' discover anything, either?
| ncmncm wrote:
| Not to neglect Al-Haytham, inventor of science itself, as
| presented in his book, Optics.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| This seems incorrect. The idea of pharmacology as a separate
| discipline and profession comes from the Islamic golden
| age[1]. Optics lead to the microscope, so that's pretty big.
| The work in translating and preserving Greek medical works
| was mostly undertaken during the Islamic golden age. The
| Ottomans pioneered clean water as a source of health and the
| regulation of medicine as a profession.
|
| [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5723183/#:~:
| tex....
| belugacat wrote:
| > substantially true, if overly harsh
|
| That tracks with the professor being French.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > Half of it are "discoveries" which were lost or disregarded
| and had to be "re-discovered", and IMO those are not
| discoveries at all since they change or affect nothing.
|
| Surely the relevant consideration should be how much the
| discovery affected people at the time, not whether the
| discovery was eventually lost and needed to be re-discovered.
| Consider that all discoveries we have made could eventually
| be lost. It certainly doesn't diminish the historical
| significance of the discovery of penicillin if that discovery
| is lost in the population bottleneck caused by the 2095 A.I.
| War and only re-discovered 100 years after that.
| willis936 wrote:
| The simple narrative taught in every history class is
| demonstrably false and pedagogically classist.
|
| https://youtu.be/oDQXFNWuZj8
| mtmail wrote:
| Video shows a comedian playing piano and singing to a sock.
| Am I missing an important point?
| aaaronic wrote:
| But the sock puppet sings exactly the quoted line...
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _I asked what he thought of what happened in the Arabic and
| Iranian regions during that time, he replied:_ Nothing
| significant.
|
| If a tree in falls in the forest, and no hears it, does it
| really matter?
|
| There were many curious minds that made useful discoveries, but
| by ~1200 CE the general zeitgeist was to discourage scientific
| inquiries:
|
| *
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incoherence_of_the_Philoso...
|
| Further, I don't think there was a 'critical mass' of people
| exploring and exchanging ideas (either because of a too-small
| population, or difficulties in communication), and so if you
| did _just happen_ to make discoveries... there was no one to
| tell, and your book simply languished on a shelf somewhere
| unnoticed, as from your link:
|
| > _Ibn al-Nafis discovered that the blood in the right
| ventricle of the heart is instead carried to the left by way of
| the lungs.[70] This discovery was one of the first descriptions
| of the pulmonary circulation,[70] although his writings on the
| subject were only rediscovered in the 20th century,[71] and it
| was William Harvey 's later independent discovery which brought
| it to general attention.[72]_
|
| If a tree in falls in the forest, and no hears it, does it
| really matter?
| blowski wrote:
| If a tree falls in the forest, but no Europeans / Christians
| heard it, does it really matter?
|
| Yes. Yes it does.
| throw0101a wrote:
| Really? So Ibn al-Nafis discovered pulmonary circulation
| first:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine_in_the_medieval_Is
| lam...
|
| What difference did his discovery make in the development
| of medicine? Who built on it? Which therapies were
| invented? If his writings sat on a shelf, read by no one,
| why did they matter?
|
| Contrast that with the various works from the Muslim world
| on optics that did contribute the building of understanding
| in the greater world.
| blowski wrote:
| You link a page that mentions maybe 100 significant
| medieval Islamic researchers and innovations that had a
| huge impact on the world of medicine. But you pick out
| the only one described as having "limited impact on
| contemporaries" as evidence that it was all a waste of
| time?
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| My God, some things never die.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ_YDx2mtF0
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0rXaQzc0KA
| elsjaako wrote:
| What do you mean with "some things never die"?
|
| The first video I didn't watch fully (because it's 50 min
| long), but seems to be an analysis of Al-Ghazali's work in
| general. Are we supposed to make our own links to the point
| your parent poster was making? Maybe you can provide a
| timestamp for the relevant part?
|
| The second one is just an argument for the existence of
| god, and I don't see what it has to do with this argument.
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| The OP was saying "but by ~1200 CE the general zeitgeist
| was to discourage scientific inquiries," and that was
| something an old orientalist said about Al-Ghazali, that
| Muslims Scholars dismissed because it is nonsense. But
| thanks God it came from a Western scholar (because the
| west never listens), Frank Griffel has two important
| books about this, and one of them focuses on Al Ghazali,
| that discusses that book in a more rational (not a
| classic orientalist hateful way), and it is not just
| Frank, that theory isn't accepted anymore.
|
| The second link I find to be a little bit ironic, is that
| one of the top Christian American scholars borrow a good
| argument to respond to atheists "IN THAT BOOK" that his
| civilization (in the colonial days) used against Muslims.
| (Of course, all respect to him to be honest about the
| source)
|
| Muslim Philosophers were using Greek philosophy to deny
| some things in Islam, and Al-Ghazali proved they were
| wrong. These attacks happened from all sides all the
| time, most people are not aware of that.
|
| But what do you think Muslims should feel about that
| accusation?
|
| As I said in another comment, Europe had already won in
| empirical science, why do they need to spread these kind
| of lies?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > If a tree in falls in the forest, and no hears it, does it
| really matter?
|
| But people DID hear it, just not in big parts of Europe where
| most of "our" history is taught / comes from. It's very
| eurocentric to assume that just because "we" didn't hear
| about it, it didn't exist. Civilization was miles ahead
| outside of Europe for a long time.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| Is it a case here that "we" just didn't hear about it, or
| that the impact of the knowledge never made it outside the
| community/region. Did it matter to the people living it?
| Seems like absolutely yes. Did it endure beyond that
| community or region? Maybe they do not mean "insignificant"
| altogether and simply mean insignificant within the context
| of the ideas and knowledge that endured and were built upon
| to arrive where we are?
|
| I'm genuinely curious as I feel like this touches on
| something broader. I think about this with literature and
| poetry. There's a wonderful effect as you read through time
| where there are various dialogues happening. People sort of
| reacting to each other and speaking across generations and
| cultures. Ginsberg reads differently when you understand
| his relationship with the Greek epics and other poets
| before him. I guess my point is, and I may have bungled it
| spectacularly and just get told I'm an ass, something might
| not be insignificant unless evaluated as part of a larger
| context and historic dialog.
|
| edit: removed my ignorant line about the book of optics.
| gilleain wrote:
| > The wiki seems to indicate not except the book of
| optics?
|
| Not sure how you reached that conclusion. Perhaps it
| would be helpful to search for 'Latin' in that wiki page.
| There's a reason why so many of these Islamic figures had
| Latinised names - Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi ->
| 'Rhazes' or Ibn al-Haytham -> 'Al-hazen'. Their works, as
| with other scholars, were translated into Latin so that
| they could be read in Europe.
|
| There's a reason why the word 'Algorithm' starts with
| 'Al' - the etymology comes from the name 'Muhammad ibn
| Musa al-Khwarizmi'.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm#History
| libraryatnight wrote:
| Yeah that's a bad read on my part - sorry for that.
| Removed that bit :) And thank you for the information!
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Civilization was miles ahead outside of Europe for a
| long time._
|
| Yes, and what happened to it? It withered after
| flourishing. Almost all of discoveries made anywhere else
| in the world were _meaningless_ because they ended up not
| changing anything.
|
| Astronomy was practiced in all the major civilizations. The
| telescope _just happened_ to be invented in Europe in
| ~1600, and it brought to Mughal India and Imperial China
| (and spread by 'osmosis' to the Ottomans): _they were not
| interested in it_.
|
| Certain _individuals_ took it up, but _as a whole_ those
| other societies disregarded it.
| robonerd wrote:
| > _Certain individuals took it up, but as a whole those
| other societies disregarded it._
|
| Just like today? How many people today own a telescope?
| It's a niche tool useful to some but irrelevant to most.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Indeed, and if not for the Enlightenment it would still be.
| That's what made room for science on a much larger scale
| and in contradiction with lots of things that were
| considered established knowledge than ever before. The
| power of science is such that a resource poor part of the
| world managed to overtake the rest in many ways in a couple
| of centuries.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Not only resource-poor, but also a cultural backwater
| burdened with a kind of religious extremism foreign to
| much of the rest of the world.
| mgaunard wrote:
| Did you conveniently ignore Islam?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Cultural backwater right up to that point, and religious
| extremist right up to that point. Many countries/regions
| never went through such a phase and that is what allowed
| Europe to do what it did, it essentially leapfrogged from
| the dark ages to modernity in an extremely short span of
| time while elsewhere not much changed. It also enabled a
| period of expansionism and engendered some of the worst
| atrocities committed by mankind today, but the scientific
| and cultural progress can not be denied.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Why do you add the 'today' caveat? I think you again need
| to add an asterix to 'some of the worst atrocities
| committed' to instead be commonly recorded or the 'if the
| tree fell' analogy. What did the sacrifice culture of the
| Aztecs require to be sustained? Many many peoples of
| Europe were wiped from the earth (Old Prussians as an
| easy example). It wasn't about killing non-Europeans as
| Europeans were just as happy to genocide Europeans. How
| many many black slaves on whole went to China/East but
| because they used castration a permanent population was
| never established. Did this result in more or less
| suffering than slavery on the eastern seaboard of the
| Americas? Don't forget for a thousand years before
| Europeans went international slave hunting Europeans were
| the hunted (to the point they have mythical an anti-Santa
| that slave hunts for little European boys and girls). How
| many struggles like the Sioux almost genociding the Crow
| happened in the Americas that we don't know about? We
| have the same principle as being discussed happen in
| history discussions, only they are used to make European
| violence look like an outlier that it might not have
| been.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Because I don't think we've seen the worst yet.
| Balero wrote:
| "If a tree falls in someone else's forest, and I don't hear
| it, do I even care." I think sums it a bit more accurately.
| makomk wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the point of the comment that you're
| replying to is that, even in the non-European parts of the
| world where things like this were discovered, those
| discoveries were lost and forgotten and the significance of
| those discoveries only became obvious after they were
| rediscovered in Europe once society was structured in a way
| that lead to people communicating and building on them.
