[HN Gopher] How ancient people saw themselves
___________________________________________________________________
How ancient people saw themselves
Author : crescit_eundo
Score : 235 points
Date : 2025-10-26 13:13 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (worldhistory.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (worldhistory.substack.com)
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| It's about mirrors, it's about how they literally saw themselves
| in mirrors
| lurk2 wrote:
| Called it.
| raldi wrote:
| I'm surprised more museums don't have modern replicas
| demonstrating what the ancient artifacts would have looked like
| when pristine.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| There are stories of when near perfect mirrors entered trade.
| Some stories are sweet, and others rather macabre:
|
| https://www.japanpowered.com/folklore-and-urban-legends/mirr...
|
| Technology tends to influence cultures in subtle ways few
| remember a generation later. =3
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Dangerous_Animal_In_T...
| sanskarix wrote:
| British Museum actually does this with their Greek statues -
| shows how they were painted. The gap between "marble
| perfection" and "gaudy colors" is wild. Makes you realize how
| much our idea of classical taste is just patina.
| 1000units wrote:
| So the sculptors had much better taste than the painters they
| allowed? Or are the reproductions not faithful?
| ljlolel wrote:
| sounds like partly they didn't have access to great
| pigments back then
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Well, they didn't have pigments that would maintain their
| color and adhere to a surface for 2000 years.
|
| Do we?
| twelvechairs wrote:
| One view is that the western idea of "good taste" was
| informed by people looking at greek and roman statues and
| buildings and incorrectly assuming they were always
| intended to be plain.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Sort of explains a lot doesn't it
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| This is why I prefer my rust bucket of a car to something
| new. In 2,000 years the masses will view it as good taste.
| username332211 wrote:
| There are frescoes of statues[1] and architecture[2] in
| Pompeii. Feel free to compare them with the reproductions.
|
| [1] https://www.worldhistory.org/image/2232/fresco-of-a-
| statue-o...
| raldi wrote:
| You forgot link 2
| username332211 wrote:
| Sorry.
|
| https://www.maxwellanderson.com/pompeian-frescoes-in-the-
| met...
| bazoom42 wrote:
| We don't know. The painted reconstructions are based on
| pigments found on the statues, but we dont know exactly how
| the painting looked.
|
| But the paintings which have been preserved from antiquity
| are quite beautiful.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Or even polish up the corroded artifacts and mirrors they do
| have. Why don't they do this?
| jiehong wrote:
| I think there is a tension between preserving artifacts as-
| is, vs restoring them.
|
| Restoring them would also cause repeated wear and tear, and
| potentially erasing clues we haven't recognised as important
| yet.
|
| Making replicas is more suitable: the public can also touch
| and use them as well.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Ever seen a polished steel mirror in a gas station bathroom?
| llamasushi wrote:
| Am I the only one who thought this was referring to how people
| felt about the general zeitgeist? Like, how Romans viewed
| everyone outside Rome as barbarian, etc. Not in the literal sense
| like, mirrors. Nice HN switcheroo.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| Yeah, I thought it was a more avant-garde question, like Greek
| philosophical literature.
|
| It turns out the title has a literal meaning."
| danwills wrote:
| Yeah that was my original interpretation of the title too!
| Perhaps something like:
|
| How did early humans understand their situation and what did
| they think the 'world' was like, and what did they think they
| should do with their lives?! I find it fascinating to think how
| that longing to know what it's all about has changed so much
| for humans over time.
|
| Mirrors are still heaps interesting though, as is
| reflection/refraction/light-transport in general I'd say! But
| it wasn't about what I expected when I read it.
| orly01 wrote:
| I didn't expect it to be about literally seeing.
| brap wrote:
| About 3/4 into the article, "wait, it's all about mirrors?
| ...Oh!"
| saispas wrote:
| The subtitle is "The Art of the Ancient Mirror", so perhaps
| not so surprising...
| lordnacho wrote:
| I thought it would be about how much work went into different
| objects and how that made people behave, with the first example
| being mirrors.
|
| Ended up being about mirrors.
| ggm wrote:
| This is calling out for experimental archaeologists to make the
| best possible front surface reflections they can from polished
| copper, bronze, steel, obsidian, glass. The Romans had metallised
| glass. They knew how to roast glass. They may well have known how
| to vaporise metal onto glass.
|
| The state of the reflecting surface with 2ky of corrosion does
| not match even looking at your reflections in water.
| KolibriFly wrote:
| There's this tendency to assume ancient = primitive, but these
| were skilled artisans with deep material knowledge
| MayeulC wrote:
| Agreed. I imagine that obsidian surface must have been as
| polished as my smartphone screen in its prime, and probably as
| useful as a mirror (screen turned off). I am not sure of the
| flatness they were able to achieve though, so the reflection
| might not have been perfect. In theory a perfectly flat surface
| is achievable if they used the same tool to polish multiple
| mirrors at the same time!
| kennyloginz wrote:
| This person never actually reflected on the article they
| generated.
| rkagerer wrote:
| I'm not sure if it was AI generated, but I see what you did
| there with "reflected".
| suprjami wrote:
| Now you've duped everyone with the wrong headline, let's discuss
| what we thought it was about.
|
| I bet ancient people saw themselves as the pinnacle of
| civilisation, much like we do now.
|
| I'm sure Romans were sitting there with their cities and
| aqueducts and street vendors and Colosseum and huge empire
| thinking this is as good as society had ever been.
|
| Nobody was sitting there saying "we don't even have electricity"
| or "of course light doesn't come out of our eyes to see, that
| easily fails the scientific method" because they didn't know
| those things existed.
| krysp wrote:
| At the time, they were right; it was as good as society had
| ever been.
|
| I think they were much like us in many ways. They probably
| imagined that things could get better (even if they didn't
| imagine electricity or computers).
| KolibriFly wrote:
| Every era probably feels like the apex of human progress
| because people can only measure against what they know
| jalk wrote:
| Apparently MAGA disagrees
| jalk wrote:
| Why the down vote? This was a factual statement and not
| some judgement: The name implies that some previous "era"
| was greater than the current - and hence current cannot be
| the pinnacle.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| You're needlessly dragging a contemporary controversial
| political movement into a discussion about a subject
| measured in much longer time periods, which by itself is
| fine and you can trick the useful idiots into mashing the
| rightthink button if you do it right, but you didn't do
| it right.
|
| To use metaphor, you made a "haha 69" joke in a context
| where you needed at least a double entendre.
|
| If this were a comment section for an article on a
| subject of modern political relevance (i.e. a poo
| flinging match) you probably would have gotten away with
| it.
|
| You could/should have crafted the comment with more words
| and hit some other topics (maga isn't unique, there's
| other historical and contemporary movements that follow
| the same trend) to obfuscate it and appeal to the people
| who fancy themselves pseudo intellectual but that would
| have taken effort you didn't expend and so those people
| are offended by your low effort.