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18822953/
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| What else of that calibre?
| mcguire wrote:
| To disprove a universally quantified statement, only a
| single counter-example is necessary.
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| You are missing the point, I am not trying to say that
| Muslims achieved more in empirical science than Europe, I
| would be an idiot to suggest that. I am saying, it is
| pathetic for a winner to feel the need to say a lot of
| nonsensical stuff about other people.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| That's harsh, I don't know much on the subject but I assume
| Wikipedia is missing a lot or at-least glosses over it? It
| almost seems impossible they'd have accomplished so little in
| that field.
| chx wrote:
| > for example, a coalition of rulers around the turn of the
| second millennium - Pope Sylvester II, Holy Roman Emperor Otto
| III and Byzantine Emperor Constantine V, say - who conspired to
| fix the calendar
|
| Aside from the nations the author already mentioned we have the
| Korchak culture (sixth and seventh century) and later the Szeligi
| culture (situated in roughly present day Ukraine and Poland,
| respectively) and faking an archeological culture is fairly
| impossible even today. Yes there were quite a few others in the
| "early Slavs" era and area but I mention these two because of the
| amount of findings we have for them.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| This is one of my favorite stupid conspiracies and one that a lot
| of people havnt heard of.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Ha, amateurs. Look at the work of a _professional_ (that is, he
| made it his source of income) conspiracy theorist:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_chronology_(Fomenko)
| the_only_law wrote:
| > The conspiracy theory further proposes that world history
| prior to AD 1600 has been widely falsified to suit the
| interests of a number of different conspirators including the
| Vatican, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Russian House of
| Romanov, all working to obscure the "true" history of the world
| centered around a global empire called the "Russian Horde".
|
| Sounds like he just played too much eu4.
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| That's actually what I thought the article was about. Odd that
| there wasn't any mention of it.
| golergka wrote:
| He is actually a quite well-known and professional
| mathematician. Too bad it's not what he's known for anymore.
| andrewla wrote:
| Some of the New Chronology is delightfully whacky. In
| particular I love the idea of historical events documented by
| independent sources result in appearing to be two or more
| events that cause the timeline to be expanded. One example is
| that Suleiman the Magnificent and Solomon were the same person,
| just documented from two different perspectives. And thus the
| Hagia Sofia and Solomon's Temple are the same building.
|
| His criticisms of radiocarbon dating are interesting (while not
| completely supportive of his hypothesis). But it is an
| interesting rabbit hole to dig into; the relationship between
| radiocarbon dating and dendrochronology, and the attempt to get
| an accurate historical record of carbon isotopic composition
| over the last couple of thousand years is a surprisingly
| difficult problem, and in many cases has circular dependencies
| on known ages of artifacts.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Yeah, this stuff is whacky but really fun to read about. Even
| though most of it is surely wrong it leads to all sorts of
| fascinating rabbit holes.
|
| I wrote a three part series where I summarize some of the
| more interesting pseudo-history theories that are out there:
|
| https://blog.plan99.net/meta-historical-conspiracies-
| part-1-...
|
| https://blog.plan99.net/meta-historical-conspiracies-
| part-2-...
|
| https://blog.plan99.net/meta-historical-conspiracies-
| part-3-...
|
| PTH doesn't really make an appearance because it's actually
| one of the less interesting theories. I don't believe these,
| but the facts the authors bring up to argue for their
| position are always interesting to learn about. Part 3
| discusses some of the issues with 'scientific' dating methods
| and covers the circularity problem you discuss.
| Semiapies wrote:
| Beat me to it; the New Chronology is wonderfully bonkers.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Related, but Tartaria is another fun rabbit hole to wander
| down.
| Semiapies wrote:
| Oh, wow. That is...a Hell of a thing. Thanks for the tip!
| lukeqsee wrote:
| Clever presentation of the basics of how conspiracy theories
| begin, are substantiated, and then can (often) be refuted by
| zooming out and regaining a little perspective.
| blowski wrote:
| Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco is a fantastic novel for
| doing this. You find yourself sucked right into the conspiracy,
| only for him to then reveal the facts that destroy it.
|
| There's a subplot on how the number of letters in a document
| proves the Templars possession of the Holy Grail. A character
| then shows how a random shopping list follows a similar
| pattern.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| One of the most memorable lines from the novel for me was
| something along the lines of "if you lend too much credence
| to symbolism, you end up believing the male penis is only
| there as a phallic symbol" (said by the main character's
| girlfriend, if I remember correctly).
|
| It's also fun to read Umberto Eco's take on Dan Brown and his
| Da Vinci's Code. Eco was joking that he feels he should get
| some credit for the whole thing, as Dan Brown is so clearly
| just a character from Foucault's Pendulum.
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| Aw man, this should have had a spoiler warning. Could be a
| good feature for HN.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Save yourself a step and read the Illuminatus! trilogy first.
|
| There's a clear lineage of bonkers conspiracy theories
| getting more popularly approachable from Illuminatus! to
| Foucault's Pendulum to Dan Brown.
| blowski wrote:
| The Illuminatus trilogy is pretty avant garde in style,
| whereas Foucault's Pendulum is fairly standard prose.
| Really depends on what type of book you want.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Yes, and Foucault's pendulum is very literary research
| oriented (long expositions of guys surfing their
| zettelkasten), where Dan Brown's books are standard pop
| fiction action fare.
|
| Every 15 years or so, we get a new, more popularly
| approachable entry in the "Templars/Illuminati are real"
| mystery thriller genre. We're about due another one, but
| I'll bet I missed it because it's in the Young Adult
| Fiction section.
| corsac wrote:
| > can (often) be refuted by zooming out and regaining a little
| perspective.
|
| I think this is exactly why it is so maddeningly hard to engage
| critically with those who espouse these theories - they keep an
| 'authoritative' death-grip on the frame.
| rado wrote:
| Cool movie idea.
| ideamotor wrote:
| "no conspiracy theory has yet emerged arguing that the Empire
| never really fell at all"
|
| Really, no Philip K Dick VALIS mention? The book that repeats
| "the empire never ended" and argues that much of the time between
| now and the was "false?"
|
| See also: https://philipdick.com/resources/miscellaneous/the-
| religious....
| Finnucane wrote:
| Clearly this guy has not seen the pink beam of light.
| bpiche wrote:
| When I read it it didn't seem like it argued that the time
| between now and then was 'false'. VALIS argues that the time
| and events between now and then are constantly being
| 'laminated' (PKD's term) onto the long now. Iirc Horselover Fat
| develops the ability to see the layers of history laminated
| onto the present and concludes that the Empire never ended.
| Caveat lector, I haven't read the other two books in the VALIS
| trilogy.
| gpderetta wrote:
| first thing that came to my mind as well. The missing time is
| also on-topic.
| x86x87 wrote:
| PKD does not argue that the actual roman empire did not fell.
| It's most around the idea of the empire and the existence of an
| entity that continuously makes our life miserable. Keeping us
| closed in a metaphorical black iron prison. From that POV the
| empire never ended - even worse: nowadays we have multiple
| flavours of it.
| jrumbut wrote:
| Tongue firmly planted in cheek but...
|
| There's a guy in Rome still holding one of the Roman emperors'
| titles, pontifex maximus (held by some of them anyway).
|
| Meanwhile, there's a powerful army marching all over the world
| with an eagle standard and a commander-in-chief who recognizes
| the Roman guy's authority in some matters but not others. He's
| trying to deal with rising food and oil prices while organizing
| resistance to an invader from the east and warding off a
| domestic usurper.
|
| When did the Roman empire fall again?
| Perceval wrote:
| https://twitter.com/publicanthony/status/1542922977481728000
| dncornholio wrote:
| I reckon there were people who lived under different empires and
| kings, who did not notice one thing.
| corsac wrote:
| > It takes a bunch of 'facts' - some of which are accurate but
| entirely explicable, some of which are just plain wrong - and
| knits them together into an ostensibly compelling narrative.
|
| I feel a need to add that conspiracy theorists deserve no
| grudging credit for "ingeniously" pulling this off, any more than
| sociopaths deserve credit for "ingeniously" manipulating people.
| With little enough intellectual integrity, any dope can do it.
|
| As an off-topic aside, did you know that the Wuchang Uprising (a
| key 1911 anti-Qing rebellion in _Wuhan_ ) had a coronavirus on
| its flag?[0] It's worth asking why the media never reported on
| it, and what shadowy Tongmenghui revolutionaries are behind the
| events of the past few years.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuchang_Uprising#/media/File:C...
| headsoup wrote:
| If we find out that one of the lab technicians in Wuhan that
| handled the viruses was a blood descendant of the Wuchang,
| well... :D
| midislack wrote:
| Conspiracy theories like this are great fun. They also cause
| certain people to pop out of the woodwork and reveal themselves
| in interesting ways. If you're fishing for certain kinds of deep
| sea critters there is no better bait.
| kochikame wrote:
| Well, I mean, in the sense that basically all historical ages are
| invented by people long after that time and would not have been
| recognized as such by the people who lived through it, then, no.
|
| The early moderns didn't know they were in early modernity. The
| fall of the Roman Empire was constructed as a narrative long
| after the facts became clear. We don't know what age we are
| living in right now that will someday be named by future
| historians (probably as the "last bit before the climate went
| tits up" or words to that effect)
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Imagine thinking there will be future historians.
|
| The crows will have an interesting time explaining the
| worldwide ash horizon in the soil a million years from now,
| though.
| int_19h wrote:
| For more on how what we _now_ term "the fall of the empire"
| manifested itself to common citizens at the time:
|
| https://acoup.blog/category/collections/fall-of-rome/
| closedloop129 wrote:
| >The Late Latin adjective modernus, a derivation from the
| adverb modo "presently, just now", is attested from the 5th
| century, at first in the context of distinguishing the
| Christian era from the pagan era. In the 6th century,
| Cassiodorus appears to have been the first writer to use
| modernus "modern" regularly to refer to his own age.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernity#Etymology
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >"last bit before the climate went tits up"
|
| indeed, Great tits could be wiped out by climate change in the
| near future https://nypost.com/2020/11/11/great-tits-could-be-
| wiped-out-... (first line: We mean the birds, dirtbags.)
| permo-w wrote:
| the Victorians could have made a fairly safe bet that they were
| living in the era of Victoria
| samatman wrote:
| > _no conspiracy theory has yet emerged arguing that the Empire
| never really fell at all_
|
| "To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement [...]
| Whoever defeats the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates
| like a virus [...] thereby it becomes its enemies [...] the
| Empire never ended." --Philip K. Dick aka Horselover Fat
|
| Seriously, if the author is into weird conspiratorial thinking,
| the late work of PKD is a must.
| toast0 wrote:
| Time began January 1, 1970 UTC. Anything before then didn't
| really happen.
| bhaak wrote:
| Time is signed though so time actually began at
| 1901-12-13T20:45:52Z.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Unless your time oracle is NTP in which case time is unsigned
| starting in 1900.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| On some systems errno is not set by a failed call to time()
| in which case the only way to check for an error is if the
| returned value is (time_t)-1 which makes it impossible to
| unambiguously represent 1 second before the epoch.
| bregma wrote:
| Time is not guaranteed to be signed. W Hat you have there is
| undefined behaviour.
| fluoridation wrote:
| Surely it's unspecified behavior, at worst.
| bregma wrote:
| The signedness of time_t is unspecified. If you rely on
| it being signed and overflowing so it goes back to before
| January 01, 1970, well, that's living on the edge....
| Karellen wrote:
| It's probably more likely to be _implementation-defined
| behaviour_ (as with the signedness of 'char') rather than
| _undefined behaviour_.
|
| The third alternative being _unspecified behaviour_ - see
| comp.lang.c FAQ 11.33 for more info:
| https://c-faq.com/ansi/undef.html
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| You have to find this joke on HN :)
| blowski wrote:
| And will end 19 January 2038 03:14:07 UTC.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| If there is nothing outside that range, then what do you do
| with 0x80000000? Reject it outright?
| blowski wrote:
| Send it to the very fires of hell from whence it came. Or
| use 64 bits to store timestamps.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Well, 64 bit timestamps also have that number...
| Tepix wrote:
| Which number? 2038? Because that's what you are replying
| to.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| 0x80000000, the number I asked what to do about, if it's
| neither in the past nor in the future (along with all
| other numbers between it and 0xFFFFFFFF). 0x80000000 is
| the number they said to send to hell "or" use 64 bits to
| store.
|
| But storing it in 64 bits still leaves you with the same
| number waiting for interpretation. (Possibly two numbers
| depending on sign extension settings.) So do you still
| need to send it to hell, or what happens differently?
| cercatrova wrote:
| Nit, whence already means "from where," saying from
| whence is saying "from from where"
| blowski wrote:
| https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-fro2.htm
|
| > I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence
| cometh my help. (Psalm 121:1)
|
| If the idiom is correct enough for the King James Bible,
| it's good enough for me as a Hacker News comment.
| samatman wrote:
| Johnson's Dictionary called 'from whence' "A vi[c]ious
| mode of speech", so this is a very old argument!
| blowski wrote:
| I normally try to irritate pedants, that criticise
| everything, by finding more not less mistakes, such as
| lots of prepositions to end my sentences with.
| cercatrova wrote:
| Another nit, there was never a mistake with ending
| sentences with prepositions, it comes from Latin where
| you can't do that but John Dryden in the 1600s wanted to
| bring that to English, but no one really cared.
|
| Ironic, isn't it? (I say this jokingly, I get your
| irritation with pedants, sometimes I feel the same way.)
| cercatrova wrote:
| It's not good enough for me though, won't you think of
| your poor reader? /s
| shakna wrote:
| With that argument coming from the 13th Century, I'd say
| that the democratic nature of English has killed it. So
| to be more pedantic, the 'from' is optional. Not
| required, but neither is it wrong.
| Tepix wrote:
| 64bit? Not so fast! We could just add a flag to signify
| "time after 2038" and "time before 1901". That would give
| us another 68 years into the future and the past. Doesn't
| that seeme like a great solution? /s
| fendy3002 wrote:
| Ha, make it multiplicative, so each number is 68 years.
| xorcist wrote:
| Ah! The infamous 33 bit timestamps!
| kuschku wrote:
| Ahhh, the good old IPv4+ solution
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Have you seen how ext4 stores timestamps?
|
| They borrowed 2 bits off the nanoseconds field to do
| basically that.
| mgaunard wrote:
| People usually use 64-bit timestamps, but for higher
| resolution.
|
| For example, nanoseconds. That's about up to 2500 or so?
| twic wrote:
| No, we'll just to back to the start and live through the
| 1970s again.
| blowski wrote:
| Makes me think of the TV show Life on Mars.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| I've been consuming a lot of older American pop culture
| recently and one thing that struck me was the vast
| difference in tone the 70s had.
|
| As a child of 90s (technically born in the 80s) I had a
| sense of the differences between 80s culture and 90s
| culture. I also mentally had some sense that the 50s were a
| different time, but my brain lumped the 60s and 70s
| together.
|
| But going back and reading books, watching TV shows, and
| listening to music from both eras there's a notable and
| stark contrast between the two decades.
|
| Frankly I have to say that the 70s are far and away my
| least favorite era of American popular culture. It doesn't
| fit my tastes at all, to the point where it almost feels
| like a 'lost decade' to me.
|
| In short, I'd dread having to live through it if we were to
| revert.
| mgaunard wrote:
| I have about the same age as you (maybe a bit older) yet
| I don't share any of those feelings.
|
| If anything 70s music is some of my favourite.
| loudmax wrote:
| Looking forward to seeing Led Zeppelin concert. That's if
| my parents will allow me go.
| draw_down wrote:
| antognini wrote:
| The point about the Gregorian calendar being off by only 10 days
| instead of the expected 13 is especially interesting because it's
| easy to see how you could regard it as a sort of "smoking gun" of
| the Phantom Time Hypothesis. The supposed lack of archaeological
| evidence is suggestive, but can be pretty easily dismissed with
| "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." But here you
| have a prediction that about 300 years are missing and this would
| directly explain the observed discrepancy in the drift of the
| calendar.
|
| As the author points out the problem is resolved because the
| Gregorian calendar reform only intended to reset the calendar
| back to the time of the Council of Nicaea, not the date when the
| Julian calendar was originally adopted.
|
| It's a neat example of how a theory's smoking gun can sometimes
| have an entirely unrelated explanation and a warning that even
| when you think you've found conclusive proof, it's important to
| keep digging.
| jack_pp wrote:
| Absence of evidence actually is (weak) evidence of absence.