| jalk wrote:
| Thanks, I see your point. Was not trying to be
| snarky/funny, but rather come with counter example to
| parent. I was thinking about the (recent) "Era of
| globalization" - but perhaps that is too short of a time
| span to be called an era
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Just tossing out more examples than just MAGA would
| likely have sufficed IMO. Current Russian expansionism,
| 1930s Italian ambition in Africa, etc, etc. There's a
| fair bit to to make interesting comparison to even if you
| restrict yourself to "modern" (i.e. industrial revolution
| and beyond) societies.
| saispas wrote:
| I'm not sure every era did think it was the apex of human
| progress, though, because sometimes they had physical or
| cultural evidence that previous generations could do things
| that they couldn't.
|
| E.g. if you were a petty kingdom emerging in the centuries
| after the Romans left Britain, you'd be fairly sure that you
| no longer had the technology to build aqueducts, baths or
| villas. And for centuries after that, a large element of
| learning was trying to recreate / understand the classics -
| e.g. the influence of Galen and Aristotle.
|
| Doesn't the modern idea of inevitable human progress really
| come in with the enlightenment?
| bluGill wrote:
| Those petty kingdoms did have the technology to build that
| - they just were too small to have enough people.
| saispas wrote:
| Did they? For example, the Roman formula for waterproof
| concrete was lost and only rediscovered (in the 15th
| Century) when a manuscript came to light. I think it's
| more than just a lack of people or wealth (though that
| comes into it of course): people thought of the Romans as
| being 'superior', hence the effort they went to to
| preserve surviving classic manuscripts.
|
| It's not to say that the early medieval period couldn't
| eventually built magnificent edifices or build on the
| knowledge, but for many centuries, Rome and Greece was
| seen as something to aspire to.
| bluGill wrote:
| That isn't relevant as they didn't have the spare
| resources to dedicate people to the task. If they did a
| few smart researchers could figure something out. Just
| going through all their archives would have done the job
| if they had people to dedicate to the search (though of
| course they couldn't have known that and so a track to
| create it from scratch would also be needed).
|
| Depending on where you are talking about there may not
| have been local resources to make waterproof concrete,
| which back to my point: they didn't have the resources if
| they wanted to. Though we have plenty of buildings (most
| obviously Cathedrals) dating to well before the
| rediscovery of roman concrete to prove that isn't needed.
| Those Cathedrals only exist because they had a few
| resources and so they could build them over time. Those
| cathedrals also were in use for church services - usually
| in the first year of construction - to fuel the dream.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > Those Cathedrals only exist because they had a few
| resources and so they could build them over time
|
| They also only exist because they used architectural
| techniques that the Romans never developed, namely the
| flying buttress, which could support massive relatively
| thin wall without hundreds of columns and arches
| everywhere.
| saispas wrote:
| I don't think anybody seriously suggests that the
| medieval period was incapable of developing anything new
| or of building some stunning things - it's clearly
| nonsense. They had as many geniuses and craftsman as any
| generation and they produced some wonderful things
| comparable to anything we can.
|
| I don't think it's simply a matter of lack of resources,
| though - some of the early kings had the manpower to do
| things like build an 80 mile rampart between Mercia and
| the Welsh states.
|
| In thinking about what you've written, I started to look
| for more detail on any research into _why_ there was such
| a drastic change in architecture post the collapse and
| you 're right, it clearly is more complicated than just
| lost knowledge. I didn't look far, only
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_architecture,
| but that's enough to suggest that it's now accepted that
| conscious cultural choice had a lot to do with it as well
| (if not more...). So I learnt something and will dig into
| it more - thanks!
|
| But I'm not sure that specific (Anglo Saxon architecture)
| point really negates the proposition that for a thousand
| years people looked back to Rome (and later Greece)
| writers to legitimise their knowledge. This knowledge was
| sought after and preserved (and amended to fit in with
| religious dogma, of course). There were innovators, of
| course, but there's a reason that writers like Galen and
| Vitruvius, held so much sway for so long, isn't there?
|
| In the political sphere, there were countless (real and
| figurative) battles to be seen as the heir to the Roman
| Empire because that was what success looked like... Yes,
| all these states would have torn each other to shreds
| anyway, because that's what states do if they're not
| stopped, but isn't it telling that they did explicitly so
| in terms of being the inheritor of Rome?
|
| Of course it's all more complicated than that, but it
| does seem fairly clear that the ancient world generally
| was seen as something to aspire to, to get back to, in a
| way that's probably foreign to us now.
|
| Unless you're Mussolini, of course...
| f1shy wrote:
| I would argue (without any proof, just by feeling) that
| currently there are more people that think the past is better
| than the present. There is even a statement "every past time
| was better": is a subjective perception influenced by
| cognitive biases like rosy retrospection, which causes people
| to remember the past more fondly and forget its difficulties.
|
| Many many people today tend towards ecologism, thinking we
| are now just ruining the planet, and should go back in time.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| No, most ancient people believed in a steady decline from a
| golden age in the past.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| > Every era probably feels like the apex of human progress
|
| Tell that to 600s Western Europe. They were fully aware that
| there was a society before them that had the capacity to do
| things they could not.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| I get the thrust of what you say but this wasn't always the
| case. The idea of linear progress upwards is not universal.
| Many cultures placed the pinnacle age in their past, before
| some corruption or decay took place -the ultimate expression of
| such would be like the biblical story of the Fall, but it also
| existed on less cosmic scales. The golden age when people were
| better, seeing your age as decay against the valorized past is
| in fact more common.
|
| Also just because others thought similar things doesn't mean it
| isn't true now. The progress since sometime in the 1800s has
| been insane. If in 100,000 years a super smart civilization,
| unimaginably advanced, looks at an estimated world population
| time series, they will be objectively impressed that those guys
| figured out / stumbled upon some impressive things to manage
| that. It's really interesting to think about just how desolate
| the world was even a few hundred years ago. Almost all our big
| cities today were little towns, except for like 1 or 2
| globally. The change is undeniable. It's not all subjective and
| "they said X, we say X, nobody can decide if X is true, what is
| truth anyway, etc"
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > The progress
|
| Progress towards what, exactly?
| willis936 wrote:
| Victory over the terror of the natural world on all of its
| fronts. That doesn't mean decimation of natural beauty, but
| answering the question "how will I live comfortably and not
| die today?" everyday for everyone forever.
| getpokedagain wrote:
| Do you/we think this is a truly possible or laudable
| goal.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Leaving aside the heart death of the universe, I can
| imagine a future that's a more utopian version of the
| Altered Carbon universe, where everyone who wants to have
| daily backups, which they could set to restore either in
| the cloud or in a biological/robotic body in the case of
| an unintended death.