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mnS2WYLCGJP2kQkRn/absence-of...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > (weak)
|
| It's actually as strong as your expectation of the evidence
| being there. If you are absolute sure of the evidence, look,
| and don't find anything, this is very strong evidence of the
| absence.
|
| But well, on this case the absence is quite expected too.
| alxlaz wrote:
| There is no absence of evidence, not by a long shot. There
| are fewer written records in the traditional sense (books,
| letters, legal documents concerning things like transfer of
| property) but there is no shortage of inscriptions on various
| sorts of things, for example -- not to mention every other
| kind of historical evidence and, of course, the fact that
| some aspects of early medieval Western chronology can be
| cross-checked against contemporary sources in North Africa
| and the Middle East. We call it "the Dark Age" by comparison
| with, say, Late Antiquity, but even so, we have vastly more
| evidence about what happened in this age in Western Europe
| than we have about what happened in various ages of Antiquity
| all over the place, and no one thins those were made up.
|
| As for the article you linked to, that kind of probabilistic
| approach sort of works for recent events. Applying it to
| things that happened a long time ago, where the presence or
| absence of evidence is correlated with a whole lot of other
| things, from court historians making shit up to cows tripping
| up over a lamp light and burning whole cities, is a pretty
| futile exercise.
| groffee wrote:
| > There are fewer written records in the traditional sense
|
| But still more written than you could ever hope to read in
| your lifetime.
| croes wrote:
| Is there such thing as weak evidence?
| dalbasal wrote:
| Sort of.. at least there is in the scientific tradition.
|
| Your theory predicting reality is generally weak evidence.
| It opens your theory to invalidation if the prediction
| fails, but does not rule out hypothetical alternative
| theories that also make the same prediction.
| samatman wrote:
| Theories aren't evidence at all, what could you mean by
| this?
| pessimizer wrote:
| A particular theory is a glue potentially connecting some
| number of observations. The observations + theory are
| evidence.
|
| The reason that a messy pool of blood on the floor is
| evidence of violence is the theory that the blood came
| out of a person in a messy way.
| jstanley wrote:
| Evidence that irrefutably proves something is very strong
| evidence.
|
| Evidence that kind of points towards something, but
| inconclusively, is weak evidence.
|
| For example, if 100 witnesses saw the accused murder the
| victim, and they're all credible, and they tell
| corroborating stories, that's pretty strong evidence.
|
| If 1 person thinks he saw the accused murder the victim,
| from the other side of a car park, but he has bad eyesight
| anyway and it was dark and raining, then that's weak
| evidence. It's not _nothing_ , it's still _evidence_ , but
| it is weak.
| golergka wrote:
| If you're bayesian.
| rootsudo wrote:
| Wouldn't that mean the quantity vs quality of
| conspiracies though?
| samatman wrote:
| This seems to be equivalent to asking if there is any such
| thing as strength of evidence at all, and so yes, of
| course. The evidence that 100mg of cyanide will kill you is
| very strong, the evidence that seed oils cause inflammation
| is weak, even though there's a lot of it.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| For me, the thing that kills the theory for me is the idea
| that, _in the middle of western Europe being about as
| politically stable and integrated as modern Afghanistan_ , all
| the warlords pillaging the country to kill each other were able
| to not only unanimously agree on "let's change the year to a
| nice round number", but were also able to coordinate this
| without leaving _any_ historical records of it.
|
| Here's the thing about conspiracies: they have a shelf life.
| The amount of time you can keep a conspiracy secret is bounded
| by the number of conspirators, how well you can get them to
| shut up, and how long it has been since the conspiracy
| occurred. You can take a secret only you know to your grave,
| but work in a group of ten and _someone_ will confess before
| their death. Bring in hundreds or thousands and the conspiracy
| will be blown open accidentally before you can even execute on
| it.
|
| Now think of how many people had to cooperate to change
| something as simple and fundamental as the passage of recorded
| history. Hell, forget the fact that these were all angry,
| violent warlords; just think of how many scribes, monks, and
| bureaucrats would all have to remember to write 1000 instead of
| 736 whenever they wrote a date. It only takes one slip-up to
| reveal the fraud to archaeologists in the far future, even if
| they all agreed that they wanted to live in the nice round-
| number millennium. And nobody would be trying to protect
| against that because nobody would be thinking, "how do we hide
| this from 21st century archaeologists trying to discover our
| time crimes?"
| User23 wrote:
| > Here's the thing about conspiracies: they have a shelf
| life. The amount of time you can keep a conspiracy secret is
| bounded by the number of conspirators, how well you can get
| them to shut up, and how long it has been since the
| conspiracy occurred. You can take a secret only you know to
| your grave, but work in a group of ten and someone will
| confess before their death.
|
| As you effectively prove, any long running conspiracy must
| have tools to discredit defectors. I'm willing to bet dollars
| to donuts that if, hypothetically, some WEF flunky went on
| twitter and started posting about a global depopulation
| conspiracy, that the prestige media would either ignore or
| deny ("debunk") it and any alternative sources would be
| smeared and delegitimized somehow.
|
| One possible tool for discrediting tales of one's real
| conspiracy would be spreading stories of various fake
| conspiracies and then lumping them all together as nonsense.
| synu wrote:
| This only works as long as the defectors have no evidence,
| right? That seems like it would be harder to guarantee.
| User23 wrote:
| So long as the defectors have no _credible_ evidence.
| Evidence and people both are observably fairly easily
| discredited for the majority of the population.
| synu wrote:
| Isn't that a good thing? I can deliver a bunch of non-
| credible evidence for basically anything I make up. It's
| unfortunate if a person is blowing a whistle on something
| real but can't actually prove it, but the alternative is
| just believing whatever fits your biases. You end up with
| those alternative news sites where everyone just believes
| everything they hear and there are vast interconnected
| conspiracies running everything.
| ospzfmbbzr wrote:
| Non-credible is totally subjective. You are always taking
| someones word unless you check for yourself. Who do you
| believe? It's not the alternative it's the way things
| are.
|
| Evidence to the contrary doesn't discredit anything in
| the minds of most people... They are more likely to
| simply attack the person putting forth the evidence for
| causing them cognitive dissonance migraines.
| synu wrote:
| Credibility of evidence is not totally subjective. I (and
| you, and anyone) can personally prove in a variety of
| ways that the earth is not flat, but still many people
| believe there is a conspiracy that the earth is round.
|
| Of course they all tell each other that all facts are
| subjective anyway and wouldn't it be cool and interesting
| if you were in on a big secret and everyone else except
| you and your new friends were sheep.. oh and by the way
| did you know that it's actually lizard people who started
| the idea that the earth was round? Doesn't that feel
| right and would explain why your life hasn't turned out
| the way you wanted? And so on.
|
| In this case I'm explicitly talking about making up non-
| credible evidence. If everything is subjective then
| whatever I made up is as good as anything else, I just
| need to tune it to your biases to make it feel as truthy
| as possible. But if you believe me then you'll start to
| have problems when you need things to actually be true
| (like running a space program or military for example).
| ospzfmbbzr wrote:
| Or no ability to speak -- like Neo.
| ospzfmbbzr wrote:
| Muddy the waters... then you label anyone who notices as a
| water purist, and tell the dumb ones that the water purists
| are the ones who muddied the waters.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The problem with conspiracy _theories_ is that they tend to
| be less useful as a way to sus out actual abuses of power
| and more useful as an ink blot test. People see what they
| _want_ to see, because humans are creatures of fiction that
| can 't stand the thought of living in an objective reality
| where coincidences are just coincidences and the most
| boring explanation is probably true.
|
| The World Economic Forum is just a bog-standard capitalist
| outfit. Their more out-there views are not particularly
| divorced from the rentier capitalism of the New Gilded Age.
| To be unambiguous about it, that means a heady mix of
| international megacorporations, uncensored corporate
| speech[0], copyright maximalism, and the Brussels
| Effect[1]. The Occam's Razor explanation for the WEF is
| that greedy corporations that want to maximize profits are
| going to be greedy and profit-maximizing - in other words,
| it's the "capitalist agenda".
|
| But if you have particular kinds of brainworms[2], you're
| going to ignore the greed that you don't want to talk about
| and start making up reasons for their actions wholly
| unrelated to what they actually think. For example, if you
| think white people are being "replaced", then you'll look
| past the obvious explanation and into the fringes of the
| ink blots, and come back thinking that the WEF was created
| by the powerless to oppress the powerful with... power they
| don't have.
|
| In cases where conspiracies have _actually_ tried to
| discredit defectors, it usually fails. In fact, it fails so
| hard that it becomes a meme, like "Russia denies" or "I
| did not have sexual relations[3] with that woman". Most
| actual conspiracies are just not that well thought out[4]
| enough for this to work, while the people writing the
| conspiracy theories are actually _overthinking_ things.
|
| What _actually_ kills conspiracy theories is conflicting
| information - i.e. the conspiracy theory not actually
| lining up with reality. There will always be people who
| still buy it, though, because conspiracy theories that are
| not true always substitute veracity with narrative
| salience. In fact, sometimes being widely known to be false
| _benefits_ the conspiracy theory, because now you can work
| the debunking of obvious lies into your conspiracy
| narrative and make it more salient than ever. And there 's
| no actual conspiracy on the debunking side, either. You are
| not being smeared by the media because they're all in on
| trying to hide the truth - remember, coordination leaves
| evidence. You are being smeared by the media because you
| are on the side of narrative fiction.
|
| [0] Sometimes complained about under the banner of "money
| is not speech"
|
| [1] The process by which treaties agreed to by rich
| countries tie the hands of non-party countries by way of
| tolerance.
|
| [2] Typically the "50s red scare" strain of anticommunism
|
| [3] it's only sex if the balls are touching - Bill Clinton
|
| [4] Reason being that being in a position of power gives
| you symptoms of brain damage. In order to implement a
| successful conspiracy you need power, and that power will
| blunt your reasoning over time.
| [deleted]
| zmgsabst wrote:
| > One possible tool for discrediting tales of one's real
| conspiracy would be spreading stories of various fake
| conspiracies and then lumping them all together as
| nonsense.
|
| To which you replied with a strawman:
|
| > For example, if you think white people are being
| "replaced", then you'll look past the obvious explanation
| and into the fringes of the ink blots, and come back
| thinking that the WEF was created by the powerless to
| oppress the powerful with... power they don't have.
|
| ...in a very detailed comment trying to portray the WEF
| as not a cabal subverting democracy with oligarchical
| acts.