|
| I don't know if it's a laudable goal, but I think it'll
| eventually be possible.
| willis936 wrote:
| I was asked about the direction of the destination.
| Saying the direction and having everyone agree on it is
| worth a lot when the current bus driver is heading
| towards a cliff. I do think things get better if we all
| pursued this destination together.
|
| If you asked me several years ago I would have said "yes,
| the star trek future is at least partially attainable",
| but that requires a lot of optimism in technological
| advancement that I don't have. I do think that with the
| technology and resources available to us today (or the
| near future) we could support 10 billion people working
| safe labor in air conditioning, full stomachs, free time,
| and on a planet that is still hospitable.
|
| If you want to know how to actually get there: I have no
| idea, but I do know if we don't agree on the direction
| and make steps towards it continuously for many
| generations that we'll never get there. For now I'm
| voting with my feet and contributing my labor to a cause
| I think pushes us in the right direction.
|
| Also, I'm setting aside the battle with natural death.
| Preserving brains and their contents indefinitely is not
| impossible, but transhumanism is as much philosophy as it
| is technology.
| getpokedagain wrote:
| Hmm. I think I get it and its certainly a goal you could
| get behind. I take it you basically oppose Ivan Illich's
| premise that modern medicine will never out smart death
| and fails to help people adapt to the truth of their
| mortality?
| willis936 wrote:
| I don't think that death is a certainty. It is today, but
| we are working on it. We are not supernatural. CGPGrey's
| thoughts on this mirror a lot of my own.
|
| I grant that not all care given to aged is a kindness,
| but not fighting aging is not virtuous.
|
| https://youtu.be/C25qzDhGLx8
|
| https://youtu.be/cZYNADOHhVY
| _el1s7 wrote:
| Good question, I guess progress to the betterment of
| society, people's lives, and human knowledge and power.
|
| But no one really knows what future we are heading towards,
| or what would happen to us in 100,000 years. No one really
| cares to think that far ahead I guess.
| yurishimo wrote:
| We don't think about it that much because every
| assumption we make is likely to turn out to be wildly
| inaccurate and the technology of the time will likely
| solve all of the problems we worry about now long before
| they ever reach that breaking point we are currently
| worrying about.
|
| Take the example from another thread today. In the 60s we
| were worried about food shortages to support the
| exploding population, but it turned out that we solved
| that problem way before the population number was at that
| assumed "breaking point".
|
| We can theorize now about the problems we will face in
| 100k years, but what about the problems we can't ever
| foresee? Aliens with hyperlight laser beams? Rogue
| asteroids? We have no answers for those types of
| problems, but they are probably more likely than anything
| we can dream up today.
| bluGill wrote:
| astroids are a problem, but we know enough physics to say
| aliens can't attack. if they exist they are too far away
| to know we are here.
| griffzhowl wrote:
| > we know enough physics to say aliens can't attack
|
| Don't be too optimistic... This isn't just a question of
| physics but also about the probability of the emergence
| of complex technological intelligence. Since we only know
| about a single case, we can't determine this probability.
| We can make various guesses but these all involve
| assumptions about things other than physics
| bluGill wrote:
| all the alien intelligence needs to obey the laws of
| physics we know. There might be major things we don't
| know but it still fits in our current laws.
|
| unless you are appealing to 'God can do anything' - but
| since God wouldn't do that we can ignore that he could.
| griffzhowl wrote:
| Well, one thing we don't know physically is whether
| traversable wormholes exist
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole#Traversable_wormho
| les
|
| Even if all travel is limited by lightspeed, without
| knowing the probability of emergence of intelligent life,
| we don't know how far away or how long ago such life is
| likely to have formed.
|
| Even if we did have a better idea about this probability,
| we still couldn't rule out that intelligent life had by
| chance formed relatively nearby, relatively long ago,
| thereby allowing them to reach us by now. Nothing in
| physics forbids this as far as I know.
|
| Personally I don't think an advanced alien civ would
| attack us anyway, because we'd be no threat. Since
| intelligence seems to imply curiosity, they might want to
| observe or experiment with us instead, but that's
| speculative
| butlike wrote:
| Well it can be fun (sometimes terrifying) to try and
| imagine that far ahead, but unlike hindsight, it is, at
| the end of a day, just a guess
| bonoboTP wrote:
| I didn't mean it in a moral sense, but in sheer production,
| population, the physical energy moved around the mass of
| materials moved around etc. It's a wholly orthogonal
| question whether this is better in a moral sense, whether
| people are happier, live more in harmony with their
| authentic selves or with God or whatever. The point is that
| even an alien would be able to see that this age is not
| simply like any other where people thought highly of
| themselves. There has been massive material-technological
| improvement in the last two centuries in a way that doesn't
| apply to every era at all. Seriously look at a chart of a
| world population. It's a hockey stick. Again I'm not
| claiming here and now that this is a moral improvement.
| Maybe you think it's for the worse and take the cautionary
| view, like the stories of Icarus, or the Tower of Babel and
| think it's bad that we took too much control of things. But
| that's an orthogonal question.
| cutemonster wrote:
| Not having half of your kids die, could be one thing:
|
| " _For most of human history, around 1 in 2 newborns died
| before reaching the age of 15. By 1950, that figure had
| declined to around one-quarter globally. By 2020, it had
| fallen to 4%._ "
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality
| achrono wrote:
| Towards maximizing the sum of individual happiness, power,
| beauty and knowledge. Maybe a few other attributes in
| there, but these are the bare minimum that no civilization
| would deny for itself.
|
| The question of course is 'how'. For the last few
| centuries, the answer has been technology.
| vjk800 wrote:
| In many cultures, there is/was also the idea of cyclical
| history. Things don't go forward or backward, they just
| repeat themselves in slightly different ways infinitely.
| grosswait wrote:
| " all this has happened before. All this shall happen
| again."
| Tyrannosaur wrote:
| It reminds me of Vernor Vinge's _Zones of Thought_ trilogy,
| especially the observation the traders make in the second
| book that all planet-bound civilizations are doomed to
| collapse at some point. They are usually able to restore
| technological progress more quickly the more records they
| have, but without leaving the planet are still doomed to
| repeat the cycle. IIRC there is even more-or-less
| standardized "uplift" protocols - series of technological
| reveals for less-developed civilizations to rapidly
| advance/restore their capabilities.
|
| I wonder if there is academic study comparing past-focused,
| future-focused, and cyclical views of human progress in
| literature.
| korse wrote:
| Excellent books.