|
| I think it's interesting that your comment can be
| understood as what the GP was discussing in action.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > ...in a very detailed comment trying to portray the WEF
| as not a cabal subverting democracy with oligarchical
| acts.
|
| I'm not sure how you got that from GP's comment, but they
| were saying the exact opposite about the WEF: it is just
| a way for greedy corporations to maximize profit by co-
| opting governments and international institutions to do
| their bidding. That's what they meant by "corporate free
| speech" and the Brussels effect.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| > it is just a way for greedy corporations to maximize
| profit by co-opting governments and international
| institutions to do their bidding
|
| Except we know that's not true, eg, in the case of
| pushing DIE which has catastrophically reduced profits in
| Disney, WarnerMedia, and Netflix. And more broadly ESG
| scores, which have led to the ridiculous virtue signaling
| we see.
|
| The "boring" explanation is that it's a cabal by the
| people involved to implement their vision -- not that
| there's some magic corporation that's always maximizing
| its value through its drone agents. That's just as much a
| fiction as anything else.
|
| To portray the WEF as "those greedy corporations!"
| minimizes the nature of what people there are doing by
| creating fictional entities who are the _real_ actors.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Rich people pushing a liberal agenda are still rich
| people. The "capitalist agenda" I mentioned in my prior
| comment still applies and supersedes the virtue
| signaling.
|
| For example, Bill Gates, the EU, and the MPAA all stepped
| in to tell President Biden to get lost when he proposed
| suspending COVID-19 vaccine patents. They worked
| tirelessly to water down and chip away at every WHO
| vaccine program that might have meant them either having
| to negotiate a rate or not enforce patents in certain
| countries. If this was just about pushing a liberal or
| left-ish agenda at the _expense_ of profits, they would
| have just licensed the patents at zero cost to anyone in
| Africa with an mRNA printer[0], and then lobby the
| government to suspend patent protection so the laggards
| couldn 't get a competitive advantage with a proprietary
| vaccine.
|
| Things like ESG scores are offered because people don't
| want to invest in oil companies and investment brokers
| can make more money if they offer that option to people
| who would otherwise not have invested in the stock
| market. This is free-market capitalism working "as
| intended" - people see the long-term risks of bad
| environmental management and divest themselves from it.
|
| I have no idea what "DIE" means or how it has
| catastrophically hurt Disney profits.
|
| [0] (aggressively pirated grunge metal plays in the
| background)
|
| You wouldn't steal a car. You wouldn't steal a handbag.
|
| Downloading COVID-19 vaccines is stealing.
| User23 wrote:
| > humans are creatures of fiction that can't stand the
| thought of living in an objective reality where
| coincidences are just coincidences and the most boring
| explanation is probably true.
|
| Alternately, they can't stand living in an objective
| reality where powerful people are systematically up to
| bad things and they're helpless to do anything about it.
| Given the response to the comment you're replying to,
| even the possibility that there might be any kind of
| conspiracies is displeasing to many.
|
| As for the most boring explanation probably being true,
| well that would be a terrible heuristic to use for any of
| the hard sciences. I don't see why it would be the case
| for the considerably more complex and chaotic social
| sciences.
|
| > The World Economic Forum is just a bog-standard
| capitalist outfit.
|
| That's certainly what the prestige media will tell you!
| In any event I just tossed it out there as an example.
|
| > Typically the "50s red scare" strain of anticommunism
|
| You may want to pick another example, given that there
| were in fact communist sympathizers in the State
| Department at the time.
| XorNot wrote:
| Sympathisers aren't implicitly traitors, and the idea
| that there was going to be one global communism, with
| power centred in Moscow was thoroughly discredited by
| history since.
| User23 wrote:
| You're giving a wonderful example of the phenomenon I'm
| discussing. You learned, probably in grade school, about
| McCarthyism and whatnot and now you're ironclad convinced
| the whole thing was a paranoid fantasy conspiracy theory
| or if there is any truth to it at all that it was
| insignificant. Meanwhile, there are a large number of
| known communist traitors and spies from the era[1] and
| probably many more that weren't discovered. It's been the
| better part of three decades since the Venona Papers were
| declassified. This is ironclad history[2].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Eastern_Bloc_ag
| ents_in...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_in_th
| e_Venon...
| ornxka wrote:
| >I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it
| to me. How? Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus
| raised from the dead, then they proclaimed that truth for 40
| years, never once denying it. Every one was beaten, tortured,
| stoned and put in prison. They would not have endured that if
| it weren't true. Watergate embroiled 12 of the most powerful
| men in the world-and they couldn't keep a lie for three
| weeks. You're telling me 12 apostles could keep a lie for 40
| years? Absolutely impossible.
|
| - Charles Colson, advisor to Richard Nixon during the
| Watergate scandal
| zionic wrote:
| kmeisthax wrote:
| ...and Chelsea Manning, and Julian Assange, and Mark
| Klein, and Leslie Cauley, and Russ Tice, and Clare Short,
| and[0][1]...
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_dis
| closure...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_dis
| closure...
| int_19h wrote:
| Why leak it more than once, though? At this point, the
| facts are already well-established. It's just that we as
| a society apparently just don't care enough to hold our
| rulers accountable (with torches and pitchforks if
| necessary).
| labster wrote:
| Nah, it leaks. Besides the big leaks like Chelsea
| Manning, there are constant small leaks: things like
| anonymous sources to the papers, and via Congressmembers
| (who collectively leak like a sieve). A lot of that is
| intentional.
| connicpu wrote:
| I think the perspective the people involved have matters
| a lot. If you just view what you're doing as your normal
| job, you don't even need to lie about what's going on,
| you just don't even talk about it because it's a mundane
| detail. When you conspire to do something everyone
| involved knows is illegal and wrong, your guilt weighs
| more heavily and you start slipping.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| And that's why Jim Jones was truly God. Man got 900 people
| to literally drink the kool-aid.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| > kool-aid.
|
| You say literally, but the Kraft Heinz company would like
| you to know that it definitely also might have been
| Flavor Aid.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Makes sense. Socialists ain't got enough money for
| koolaid.
| lisper wrote:
| Hard to tell if you or Charles Colson is/was being serious,
| but for the benefit of the many, many people who actually
| do believe this: there is not a single account of an
| apostle dying for their beliefs that was written by someone
| who 1) was contemporaneous with the apostles and 2) put
| their name to the account. All of the supposed first-hand
| accounts are anonymous.
| upwardbound wrote:
| There's a fringe hypothesis that historical Jesus (the
| human person behind the legends) survived crucifixion,
| perhaps aided by secretly-sympathetic guards, and was in a
| near-coma for 3 days in the tomb but then returned to
| alertness and was helped out of the tomb (perhaps by
| sympathetic guards).
|
| The Roman official who ordered Jesus' execution didn't
| really want him dead, so perhaps he gave off-the-books
| instructions to the guards that "if this person were to
| miraculously survive being crucified, and escaped his tomb
| in a few days, well there's nothing you could have done to
| stop a miracle. His tomb that of course is temperate and
| happens to have water supplies inside. There's nothing you
| could have done. Wink wink."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilate%27s_court
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swoon_hypothesis#Supporting_a
| r...
|
| "It was uncommon for a crucified healthy adult to die in
| the time described by the Gospels; the Gospel of Mark
| reports that Jesus was crucified at nine in the morning and
| died at three in the afternoon, or six hours after the
| crucifixion. ... The average time of suffering before death
| by crucifixion is claimed by some to have been observed to
| be 2-4 days. ... Modern scholarship has also cast some
| doubt on the generally agreed depiction of Jesus being
| nailed to a cross, as opposed to the more common method of
| having a victim's hands and feet being tied to a cross."
|
| If dying normally took 2-4 days, it's possible that a
| sympathetic guard could have declared him dead after only 6
| hours on the cross (maybe after he first fell unconscious)
| and then transferred him to the tomb in the hopes that he
| might recover in the remaining 1.5-3.5 days, perhaps
| moistening his lips in the process.
|
| If Jesus were tied to the cross rather than nailed to it,
| there's really not any plausible thing that could have
| killed him in just 6 hours of mild to moderate blood loss +
| heat exhaustion. It's much more plausible that he would
| have fallen unconscious while maintaining a heartbeat and
| weak breathing.
|
| I used to be Christian and am now more of an agnostic who
| wants to believe in a benevolent God, and it would be
| really cool if something like this did happen. Maybe Jesus
| was just a person but a good one who tried to do good and
| got lucky through some series of events like this.
|
| I recently unfortunately had a loved one who went through
| the dying process in hospice care, and it was horrifying to
| watch, but it took multiple days, about 5 days, and 6 hours
| just isn't plausible. 6 hours on the cross + a recovery
| from near-death three days later in a cool tomb makes a lot
| of sense if someone gave him water on the way to the tomb.
| Or maybe the tomb had a hidden supply of water in it, like
| a puddle big enough to drink.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Jesus
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| > who wants to believe in a benevolent God
|
| What would be a benevolent God, in the context of our
| history and present? (wars, torture, floods, famine, ...)
|
| (I am myself an atheist, curious of what drives people to
| believe in a deity)
| starwind wrote:
| > Here's the thing about conspiracies: they have a shelf
| life. The amount of time you can keep a conspiracy secret is
| bounded by the number of conspirators, how well you can get
| them to shut up, and how long it has been since the
| conspiracy occurred. You can take a secret only you know to
| your grave, but work in a group of ten and someone will
| confess before their death. Bring in hundreds or thousands
| and the conspiracy will be blown open accidentally before you
| can even execute on it.