| rmah wrote:
| Sounds like Niven and Pournell's Moties civilization
| cycle from "The Mote in God's Eye"
| frmersdog wrote:
| "Collapse" is maybe hyperbole in this case, if it's
| building on our own history to extrapolate forward. For
| us, certain societies have collapsed, and with them have
| been lost certain practices or technologies, but human
| civilization as a whole has been largely steady or
| growing since the agricultural revolution (using
| population size as a heuristic). There's always the
| threat of ecological collapse, but that's something that
| has only happened a few times in the history of life on
| the planet, and we haven't really faced anything like it
| before at civilization-wide scale. There's always been
| another group to move in and take up the abandoned land.
| Without some major technological breakthroughs, yes,
| we're likely to face a collapse eventually, but as a
| biosphere, not merely a civilization. Short of that,
| people seem to keep on keeping on.
|
| I think the mistake comes from something common to a lot
| of sci-fi, which is mistaking the scale of a planetary
| setting. It takes a lot of energy to disrupt life on a
| global scale (we're managing it, but it's taken hundreds
| of years). "At some point" is carrying a lot of weight in
| that observation.
| eep_social wrote:
| > always been another group to move in and take up the
| abandoned land
|
| Completely agree with your points, but I think it's worth
| mentioning that the collapsing populations may not have
| been aware of this depending on their level of isolation
| and cultural view on outsiders.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > Many cultures placed the pinnacle age in their past, before
| some corruption or decay took place
|
| North America, for example.
| plomme wrote:
| IIRC the ancient Greeks did not view themselves as the
| "pinnacle of civilisation", but somewhat fallen from a time of
| heroes or a golden age in the past. This golden age is when
| many of their well known epics take place. Another point of
| interest here is that I have heard the estimated timing of the
| golden age to be right before the bronze age collapse, meaning
| that they were literally a kind of post apocalyptic society
| reminiscing about their past.
| username332211 wrote:
| Or, if you were less charitable about the nature of Bronze
| Age social organization, you could say it's a society of
| former slaves hopelessly romanticizing their former masters.
|
| On a related note, I think the whole mystery of the Bronze
| Age collapse becomes fairly obvious once you consider the
| nature of Bronze Age societies and the way they'd be affected
| by a technology [iron] that allows a village with a can-do
| attitude to resist the predations of the local god-king. (Or
| to become predators themselves, perhaps by taking to the
| sea.)
| mr_toad wrote:
| Slavery was quite common in classical Greece too,
| especially in Sparta.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Athens too - the vast majority of the population were
| slaves or 'metics' - non-Athenian foreigners. Some slaves
| worked as partners with their citizen master and it
| wasn't unusual for such a slave to be adopted into a
| family and thus become a citizen. Such slaves had greater
| rights than women, who could never become citizens.
| username332211 wrote:
| That was chattel slavery which doesn't generate the same
| feelings of devotion compared to divine monarchy. We've
| all seen the great sadness of the North Korean people at
| the passing of their Dear Leaders.
|
| This in spite of the tendency of said Dear Leaders to
| keep their charges in famine conditions, something absent
| even from most modern systems that are close to chattel
| slavery, for example in the Gulf states and in human
| trafficking operations.
| coliveira wrote:
| Many people in USA are very fond of their Dear Leader,
| despite cuts on basic survival needs such as food stamps.
| close04 wrote:
| > I bet ancient people saw themselves as the pinnacle of
| civilisation, much like we do now.
|
| I think the Romans were right to believe that, and so are we
| today.
|
| But the ride wasn't sa clean, steady slope up. For example
| there's a reason the dark ages are called dark. Most people of
| the time (except the few educated) didn't know there was
| something better in another time and another place. They
| probably thought that's as good as anyone's ever had.
|
| Now we live in the first period in history where knowledge of
| history is accessible to almost any person. So as a regular guy
| you can have a good sense of where to place these times on the
| scale of civilization.
| graemep wrote:
| > For example there's a reason the dark ages are called dark.
| Most people of the time (except the few educated) didn't know
| there was something better in another time and another place.
| They probably thought that's as good as anyone's ever had.
|
| I am pretty sure you are wrong on multiple counts there.
|
| 1. The "dark ages" were called dark because of a lack of
| written records, after the collapse of the Roman Empire and
| its centralised systems and imperial bureaucracy.
|
| 2. A lot of people did know there had been a different age
| before. Even if not literate they would regard the literate
| as the source of knowledge and every village would have some
| literate people.
|
| 3. Life was better for many people. An obvious example was
| the decline of slavery ( a huge proportion of the population
| of the Roman Empire) but the descendants of slaves were not
| the only people who benefitted from the removal of imperial
| power, and heavy imperial taxes, etc.
|
| https://www.medievalists.net/2023/06/middle-ages-dark-ages/
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
| saispas wrote:
| I think that's true (particularly about the Dark ages not
| being uncultured), but in some places, the signs that what
| came before was vastly superior technologically (and
| culturally) would have been all around them.
|
| E.g. a century after the Romans left Britain, it would be
| fairly obvious to everyone that whoever built the
| aqueducts, villas, fortresses etc had vastly superior
| technology.
|
| And much of the literacy was aimed at preserving what
| knowledge had survived from the classical period - in the
| service of religion in the monasteries, of course, but also
| in what we'd know call 'science'. E.g. wasn't Aristotle
| taken as the go to authority in scientific matters for the
| scholastics?
| arethuza wrote:
| Wasn't the Renaissance about the idea that, after nearly
| a thousand years, society was finally approaching the
| levels that Rome had achieved?
| graemep wrote:
| There were many medieval advances in technology, art,
| architecture and science.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_technology
|
| There were serious scientific advances including the
| beginnings of the scientific method which goes back about
| 500 yeas earlier than the renaissance: https://en.wikiped
| ia.org/wiki/European_science_in_the_Middle...
| arethuza wrote:
| Yes, I'm not denying that there were a lot of
| developments in that time period - more that there was a
| _perception_ that things were declining, even if that
| wasn 't actually true.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >There were many medieval advances in technology, art,
| architecture and science.
|
| My favorite is the gothic arch because it basically
| decomposes into the math of man hours, calories and the
| work of moving stone. They didn't have the surpluses the
| Romans did so they were forced to invent a more efficient
| arch.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| Medieval != Dark Ages
|
| The Dark Ages refers to the 2-3 centuries immediately
| after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Medieval
| era / Middle Ages extend all the way to the start of the
| Renaissance.
| graemep wrote:
| > E.g. a century after the Romans left Britain, it would
| be fairly obvious to everyone that whoever built the
| aqueducts, villas, fortresses etc had vastly superior
| technology.
|
| Yes, but
|
| 1. Britain was where there is the best case for a serious
| regression. 2. Building those systems was also a matter
| of imperial priorities and imperial centralisation.
| Smaller kingdoms did not need it.