|
| That's what they want you think!
| kmeisthax wrote:
| If someone has the means to compel the silence of millions
| then we're not talking about a conspiracy anymore. We're
| talking about the SCP Foundation. The conspiracy will grow
| to encompass the entire planet, after which there will be
| no one to hide the conspiracy from[0].
|
| [0] https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/everyone-knows
| t_mann wrote:
| Fyi, someone actually built a formal model to demonstrate
| that large conspiracies are probabilistically doomed to get
| exposed:
|
| https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0127/Can-
| mathematics-...
|
| However, the model makes a few simplifying assumptions, eg a
| single leak is sufficient to expose the conspiracy, and I
| think it also doesn't cover mortality. A conspiracy that
| wasn't exposed up until the death of all in the know would
| probably be considered as succesful by the model. I think
| it's fair to assume that the probability of getting exposed
| at least significantly drops at that point.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| This is specifically the mathematical model I'm
| referencing, I should probably save this so I remember what
| to cite next time.
|
| While there probably are conspiracies that would take
| multiple leaks to fully expose, one thing to note is that
| leaks tend to be correlated with one another. Newsworthy
| reporting on conspiracy leaks inspires copycat leaks[0] -
| either to get one's fifteen minutes of fame or to jump ship
| before the prosecutions come about.
|
| A conspiracy that is "successful" in the sense that it was
| taken to the grave can still get exposed, though. Sure, the
| members of the conspiracy can't leak it themselves, but
| they also can no longer destroy any physical evidence or
| information they left behind. So that evidence could itself
| be considered a conspirator that cannot die and will
| eventually leak.
|
| [0] This also applies to school shootings.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Bring in hundreds or thousands and the conspiracy will be
| blown open accidentally
|
| There's still a credibility issue. There are a lot of people
| who claim to have worked for the government and have direct
| knowledge of extraterrestrials. They mostly come across as
| crazy, but this might also be what a conspiracy looks like.
| Even when people expose it, they just look crazy and are
| easily dismissed.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| > being off by only 10 days instead of the expected 13
|
| Doesn't that account for 3 mystery days per year? The Gregorian
| calendar was introduced 1582. That's not even 500 years. Makes
| 500y * 3d/y = 1500d is about 4.5 years.
|
| How does this explain "about 300 missing years"?
| simiones wrote:
| The Julian calendar is wrong by ~1 day/128 years compared to
| the true solar year, not 1 day per year. So 3 days => ~390
| years.
|
| And the computation goes like this:
|
| 1. Julian calendar was created in ~45 CE.
|
| 2. Gregorian calendar was created in ~1582 CE.
|
| 3. To bring Gregorian time back in line with Julian time, you
| would have needed to subtract (1582-45) / 128 ~= 13 days.
| However, they only subtracted 10 days.
|
| Wrong conclusion: they were actually in the year 1285, not
| 1582.
|
| Correct conclusion: they were not trying to bring Gregorian
| time back in line with Julian time, but with a later time,
| that of the Nicean Council in ~325 CE.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| > Wrong conclusion: they were actually in the year 1285,
| not 1582.
|
| I read the whole article and I did not understand this part
| describing the premise of the conspiracy.
|
| Is the suggestion of the conspiracy that they essentially
| made a transposition error between 1285 and 1582 while
| fixing a relatively minor skew of a few days?
| simiones wrote:
| No, the conspiracy suggests that the leaders of the major
| powers in Europe in the year 700-and-something conspired
| to simply start calling it the year 1000 for the prestige
| value, without recording this decision anywhere.
| Essentially it's like we all agreed tomorrow to start
| calling next year 2300 instead of 2023 (but theoretically
| slightly more plausible in a time before centralized
| calendars and computing).
|
| Later historians simply took the official date for
| granted - so the people in Pope Gregory's time believed
| they were living in the year 1582, but, unbenknownst to
| them, only 1285 years had passed since the year 1CE. The
| real date was reflected in their astronomical
| calculations, leading to the 10 day correction instead of
| a 13-day one.
|
| Of course, this is all absurd for all the reasons listed
| in the article, and others.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| It's not that absurd to believe mistakes could have been
| made there. The BC/AD system was invented centuries after
| Christ and only started to become actually known around
| the 730s:
|
| _The addition of the B.C. component happened two
| centuries after Dionysius, when the Venerable Bede of
| Northumbria published his "Ecclesiastical History of the
| English People" in 731, wrote Antonia Gransden, who was a
| reader in history at the University of Nottingham, in her
| book "Historical Writing in England: c. 500 to c. 1307"
| (Routledge, 1997). The work brought the A.D. system to
| the attention of more people and expanded it to include
| years before A.D. 1. Prior years were numbered to count
| backward to indicate the number of years an event had
| occurred "before Christ" or "B.C.
|
| The B.C./A.D. system became more popular in the ninth
| century after Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne adopted the
| system for dating acts of government throughout Europe."_
|
| https://www.livescience.com/45510-anno-domini.html
|
| Before the adoption of this system dating was rather
| chaotic, with dates usually being recorded as "year X of
| the reign of so-and-so". To line dates up and synchronize
| them on a timeline was difficult, and synchronization of
| European, Islamic, Greek and Roman history wasn't even
| attempted until the 16th century (Scaliger's De
| Emendatione Temporum).
| mcguire wrote:
| Mistakes, yes. 300 years? No. 300 years, including the
| Carolingian Dynasty, the expansion of Islam (i.e. The
| Battle of Tours), the Norse expansion (eventually leading
| to the domination of Europe by a bunch of guys named
| Norman)? Nope, no so much. And that's before you start
| looking at Islamic, Indian, and Asian data.
|
| And then there's radiometric dating and dendrochronology,
| which are chaotic in their own right, but 300 years? Nah.
|
| Weirdly, I was just reading Lynn White's _Medieval
| technology and social change_ (1966), discussing the
| introduction of the stirrup and the heavy plow (as
| opposed to the scratch plow), both of which happened in
| this period. There 's little in the way of good dates,
| but some very big changes such as the move from
| individual family subsistence farms to large, ridge-and-
| furrow strips and Charles Martel's redistribution of
| church lands to his followers, introducing true heavy
| cavalry and the feudal system. (Note: may be a bit out of
| date with modern research.)
| drewzero1 wrote:
| In some ways, it might be easier to pull off with
| centralized digital calendars, as long as the powers-
| that-be have access to commonly-used NTP servers. (Which
| could certainly accelerate the Y2038 problem!)
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| Globally centralized timekeeping could certainly make for
| an interesting premise to a dystopian sci-fi novel. Time
| really does fly when the Fed controls the NTP root nodes.
| Archelaos wrote:
| This. But even what the article agrees with is wrong: "It only
| works if you focus solely on western Europe, where the decline
| of Rome left a nasty gap in the records." -- There is not
| really a gap. We have fewer records, but still covering a lot.
| They may not be autographs, but that is not very different from
| the situation with antiquity. And when it comes to supporting
| chronology, numismatics is probably the best evidence. It would
| be impossible for a forger of history to bury hundreds of
| thousands of matching coins all over Europe.
| prox wrote:
| I have always found the history around the Holy Roman Emperor
| interesting, with prince electors :
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Emperor as a basis of
| continuing the Roman Empire in the west.
|
| As it is I think we know little what happened to aristocratic
| families at the end of the Empire as well.
| tomatocracy wrote:
| I rather like Gibbon's argument that the Ottoman empire was
| effectively the continuation of the Byzantine/Eastern Roman
| empire - by that line of thinking the ultimate surviving
| descendant of the Roman Empire fought in the First World War.
| simiones wrote:
| It's also fun to note that one of the first leaders of the
| Russian empire married one of the last Byzantine princesses
| - thus taking the title of Caesar (Tsar).
| neaden wrote:
| Yeah Moscow sometimes referred to as Third Rome by people
| who view it as the continuation. The Holy Roman Empire
| would have of course differed as the Kaiser (also Caesar
| derived) similarly counted himself as the continuation of
| the Roman Empire.
| vt85 wrote:
| And since when Tsar is Byzantine title? :)))
| int_19h wrote:
| Tsar is a contraction of Caesar as pronounced in Slavic
| languages. The corresponding Byzantine title was
| Basileus, and while the word itself is unrelated, the
| title correspondence was very well established at the
| time (much like the use of "emperor" for Chinese and
| Japanese rulers, even though the titles in those
| languages are not etymologically related, either).
| bhaak wrote:
| We know so little that there is no verified unbroken lineage
| between anybody from Antiquity to the Middle Ages.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_antiquity
| walnutclosefarm wrote:
| And what we do know, doesn't necessarily mean what those
| searching for descent from antiquity think it means. All
| tracing of such descent assumes that pregnancies involved
| known paternity, whereas we know that in general, there is
| a lot of error in recorded paternities (one of the more
| interesting side effects of DNA sequencing, both in
| consumer offerings, and in medical and official use, is
| demonstration that far more children are not the children
| of their named or assumed father than was suspected). Add
| to that, the fact that you could potentially have, say,
| Charlemagne in your direct line of descent, and still have
| none of his genetic material in your makeup. This is so
| because at the remove of Charlemagne, you're 48, give or
| take a few, generations, removed from the trillions of
| leaves on your family tree, but you get roughly 1/2^-n of
| your DNA from an nth generation progenitor and have only
| 2^36th or so base pairs of DNA in your entire genome. So,
| Charlemagne can be your umpty-great grandfather, and yet
| you in be in no genetic sense, a descendent of Charlemagne.