|
| > And much of the literacy was aimed at preserving what
| knowledge had survived from the classical period
|
| Much was, and Aristotle was taken as far too much of an
| authority. There were probably not many advances in
| science during the early middle ages, but there were in
| high and late medieval. Even in the early middle ages
| there were advances in architecture and agriculture and
| some amazing art produced.
| saispas wrote:
| I chose Roman Britain because I live in a city (Deva)
| which was once meant to be the capital of the whole
| province, where the evidence of lost glories would have
| been glaringly apparent to everybody for a long time,
| even though the settlement was still major in
| contemporary terms.
|
| More generally, some technology _was_ lost everywhere
| (well, in the Western world anyway): nobody knew how to
| make waterproof concrete again until a manuscript
| reappeared in the fifteenth century.
|
| Roman Britain is just one example, but it does disprove
| the general thesis that people always think they are the
| pinnacle of civilisation - and it's by far from the only
| example, of course. For much of the next thousand years
| (and beyond) Classical Rome, and later, Ancient Greece
| were seen as a lost golden age, something to learn from
| and aspire to (and adapt to religious dogma in a fallen
| world which was going to end fairly shortly anyway...)
|
| Of course they had their fair share of brilliant people
| and they made significant advances and it's facile to
| disparage them ("Dark ages") but it does seem like a very
| different mental view of the world.
| close04 wrote:
| Well that was trigger happy and arguing for the sale of
| arguing. We have different definitions of what an advanced
| civilization is.
|
| On #1, do you see the lack of written records as cutting
| down bureaucracy? Because historians see it as a period of
| civilization downturn and turmoil. No focus on things
| outside the necessities which were mostly about survival.
| The enlightenment or renaissance didn't have these names
| for the return to documenting thoroughly. It was because of
| everything in between.
|
| #2 "A lot of people" says nothing. The average person in
| the year 900 had no formal education so would probably know
| at best some stories or legends about what came 500 years
| before. But let's not pretend this changes the meaning of
| what I said.
|
| #3 Many people today are slaves so were the dark ages more
| civilized?
| potato3732842 wrote:
| > An obvious example was the decline of slavery ( a huge
| proportion of the population of the Roman Empire) but the
| descendants of slaves were not the only people who
| benefitted from the removal of imperial power, and heavy
| imperial taxes, etc.
|
| Look at how a lot of those societies were structured. Were
| those people really doing "better" or are we just assuming
| that because of the biases our modern culture brings?
|
| Being not a slave across the rome-middle ages boundary is
| like having a degree in liberal arts. It might've meant
| something at first but the back slide basically watered it
| down to nothing for a lot of people. That's why it went
| away. There was no point in maintaining it as an
| institution generally after Rome fell.
|
| More broadly, there's a reason nobody really cared about
| slavery, rights, freedom, etc, etc, until the 1600s+ (i.e.
| the beginning of the off ramp toward industrialized
| societies). Prior to then so much of society was enslaved
| by the literal physics of the work that needed to be done
| to keep a roof over everyone's head and food in their
| stomachs that it didn't really matter. Almost nobody was in
| a place to exert more influence upon their life arc than
| the wind does upon the path of a stone thrown through the
| air (which is to say some but not much) so society didn't
| expend effort to hash out the details of something that
| wasn't relevant. Only once there were more surpluses the
| various shades of freedom become something that society
| could benefit from defining.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| The lack of written records during the Dark Ages is a sign
| of a major civilizational regression.
|
| Writing and learning retreated to a relatively small group
| - the clergy. The cities that had thrived under the empire
| - and the public works that supported them - disappeared.
|
| There has been a historiographical tendency to downplay the
| significance of the fall of the Western Roman Empire and to
| euphemistically refer to it as a "transformation." But
| we're talking about a massive decline in literacy and
| economic activity, and there are all sorts of indicators
| (like average human height) that show that people were
| dramatically worse off.
| verzali wrote:
| Is the headline actually wrong? Its literally about how they
| saw themselves.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| Since I'm assuming that Bret Devereaux [1] isn't here to raise
| the point, I'll do it instead: "ancient people" is a term that,
| as we colloquially understand it, tends to exclude _most of the
| ancient people_ , namely, the peasants. Sure, a Roman would sit
| with their aqueducts, but for that one person in the city you
| need a couple orders of magnitude more people working the
| fields.
|
| As I understand Bret's last post about the life of peasants[2]
| regarding how they saw life,
|
| > _the lives of these peasants work in a series of cycles.
| There's a reason agrarian societies of these sort often do not
| think in terms of time as a linear progression, but instead as
| a set of 'ages' or 'cycles,' with the present, in a sense,
| endlessly repeating in a static sort of rhythm. For these
| societies technological and social progress, while real is
| often so slow as to be almost or entirely imperceptible on a
| normal human lifespan._
|
| [1] https://acoup.blog
|
| [2] https://acoup.blog/2025/10/17/collections-life-work-death-
| an...
| potato3732842 wrote:
| I think your (perhaps intentionally) missing the point as a
| pretext to pontificate about and link to things that are only
| tangentially related.
|
| Even if these people aren't well recorded in history you can
| take a pretty ironclad estimate as to what they thought in
| aggregate by looking at the clergy, the administrators, etc,
| etc and what they were preaching, saying, etc.
|
| How one sees their individual life doesn't have direct
| bearing on the society they live in.
|
| Let's take for example a farmer on the outskirts of some
| village in southwest England. His bloodline may have been
| occupying the same land for Millenia. Their feelings about
| doing so may not even change over that time. But depending on
| the century you put him in he and everyone else in the
| society he lives in think of the way they fit into the larger
| world very differently.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| Roman elites were obsessed with Greek culture, in a way similar
| to many Americans' current fascination with the British class
| system (Downton Abbey, Bridgerton, Rivals, etc.)
| compyman wrote:
| This is a very flat view - the Roman empire is born in a period
| of civil war, and after a relatively brief period of peace in
| the imperial core starts imploding and rebuilding itself in
| different configurations.
|
| The art and culture was very often echoing an imagined past of
| yeoman landholders + citizens.(very similar to the invocation
| of 'Real America' today). And their foundation myth imagines
| that they are a continuation of the trojan civilization.
|
| For everyone who was not at the top of the imperial hierarchy
| it's pretty easy to imagine that they thought civilization
| could be improved! Aristotle writes a defense of slavery -
| which implies that someone was attacking the institution. It's
| not a big leap to think that enslaved people could picture a
| world where they weren't enslaved, or that women could imagine
| having political/civil/property rights.
|
| I think maybe something you are getting at is that those
| structures felt indestructible at the time, that in
| christianity associating the end of the roman empire with the
| apocalypse. Needless to say we aren't posting this in latin.