|
| In other words, past a dozen or so generations, any data
| we've got on bloodlines has a lousy signal to noise ratio
| for proving direct descent.
| jlawson wrote:
| Non-genetic descent is actually much stronger than that
| even.
|
| When genes are sexually recombined, they don't recombine
| randomly per-base pair, they're cut and recombined in big
| strips. The chromosomes actually only 'snip' in a small
| number of places.
|
| This means that after a relatively small number of
| generations, it's quite easy to have no genes at all from
| one of your ancestors.
|
| I don't recall the exact numbers but it's something like
| 8-12 generations where you start having serious numbers
| of ancestors with no genetic connection.
| walnutclosefarm wrote:
| Of course. Absent recombination, you'd start having
| ancestors dropping out after only 5 generations. With
| recombination, it's a few more. I didn't make the
| argument that way, because when I have in the past, I get
| a bunch of "yeah, but ..." rebuttal. In addition to the
| complicated nature of recombination, there is the
| additional complication that when you get back 6 to 8 or
| more generations, the same progenitors generally start
| appearing in multiple branches of your family tree -
| sometimes in many, many branches. But it is nevertheless
| the most correct. We all probably have great, great,
| great, great, great, great grandparents from whom we have
| no genetic inheritance at all. Add a couple more greats,
| and it's a near certainty.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Matrilineal or patrilineal lines give you much stronger
| signals than that, though, thanks to mitochondrial and
| Y-chromosome DNA respectively.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Sure, but unbroken patrilineal or matrilineal lines of
| descent are rather improbable over such long times - any
| family that had only sons or only daughters breaks the
| line, and that's not particularly uncommon. Add some
| infidelity into the mix and it becomes even harder to
| believe.
| walnutclosefarm wrote:
| I don't see how. Sure, if you had mitochondrial DNA from
| your long-dead male ancestors, you could suss out your
| true patrilineal line of descent, but it's extremely
| unlikely that such data is available. You might be able
| to get it by inference by analyzing the fanned-out
| descendents of a relatively recent putative paternal
| ancestor - back 8 or maybe ten generations, but even
| that's unusual. And, if you're targeting a specific
| ancestor, it requires an unbroken line of paternal
| descent - as soon as your path to, say, Henry VIII goes
| through a female descendent, at any generation, you've
| lost the Y chromosome relationship. Same argument applies
| with the sex roles reversed for females and mitchondrial
| inheritance. At ten generations back, you've got 1024
| grandmother leaves on your tree. Only one of them is your
| mother's mother's .. mother's mother. At 20 generations
| (say, 500 years, so the actual age of Henry VIII), you've
| got a million grandmother or grandfather leaves on your
| tree, and only one is purely matrilineal, and one purely
| patrilineal. (That doesn't mean, of course, that you've
| got a million distinct grand^20 fathers - it'll be way
| less than that, because the some men will appear on many
| different leaves, and the same for mothers. But the odds
| that the path you claim to Henry VII is purely maternal
| or purely paternal are still very small.
| ginko wrote:
| Meanwhile there's people alive today who claim main line
| descent from Confucius who lived in the 5th century BC.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Tsui-chang
| peter303 wrote:
| Genealogists have worked out most American Presidents 800
| years or so. A couple interesting facts include (1) about
| everyone one of them is at least 10th cousin to every
| other one and (2) a large fraction descend from King John
| of England. Probability suggests that after a millennium
| that that someone becomes a super-ancestor, i.e. everyone
| is descended from them, or no one is descended from them.
| Very little middle ground. (A lot of northwest European
| Americans probably have the same statistics as
| Presidents.)
| bhaak wrote:
| We lost a lot of historical records between late
| antiquity and the early middle ages. Most devastating for
| Italy was probably the Gothic War.
|
| Then the records that were in Constantinople were also
| lost, not only by the fall of Constantinople itself but
| also by the sacking of it by Christian crusaders.
|
| Lots of records that could have shown such a descent are
| lost.
|
| Now Confucius was an important historical figure.
|
| It's not surprising that he is one of the few cases where
| an uninterrupted descent could be true. If Jesus or
| Caesar had a family line run into modern times or if the
| Papacy was hereditary, we might have such a line for
| Western civilization as well.
| JamesSwift wrote:
| China also has kept a fairly robust set of records
| compared to the rest of the world.
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| Would be hard for Jesus, given he didn't exist.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| That is an extremely fringe belief, in disagreement with
| most scholars of antiquity.
| ncmncm wrote:
| But the gradient is positive.
| bhaak wrote:
| What's that supposed to mean?
| ncmncm wrote:
| In 1900, no historians thought Jesus was like Moses,
| Abraham, and Adam, made up from whole cloth. In 2000,
| some did. Today, more.
|
| The scenario as I understand it is that Paul's writing
| came first. But to get a congregation to pay attention
| they found they had to invent a corporeal Jesus to have
| said their things, then apostles to have heard them, then
| a bio for where and when, and finally gospels to tell it
| in.
|
| For those who object that such a thing wasn't done,
| consider Moses and, really, all of Genesis and Exodus.
| Iliad. Thor'n'Loki. It was not just done, but positively
| demanded.
| option_key wrote:
| True, but that's because history as a discipline has
| incredibly low standard of evidence. They collectively
| decided that since reliable evidence is often very
| difficult to produce, they will settle for what they can
| get. A lot of antique or even medieval historical figures
| are known from a single sentence in some chronicle
| written 100 years after their death.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Even the most ardent Christian biblical scholars admit
| the overwhelming majority of writings claimed to be 1st
| century are much later forgeries. They have picked out a
| few scraps they have not been able to prove were forged,
| and based everything on those.
|
| But the most favored bit of positive evidence is a single
| paragraph that everybody agrees was badly doctored up.
| They have "reconstructed" what they think the original
| must have actually said. But the text before and after it
| would flow neatly one to the next without it.
|
| Next best is a line in Paul where he mentions somebody is
| Jesus's brother.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| That would make it unknowable whether he existed, it
| would not mean we have reason to believe he didn't.
|
| This is not like physics where it's natural to assume
| something didn't exist if the proof for its existence is
| not strong enough.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Only because a lot of people want to believe.
|
| We are all confident Adam, Noah, and Moses were made up,
| with none of the proof positive that you are demanding
| for this one case.
| scott_s wrote:
| I don't think it is a fringe belief. I have not heard of
| such a consensus among "most scholars of antiquity." What
| are you basing that on? A discussion I heard in the past
| few years which mentions that is an open question is
| here: https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/the-
| evidence-f...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| China also has a continuous literary tradition between
| that time and now, so the claims are plausible.
|
| I'm actually more impressed that the old Chinese imperial
| families are still around:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Zhao
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Zhu
|
| In what I would think of as the "standard model" of
| history, one of the highest priorities for a new king is
| eliminating everyone who might theoretically be related
| to the old king.
| vkazanov wrote:
| Yeah.. even the last Chinese emperor wasn't executed,
| despite the endless civil war and his cooperation with
| Japanese.
| peter303 wrote:
| Japanese emperors back to 600 BCE.
| jl6 wrote:
| What does "main line" mean in this context?
| prox wrote:
| I would assume father > son descent, so oldest son is
| usually the main inheritor.
| abirch wrote:
| Depth First Search for heirs.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| That sounds like an elevator pitch.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| These were totally different systems between the Roman era
| (or eras) and the catholic Western European system of
| nobility.
|
| Even at the peak of the empire, it wasn't like driving
| around in a modern nation state, there were all sorts of
| associated kingdoms and tribes within the borders you see
| in history books. In many ways the empire was like a
| franchise with local governors wielding varying power and
| independence.
|
| As the empire declined, association with that state became
| less relevant, so they dropped the pageantry of being the
| great grandson of Marcus Whomeveritus. As the petty kings
| and nobility started consolidating and emerging as
| "legitimate" in a system, the "mists of antiquity" served
| to launder that your background descended from an usurper
| governor, tax farmer, or barbarian warlord.
| erdaniels wrote:
| So kind of like going from version 4 to 6
| bsedlm wrote:
| > no conspiracy theory has yet emerged arguing that the Empire
| never really fell at all, and that everywhere from Carlisle to
| Cairo is still secretly being run by an emperor hidden somewhere
| under Rome. Which is a pity, because that would be brilliant.
|
| it's mere occulted knowledge. Philip K. Dick says so in his
| exegesis. "the empire never ended"
|
| additionally, the empire, which could also be regarded as an
| ideology or even an instutional tradition of hiding knowledge (to
| construct authority and wield it as power) has a deeply ingrained
| habit of erasing and rewriting history
|
| to the point that this author is doing the bidding of this
| occulted (and possibly nonexistent) cult of occulting (i.e.
| hiding and mystery making) ideological/institutional force; he's
| rationalizing and backing the claim "conspiracies are silly
| nonesense, mkay? nothing to see but fools and buffoons".
| blowski wrote:
| The Julian Calendar would _now_ be 13 days behind the Gregorian
| calendar. But 400 years ago, it was only 10 days behind. If only
| all conspiracy theories were so easy to refute.
| leto_ii wrote:
| TLDR: yes it did, there's no phantom time; check with the
| Chinese, Persians, Byzantines etc.
| aaron695 wrote:
| RivieraKid wrote:
| Am I the only one who thinks that the "ethics" part of philosophy
| is kind of trivial? The only part of philosophy which took me a
| long time to form a clear opinion on was the hard problem of
| consciousness and related topics.
| golergka wrote:
| You're definitely not the only one, but most people who share
| this opinion didn't study ethics well enough. Its a field full
| of complicated contradictions.
| acoard wrote:
| As a philosophy major who was never particularly interested in
| ethics, I certainly don't think it's trivial. If you trivial as
| in "clearly obvious" then I certainly disagree. But let me try
| and charitably interpret your position.
|
| I do think that in practice the different ethical systems don't
| produce wildly different outcomes, from utilitarianism to
| deontology to even virtue ethics. Of course, in the realm of
| thought experiments they can be widely different. But in the
| real world, the hardest thing is to be moral (i.e. do the right
| thing) rather than defining your ethics (having a clear code).
| In practice, the "evil"/conflict/strive in the world I see is
| due to selfishness or amorality, not disagreements between
| utilitarians and kantians. Is this what you're getting at? That
| the distinctions between the different ethical systems collapse
| into similar practical situations? That being a "good person"
| is more important than the particular ethical code you follow?
| (That's my take, basically).
|
| I'll also say that I found meta-ethics incredibly illuminating.
| It essentially builds up a language to discuss different
| ethical systems and makes conversations around them way easier.
|
| Big up on consciousness and philosophy of mind though. I also
| found philosophy of science fascinating. And shoutout to
| Hobbes! He would have loved HN, he was such a contrarian.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| My main point is that ethics is subjective, there's no
| correct answer to ethical problems, it boils down to how
| people feel. See also my other comment.
|
| I absolutely agree that in the real world it's mainly about
| being a good person, not about being a particular type of a
| good person.
| ncmncm wrote:
| You are in luck: there is no problem of consciousness.
| charles_f wrote:
| There is a lot to it in the grey area. Don't kill, don't steal,
| don't cheat, don't eat baby seals, don't touch my grandma, that
| is trivial. The complex bit is for everything that's less of a
| drastic decision.
|
| Is it ethical to let a coworker make a mistake you saw so they
| can learn, at the cost of project progress, or is it ethical to
| help them and make sure you deliver what was promised to your
| stakeholders on time? What if you don't like the co-worker?
| What if you dont like stakeholders?
|
| Is it ethical to slack off at work if you need that for your
| mental safety? Or is it theft?
|
| And so on. Tons of little decisions that are not about life and
| death, but still very much about ethics, and that are not
| trivial at all.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| My view is that ethics is subjective, it boils down to how
| people feel. They often have various ethical systems and
| rules built on those feelings (or on axioms which feel
| right).
| mcguire wrote:
| That is true of all of philosophy (he says, at the risk of
| his Junior Philosopher's Secret Decoder Ring). The
| interesting part is the systems you build (hopefully using
| logic) around it.
| stillsut wrote:
| Could we find a tree we know was planted in say 300 AD, then
| count the tree rings in its trunk? Or some kind of river that
| floods yearly and leaves a discrete layer of sediment?
| mcguire wrote:
| That's dendrochronology, and it is used to date wooden objects.
| The problems are that you only get an age (the tree was N years
| old at the time this object was created), and that you only get
| a slice of the tree (you can only see the subset of rings that
| are visible in the wooden beam supporting the house).
|
| You can compare ring widths, assuming you have wood from the
| same climatic area, and use that as a standard candle to date
| objects reasonably well.
| drewcoo wrote:
| > This lack of records led some later scholars to give the years
| after the Roman collapse the now deeply unfashionable label 'the
| Dark Ages', to reflect the fact they literally couldn't see what
| was going on.
|
| That is entirely crap. They're called the dark ages because some
| humanists, full of themselves, started calling themselves the
| enlightenment and what came directly before their era "dark."
| Kids those days, am I right?
|
| https://www.medievalists.net/2014/02/why-the-middle-ages-are...
| Veen wrote:
| The dark ages were supposed dark in contrast to the earlier
| classical period, not the post-renaissance period. The
| enlightenment happened several centuries after the term was
| first used, and has nothing to do with medieval humanists.
| jkingsbery wrote:
| As the link you provided indicates, it's a bit more complicated
| than that. But generally, yes, people would benefit from
| understanding more about Medieval History, and how our
| conceptions about it are shaped by Renaissance, Protestant and
| Enlightenment writers all used the Medieval period as a
| punching bag.
| nl wrote:
| >> This lack of records led some later scholars to give the
| years after the Roman collapse the now deeply unfashionable
| label 'the Dark Ages',
|
| > That is entirely crap.
|
| It's absolutely not crap.
|
| Wikipedia says (referring the quote used in your link):
|
| _The concept of a "Dark Age" originated in the 1330s with the
| Italian scholar Petrarch, who regarded the post-Roman centuries
| as "dark" compared to the "light" of classical antiquity. The
| term employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to
| contrast the era's "darkness" (lack of records) with earlier
| and later periods of "light" (abundance of records)._
|
| I'd emphasize the "lack of records" here. It's absolutely true
| to say that _some_ scholars use that as a reason to label it
| the dark ages.
|
| > They're called the dark ages because some humanists, full of
| themselves, started calling themselves the enlightenment
|
| I'd note that Petrarch (quoted in the link you posted!) was
| talking about the times he lived in himself as dark, and was
| far from claiming to be any sort of enlightenment.
| origin_path wrote:
| Petrarch pretty clearly was not using the word "dark" to mean
| lack of information if he considered the year in which he
| lived to also be "dark". Did he explicitly state he was
| talking about abundance of historical records anywhere, or is
| that something that was projected onto his writings later?
|
| Renaissance humanists were famous for considering the Roman
| Empire to be the peak of sophistication and all things cool.
| They were also famous for going to great lengths to recover
| supposedly lost works of Roman literature, which were often
| found in obscure places. It seems quite unlikely those people
| would have been using the word "light" to mean abundance of
| literature given the difficulty they had in obtaining said
| literature.
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| The "Dark Ages" is a thing in English mostly. In other
| languages and countries there's no such thing. It's simply
| the middle age or early middle age. I've noticed it affects
| how English speakers see this period of history.
| blowski wrote:
| It depends on who you think coined the term "dark ages".
|
| Protestants did indeed write of a dark age of ignorance, but
| that comment came 200 years after the Catholic Baronius wrote
| of a "lack of writers" producing a dark age.
| mynameismonkey wrote:
| >no conspiracy theory has yet emerged arguing that the Empire
| never really fell at all, and that everywhere from Carlisle to
| Cairo is still secretly being run by an emperor hidden somewhere
| under Rome. Which is a pity, because that would be brilliant.
|
| The Empire Never Ended:
|
| https://1library.net/article/empire-ended-philosophy-science...
| age_bronze wrote:
| Here's a real historical inconsistency:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_years_%28Jewish_calend...
|
| I dislike the framing of some inconsistencies as "conspiracy
| theory". Mistakes can and will happen, it's an argument of
| emotion to frame an inconsistency as a "conspiracy theory". Just
| because one possible explanation is that people colluded
| intentionally and conspiratorially doesn't rule out all the other
| more plausible explanations that something really is wrong.
|
| It's also bad epistemology. Literally everything can be explained
| as a conspiracy, so the fact the the only explanation you can
| think of to an inconsistency is "people colluded" reflect more on
| you than on the problem. Historical records can and will be
| inaccurate.
|
| Some people's epistemological metric goes haywire from those two
| words. People write inaccurate stuff all the time. It's literally
| just papers. Other civilizations are other clocks and there are
| very few historical evidence to synchronize those clocks,
| especially when the travel time of news and people in those times
| was extremely slow. Lack of international news also means loss of
| synchronization.
|
| If the invocation of the words "conspiracy theory" in any way
| repels you from exploring inconsistencies with an open mind, the
| problem is with your emotional reasoning. If you believe this
| guy, something like the missing years could never have happened.
| It clearly happened, and I am sure there was no conspiracy behind
| it. Two words, "conspiracy theory", entirely shifted your
| internal model of the world emotionally, when epistemologically,
| it shouldn't change your opinion into either direction. The
| existence of an extremely unlikely explanation is completely
| equivalent to just no explanation. "Conspiracy theory" is purely
| an appeal to emotion. Someone claimed A, and a guy told you
| Conspiracy=>A therefore ~A. Only an emotional human would process
| this useless information in any way.
| NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
| We live in very advance simulation that is optimizing in such
| way, so that when ever we find out it is overlord hoax - it
| increase historical details :D
| jacquesm wrote:
| Douglas Adams beat you to that one by a couple of decades.
|
| "There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers
| exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will
| instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more
| bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states
| that this has already happened."
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Reminds me of Scott's The Pyramid and the Garden
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/05/the-pyramid-and-the-ga... ,
| about how many bits of freedom you need to get a conspiracy
| theory like the Pyramid of Giza encoding the speed of light.
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