| KolibriFly wrote:
| Wild how mirrors across cultures weren't just tools but often
| spiritual objects, tied to gods, beauty, protection, or truth
| intrasight wrote:
| I often find it very spiritual to look deeply into my own eyes.
| It's like a viewport into my soul.
|
| Other times I'm just removing a bit of spinach from my teeth.
|
| I assume that it was the same for ancient mirror users.
| metalman wrote:
| ancient, and some current peoples, view themselves through the
| lense of truth, verrifiable, self evidentiary truth starting with
| physical existance and that this is shared, and a complete
| understanding of what it is to be human, which may or may not, be
| shared
| wkjagt wrote:
| It's weird to think that we need a mirror (or other means of
| imaging) to see our own face. We can see a large part of our own
| body directly, but we will never be able to directly see our own
| face like other people do (unless, I guess, you have an eye pop
| out in some kind of accident, but I guess at that point this is
| not the kind of thing you would consider).
| GuB-42 wrote:
| You also can't hear your own voice like other people do,
| because what you hear when you are speaking mostly come from
| the vibrations in your bones rather than from sound waves going
| through the air.
|
| And unlike with mirrors, something we always had, be it just a
| pond of water, the ability to hear your own voice like others
| hear it came with recording devices, and is therefore very
| recent (19th century).
| aspenmayer wrote:
| You can hear your own voice as an echo, though it is somewhat
| distorted in a similar way as one's reflection is warped in a
| pool of water. Amphitheaters are an ancient building
| technique which utilize acoustic properties to reflect sound
| toward distant listeners, but I'm not familiar with
| structures built to reflect sound back toward the speaker
| specifically, though I imagine that such a structure could be
| built. Naturally occurring echo chambers exist in the
| environment, as well.
| kryptokommunist wrote:
| Thats so cool. I have built a mirror with some added technology
| for science exhibitions and now seeing that this has been an
| ancient endeavour going back to the greeks is awesome:
| https://kryptokommun.ist/portfolio/projects/tech/2024/07/01/...
| andblac wrote:
| And now we've built LLMs - the biggest mirror of them all. The
| Internet and smartphones gave us countless ways to look at
| ourselves and see how others see us. And then LLMs helped us gaze
| at the sum of all that and even confront reflections of our own
| thoughts.
|
| Yeah, TFA ended just before it got to the really interesting part
| of how self-reflection itself is fundamental to the development
| of concisousness. Mirror-like technologies don't just show us our
| own appearance. They help us understand how we relate to the
| world around us.
|
| It reminds me of Kieslowski's movie Camera Buff (1979), where the
| main character in iconic scene points the camera at himself and
| realizes that the act of making movies reflects not only his
| subjects, but also on who he is in relation them.
|
| Yeah, I'd would love to read article on all that.
| nachox999 wrote:
| "we can understand what they valued so much that they were
| willing to sacrifice long hours or scarce resources to get it."
|
| well, those long hours must have been boring as hell. I don't
| think they felt it was a great sacrifice
| Brendinooo wrote:
| This is a good piece to consider in light of some stuff I've been
| thinking about with LLMs - new technology, that is. I've been
| reflecting on how some tech changes our relationship with the
| world, and can do so with such thoroughness that we forget that
| other ways of thinking even existed.
|
| Plato didn't like books. Trithemius stood up for the scriptorium
| against the onslaught of the printing press. Baudelaire lamented
| photography as a refuge for lazy painters. And on it goes.
|
| Mirrors are so commoditized now that they are a mere utility, but
| there was a time when they were
| miraculous...mirror..aculous...never mind. Special. That's fun to
| think about. Especially thinking about something like Snow White,
| a story that people still understand but probably has a link or
| two to the past with the "mirror on the wall who's the fairest of
| them all" stuff.
| falcor84 wrote:
| I was actually talking with some small children recently about
| the snow white story, and I found it amazing how for them there
| was nothing magical about the mirror on the wall - it's just a
| different form factor of a google home device.
|
| Edit: on a separate note, this got me thinking - why does the
| story make it a mirror? I don't recall it ever being used for
| its reflective property. Is there supposed to be some deeper
| meaning to the mirror being a reflection of the queen? Because
| otherwise, it could have just been a magic talking picture.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| I don't know for sure, but it's worth noting that the
| original story was from 1812, which is...based on a quick
| wiki search, right on the cusp of mirrors being made for the
| masses. (Seems like they would have been available for
| royalty though.) And as the story was retold, it wasn't
| always a mirror.
| esperent wrote:
| The Grim version was published in 1812, but it's based on
| older stories. Here's one published in 1782 that also
| features a mirror:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richilde_(fairy_tale)
|
| However these are both just published versions of oral
| folktales. The basic outline of the story might go back
| hundreds of years earlier, and nobody will ever be able to
| say when the mirror first showed up.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| To the extent that I'm trying to make a point, I think
| this supports it!
|
| > By the time Richilde is fifteen, she is an orphan and
| the new Countess. Her dying mother warned her to be
| virtuous and never use the mirror for frivolity
|
| This is something that would be a lot harder to
| synthesize in a world where mirrors are abundant, and the
| link between self-reflection and vanity is strong here.
| loudmax wrote:
| I'd caution against looking for deliberate symbolism in these
| ancient tales. The Grimm brothers wrote these in the early
| 19th century, but the folk tales they drew from are far
| older. But the mirror seems to be a representation of vanity.
| The Queen is gazing in the mirror because she's obsessed with
| her beauty, which is why she's jealous of the younger Snow
| White.
| xeonmc wrote:
| Perhaps the fable needs a modern update:
|
| "GPTmazon-Portal on the wall, who is the fairest of them
| all?"
|
| "Excellent question! Before we delve into the answer, let
| me tell you about today's sponsored product presented by
| Samsung advertisement -- crypto.com beauty credits!"
| allturtles wrote:
| My interpretation: the mirror is a symbol of vanity.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Mirrors have many supernatural associations. Vampires, for
| instance, cast no reflection within them. They invoke spirits
| if the spirt's name is spoken three times. Sometimes, they
| can trap spirits or demons (must be a dozen modern movies
| that still utilize this trope, though the writers don't
| necessarily even recognize where the trope originates).
|
| It's some very ancient meme (in the true sense of the word)
| that follows humans around without them even recognizing that
| it's there.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Photography as well. Some cultures thought that having your
| photograph taken would steal your soul.
| falcor84 wrote:
| My first introduction to this idea as a kid was a great
| episode of the TMNT cartoon named "Camera Bugged"[0],
| which had aliens with a camera that actually made people
| disappear.
|
| [0] https://turtlepedia.fandom.com/wiki/Camera_Bugged
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The association between beauty, vanity, and mirrors is pretty
| clear I would think.
|
| Also, mirrors have always carried some mystical qualities in
| folklore. In my country, many superstitious people still
| cover up mirrors for a few days in the house of a recently
| deceased, out of some obviously pre-Christian belief that the
| soul could get trapped/hide inside.
| coliveira wrote:
| > why does the story make it a mirror?
|
| This is what's called a metaphor.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| ok what's it a metaphor for?
| coliveira wrote:
| A mirror is a metaphor for yourself, your interior world.
| The image she saw in the mirror was her own.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| as others have noted there are elements of vanity associated
| with mirrors. But that is not all of the reason, generally
| when one makes a decision in a story there are many things
| leading into the decision and the mirror is superior to a
| painting. The reasons follow:
|
| 1. A mirror does offer a current view of who you are, she
| asks it who is the fairest of all and looks at herself, but
| one day the mirror tells her she is not the fairest when she
| looks at it. This is as noted vanity, but it is also true.
| She is vain to ask the mirror who the fairest is, expecting
| the answer to be be her, but the mirror is truthful.
|
| 2. paintings do not move, a mirror moves, it is a better
| subject to query. You look at yourself in the mirror you move
| it moves, people can talk to themselves in the mirror. The
| painting of yourself offers the past and should stay
| untouched. This is why the picture of Dorian Gray does not
| say untouched, it behaves as a mirror, showing the truth
| while Dorian behaves as a painting showing the past and
| falsehood. The mirror is a better object to interrogate, the
| painting a better object to observe.
|
| 3. I believe at the time mirrors were known and more valued
| as objects to possess by the lower classes. This is just my
| belief. It is difficult for me to conceive of poor people
| thinking boy, I sure would like to have a portrait of me done
| up super fine. That would be sweet! Whereas I can totally
| imagine them thinking Wow, having a really large mirror would
| be super luxury and so useful! Damn I wish I had a mirror!!
|
| on edit: obviously there can be many more reasons for
| choosing a mirror, these are just the three that immediately
| spring to mind if I were writing the story what I would
| choose.
| geysersam wrote:
| Isn't it a mirror because the queen is so obsessed with her
| looks? She gazes at her own beauty in the mirror, before
| asking the mirror to confirm that she is indeed most
| beautiful in the land.
| krapp wrote:
| That is probably part of it, but mirrors are often used in
| the occult to summon spirits and see the future, so it's
| also an appropriately "witchy" thing to do.
| amenhotep wrote:
| Ever try implementing a mirror in a video game? They're just
| inherently magical objects, portals into an illusory world,
| you see _into_ them in a way you don 't with a picture. A
| magical talking picture just wouldn't hit the same, it'd be
| too clearly fictional.
| mikestew wrote:
| _Ever try implementing a mirror in a video game?_
|
| Completely off-topic, but how many people would you
| realistically expect to answer "yes" to that question?
| bitwize wrote:
| The name of a tool is often closely associated with its
| primary use case, not the mechanism of its function. Tools
| which offer expansions of a particular use case are often
| named for the tool that they build upon, not for the
| mechanism by which they fulfill that use. Smartphones, for
| instance, are clearly computers, yet we call them "phones"
| because we use them for social connections over long distance
| --it expands the use case for the Western Electric 500, not
| so much a Compaq 386. (This is why the fight to preserve
| total app freedom on Android is a lost cause; success would
| make an Android phone a better Compaq but a worse phone.)
|
| If the queen had an ordinary mirror, she would use it to
| ensure and maintain her beauty. It's specifically a magic
| mirror because it expands that use case, through magical
| properties that allow her to compare her beauty to that of
| every other woman in the kingdom.
| mohn wrote:
| I'd like to read the accounts of contemporary curmudgeons
| bemoaning the way young Greeks are clamoring for mom's mirror,
| and how you should limit your kids to no more than one twelfth
| of a day of mirror time, setting the clepsydra if necessary.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| Yeah, for sure! I mean, Narcissus is in the public
| consciousness there to back up your idea.
|
| It's an interesting idea: that a piece of tech can represent
| one thing and have certain moral sensibilities that form
| around it, and then some innovation or something changes our
| relationship with it (in this case, puts it on a wall in
| every bathroom).
|
| Maybe it changed us in ways we can't fully know! Maybe
| commoditizing the mirror largely robbed it of its power. Or
| maybe we're all a bunch of narcissists in ways we can't
| comprehend because we don't have the anti-mirror people out
| there scolding us.
| noduerme wrote:
| Before mirrors, people would say there was something stuck
| in your teeth and you had to just believe them.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| ::inspired by this comment, drafts a thousand word blog
| post about the decay of teeth, and social trust::
| gausswho wrote:
| Or even today, the rediscovered idea of separating the sink
| (and mirror) from the toilet, so preeners aren't holding up
| the flow.
|
| Makes you wonder if mirrors have been a net negative on
| civilization, for its acceleration of vanity.
| tuesdaynight wrote:
| > can do so with such thoroughness that we forget that other
| ways of thinking even existed.
|
| There is a debate between Chomsky and Foucault [1] where they
| discuss exactly that at some point (I don't remember the
| timestamp, sorry). There is an argument about how most of the
| knowledge of a specific era is "lost" when there is a big
| discovery. It was a random recommendation from YouTube, and I
| was quite pleased when I decided to give it a watch.
|
| [1]
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=eF9BtrX0YEE&pp=ygUVQ2hvbXNreSBhb...
| WaxProlix wrote:
| I encountered this in book form way back in my 20s and it was
| a real treasure. Somehow it didn't click that of course there
| was a video recording of the actual debate itself - a real
| debate! - and of course that recording is now on YouTube.
|
| Thanks for the link, I'll have to muster up the attention
| span to give it a (re?)watch
| cainxinth wrote:
| I thought you were going to go a different direction and point
| out that many people don't realize how easily LLMs can act like
| "mirrors" and reflect their own thoughts back to them.
| complianceowl wrote:
| The Pun Committee accepts your pun and salutes you.
| alansaber wrote:
| Our tools define what is possible, so it's not too surprising.
| I've yet to dream about CLI tools or Microsoft Word fortunately
| jacobolus wrote:
| One fun one is that people used counting boards for all of
| their complicated calculations (literally "calculi" =
| "pebbles", i.e. counters) for many thousands of years, starting
| we don't know precisely when but maybe sometime before 3000 BC
| in Mesopotamia, and at least in Europe continuing up until only
| a few centuries ago (in some places until the 18th century or
| after) and now almost no one has even heard of them, let alone
| has any idea how to use one.
|
| (For what it's worth: I think a counting board is still the
| best way to get small kids doing some basic calculations and
| understanding a positional number system: moving buttons or
| pennies around on a piece of paper with some lines drawn on it
| takes much less manual dexterity than writing, and the
| representation is much more direct and concrete than written
| symbols.)
| primitivesuave wrote:
| The abacus is a standard part of elementary education in
| several Asian countries, for precisely the reasons you
| mentioned regarding numerical intuition. In American
| education, a student might only learn about the abacus from a
| brief paragraph in their history textbook.
|
| Even today, there are average people in the Chinese
| countryside who know how to calculate the solution to a set
| of linear equations with counting sticks (a technique known
| as fangcheng - Fang Cheng ). My point being that _usage of
| mechanical calculation assistance_ is indeed a useful skill,
| and would probably be beneficial in American /western
| education as well.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| American schools do use "manipulatives" to introduce
| counting and numbers, addition, subtraction, etc. They
| might use checkers, or popsicle sticks, or anything small
| and easy to hold/move.
| jacobolus wrote:
| The use of various kinds of mathematical manipulatives
| and concrete materials is great (including base ten
| blocks, cuisenaire rods, ten frames, number lines, dice,
| balance scales with weights, geoboards, pattern blocks,
| multi-link cubes, etc.). I'm a fan of all of them. But I
| think the counting board, per se, is a sadly neglected
| tool, not least because it gives a nice connection to the
| past.
| noduerme wrote:
| The abacus is awesome, and fun to learn. My parents bought
| me a miniature one on a trip to San Francisco when I was 8
| years old (first time visiting Chinatown). It came with an
| illustrated pamphlet and I started practicing with it and
| figured out how to use it for basic math. I'd recommend it
| for any kid.
| jacobolus wrote:
| A sliding-bead suanpan or soroban is a practical and very
| portable tool for doing basic sums and differences, but
| after working with my own kids I don't think it's as good
| as a teaching tool as a counting board is, and I expect
| it's probably not as effective for doing more advanced
| calculations either, compared to a flat counting board
| where counters can be positioned arbitrarily, and where
| it's easy to add as many additional counts as you want by
| just making some more lines on a new piece of paper.
|
| The real advantages of a counting board are (1) it needs no
| special equipment beyond a pile of pebbles, pennies,
| buttons, or other tokens; (2) it can be easily modified to
| apply to different number systems or specific calculations
| (though it's perhaps not as conveniently flexible as
| symbolic writing); and (3) there are many different
| representations of any number, and the game of calculation
| is about starting the problem off immediately with one
| version of "the right answer" already on the board and then
| performing various meaning-preserving operations to
| simplify the representation until arriving at one which is
| convenient to interpret or compare. This seems quite
| different psychologically from the use of a soroban
| (disclaimer: I'm not an expert) which is more about
| performing a sequence of steps in a pre-determined
| algorithm to obtain a correct answer, with intermediate
| steps not showing a representation of the same number
| because the soroban has only one unique way to represent
| any particular string of digits. I think the more flexible
| and representation-agnostic tool better promotes an
| essential skill which only increase in use as people get to
| higher levels of mathematics and other technical subjects.
| The soroban might be better for an accounting tool but the
| inflexibility is a deficiency for a teaching/thinking tool.
| LiquidSky wrote:
| I have a toddler, do you have any recommendations of
| things you did with a counting board with your kids for
| teaching basic math at a young age?
| jacobolus wrote:
| We use a variant of Steve Stephenson's counting board,
| which we call "button arithmetic" as an activity.
| Stephenson (since deceased) was a retired engineer turned
| high school teacher who got very interested in counting
| boards in the 2000s. He made some YouTube videos here:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL545ABCC6BA8D6F44
|
| and some web pages:
|
| https://ethw.org/Ancient_Computers
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20170903104702/http://sks23cu
| .ne...
|
| Some of Stephenson's historical speculations are somewhat
| implausible, but it's fun to think about, or try to
| invent your own alternative ideas, and overall I think
| ancient calculation methods are underestimated by many
| modern scholars.
|
| With my kids (now 9 and 6), we haven't bothered with
| Stephenson's floating-point-with-exponents system, but we
| do base ten arithmetic using horizontal lines for powers
| of ten and a vertical line to separate positive/negative.
| The space between two lines represents (as in medieval
| Europe) five times the previous power of ten.
|
| I went to a fabric store and examined every type of
| button they had in bulk, then bought a bunch of my
| favorite type: some round metal ones, somewhat smaller
| than pennies, symmetrical on top/bottom, with a slightly
| domed shape that makes them much easier to pick up than
| coins. But pennies also work okay, as do carefully chosen
| beach pebbles.
|
| I think counting boards are quite helpful for kids, a
| powerful and flexible tool that they can grow into. They
| can get started with it at age 3-4, before having the
| manual dexterity to write numerals.
| LiquidSky wrote:
| Thank you!
| palmotea wrote:
| > The abacus is a standard part of elementary education in
| several Asian countries, for precisely the reasons you
| mentioned regarding numerical intuition. In American
| education, a student might only learn about the abacus from
| a brief paragraph in their history textbook.
|
| IIRC, Montessori schools use them, or something like them.
| harryday wrote:
| > In the myth of Narcissus, a beautiful young demigod who saw his
| own reflection in a pool of water became so enamored with it that
| he refused to move. He rejected the advances of beautiful young
| women and eventually wasted away, unable to break the spell of
| his own image.
|
| Alternative, deeper understanding --
| https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/10/the_story_of_narciss...
| nathan_douglas wrote:
| Thank you; I enjoyed this quite a bit.
| OJFord wrote:
| > These mirrors were valuable -- they've been found with other
| luxury grave goods -- but only somewhat useful. They were
| reflective to an extent, but aren't capable of reflecting much
| detail or color [image] Still, the people of ancient Anatolia
| thought it was worth hours of labor to see even a dim reflection
| of their own faces.
|
| I can't help but wonder if there's something we've lost, some
| stropping material or process capable of making them
| significantly more reflective than we image.
| tiahura wrote:
| I need to get to the Met.
| christudor wrote:
| Vaguely relevant: the biological symbol for female (the circle
| with a cross below it) is a stylisation of a hand holding a hand
| mirror.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| Lol. I had always assumed it was a stylized womb.
| MrsPeaches wrote:
| High recommended book which looks at the histroy of ideas, which
| gives you a good idea of what people thought of themselves
| through history:
|
| Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/408204.Ideas
| Razengan wrote:
| In the water? Since they didn't have mirrors..
| mathgeek wrote:
| > I have no idea how difficult it is to manufacture these items,
| or how it's done; the work associated with their creation is
| purposefully obscured from view.
|
| On the contrary, often these processes are easy to find via
| youtube or the ever reliable How It's Made series. I'd argue that
| for most common items, folks just prefer to not know or at least
| not seek.
|
| What _is_ obscured is the process of acquiring the resources.
| underlipton wrote:
| _sigh_
|
| https://www.penn.museum/sites/journal/8987/
|
| https://archive.is/DkRLv
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