In 331 BC, a deadly epidemic hit Rome and at least 170 women were executed for causing it by veneficium.[18] In 184–180 BC, another epidemic hit Italy, and about 5,000 people were brought to trial and executed for veneficium.[17] If the reports are accurate, writes Hutton, “then the Republican Romans hunted witches on a scale unknown anywhere else in the ancient world”.[17]
… and anyway it’s not very convincing to single out witch hunting among all the other things people have always done, because people have always been shitty. Including, but by no means limited to, massive amounts of “scapegoating and blame”.
Not sure if your point is that you disagree with my description of war in ancient Greece and the Old Testament, or that you think I cherry-picked convenient examples in trend that goes overwhelmingly in the opposite direction, or you are ignoring the data points completely and your argument is merely “what you said pattern-matches a political tribe X, now here are some books written by a tribe Y”.
Looking at historical documents, it seems to me that “kill everyone who resists, and install a puppet government” (the Western countries recently) is an improvement over “kill everyone who resists, and make the survivors learn your language and your version of history” (Russia today, and the Western countries a century or more ago) which is an improvement over “”kill everyone who resists, sell everyone else as a slave” (e.g. the ancient Greek city states) which was an improvement over “kill everyone, except for a few young women whom you decide to keep as sex slaves after you raped them” (the Old Testament, and probably everyone before them).
obviously the very concept of survival of the fittest is one that does not even come into play until the 18th and 19th centuries
The theory is new. But the practice… was already practiced by chimpanzees.
in the case of software engineers crossing into the humanities, it’s far too applicable.
They do it in science and technology too. You’re constantly seeing “My first-order, 101-level understanding of some-gigantic-field allows me to confidently say that something-actual-experts-know-is-really-hard is trivial”.
Less Wrong is pretty prone to it, because you get people thinking that Pure Logic can take them further than it actually can, and reasoning from incomplete models.
behave, both as individuals and as nations, in a way that people of the past would find despicably cruel
Please educate me more, don’t merely throw hints like this! Should we burn some cats for fun as an antidote to our general decadence, or did you have other specific things in mind?
Some hypothetical past person’s not being able to recognize their despicable cruelty doesn’t preclude their being able to recognize your despicable cruelty. Even given relatively compatible values, everybody gets their own special set of blind spots.
I do agree that romanticizing the past to vilify the present is wrong, though. And not good scholarship if you don’t bring a lot of evidence along with you. The idea that modernity is “the problem” is badly suspect. So is the idea that “the central values of this era are largely those of biological competition and survival” and that’s somehow different from the past. The past has a whole lot of this group slaughtering that group and justifying it with “survival” arguments… assuming that they bothered to justify it at all. Sometimes it seems to have been just viewed as the natural order of things. Nothing new there.
It reminds me of random affluent white college students trying to address some ancestral guilt about colonial abuses by making the people who got colonized into Morally Superior Beings… which is not only wrong, but itself dehumanizes them and reduces them to props in a rhetorical play.
This feels like debating a holocaust denier. We are moving from “it did not happen at all” to “maybe it wasn’t six million Jews but only five million”. (“You did not name a single historian, Greek city state, solitary event, or personality from history” → “ancients simply did not keep accurate records … what evidence we do have shows the numbers to be always exaggerated”)
The argument by inaccurate records goes both ways. If there is a genocide today, we probably know about it, and someone at least makes a note in Wikipedia. In the past, ethnic groups could be erased with no one (other than the people involved in the war) noticing. The fact that the list of known genocides in 20th century is longer than the list of known genocides in e.g. 12th century is mostly because of better bookkeeping.
And yet, despite choosing a century randomly (if I tried on purpose, I could have chosen e.g. the 13th century with Albigenian Crusade as a good example), Wikipedia mentions “Massacre of the Latins” with about 60 000 dead in the 12th century. In a world where the population was not even 1⁄10 of what it is today, so relatively comparable with the numbers that you have mentioned. And we have no idea about what massacres might have happened in 12th century Africa.
So yes, today we have more victims in absolute numbers, but that’s because we have larger populations and stronger weapons. When you have to kill your enemies using a hand axe, I guess you get quite tired after chopping off dozen heads. With a nuke, you just press a button and thousands die. And yet, despite the other side having nukes, most Japanese survived WW2. (Which is something they totally did not expect, given their usual behavior towards defeated enemies.) The people in the past were as efficient at killing their enemies with swords, as we are with the weapons of mass destruction today.
“Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” (1 Samuel 15:3) Tell me again how civilians were not considered valid targets in the past.
You mention compelling prisoners of war to labor, as an analogy to slavery. Yeah, but that was an exception during the war. (Except for the Soviets, who conveniently kept many of the prisoners of war long after the war was over.) Now compare to a situation thousand years ago, when the slave trade was a crucial part of European economy, comparable to oil trade today. The reason entire countries converted to Christianity was to stop the unending slave raids from their neighbors. (Christians had a taboo against enslaving each other. So did Muslims. Both of them considered it okay to enslave each other, and the pagans.) Or consider Africa: the first black slaves brought to America were legally bought in Africa from the local African slave traders. Americans did not invent slavery; they just provided a huge new market for it.
Sorry, I think it is you who needs to learn history. Yes, humans suck today; the “Noble Savages” were not any better, probably much worse.
Siege of Melos: Athens demanded a tribute, Melos refused to pay, the Athenians executed the men of fighting age and sold the women and children into slavery. They then settled 500 of their own colonists on the island.
Battle of Plataea: After the battle of Plataea, the city [Caryae] was captured by the allied Greeks, the city’s men were executed and the women were enslaved.
Miletus: Persians under Darius the Great punished Miletus for rebellion by selling all of the women and children into slavery, killing the men, and expelling all of the young men as eunuchs, thereby assuring that no Miletus citizen would ever be born again.
Battle of Thebes: Thirty thousand were sold into slavery and six thousand slain in the final fighting. The city was burnt to the ground, sparing only the temples, the Cadmae citadel and the house of Pindar, out of gratitude for Pindar’s verses praising Alexander’s ancestor, Alexander I of Macedon.
The point is exactly that the shittiness seems decreasing on the historical scale, albeit very slowly.
Compare e.g. Moses and Hitler. Both of them became famous for being leaders who demonized their enemies and tried to exterminate them to the last one. Yet the latter is considered the archetype of evil, because he did the thing during the 20th century, when we expected people to do better. The former is considered a holy man by multiple religions, and his violent actions are not considered a stain on his character, because “back then, everyone was like that”.
“Childish” is the word I also keep coming back to, but hesitate to use, for fear of insulting children by comparing them to people like Sam Altman and Elon Musk.
From Wikipedia:
… and anyway it’s not very convincing to single out witch hunting among all the other things people have always done, because people have always been shitty. Including, but by no means limited to, massive amounts of “scapegoating and blame”.
The ancient past was terrifically violent.
Not sure if your point is that you disagree with my description of war in ancient Greece and the Old Testament, or that you think I cherry-picked convenient examples in trend that goes overwhelmingly in the opposite direction, or you are ignoring the data points completely and your argument is merely “what you said pattern-matches a political tribe X, now here are some books written by a tribe Y”.
Looking at historical documents, it seems to me that “kill everyone who resists, and install a puppet government” (the Western countries recently) is an improvement over “kill everyone who resists, and make the survivors learn your language and your version of history” (Russia today, and the Western countries a century or more ago) which is an improvement over “”kill everyone who resists, sell everyone else as a slave” (e.g. the ancient Greek city states) which was an improvement over “kill everyone, except for a few young women whom you decide to keep as sex slaves after you raped them” (the Old Testament, and probably everyone before them).
The theory is new. But the practice… was already practiced by chimpanzees.
They do it in science and technology too. You’re constantly seeing “My first-order, 101-level understanding of some-gigantic-field allows me to confidently say that something-actual-experts-know-is-really-hard is trivial”.
Less Wrong is pretty prone to it, because you get people thinking that Pure Logic can take them further than it actually can, and reasoning from incomplete models.
Please educate me more, don’t merely throw hints like this! Should we burn some cats for fun as an antidote to our general decadence, or did you have other specific things in mind?
Some hypothetical past person’s not being able to recognize their despicable cruelty doesn’t preclude their being able to recognize your despicable cruelty. Even given relatively compatible values, everybody gets their own special set of blind spots.
I do agree that romanticizing the past to vilify the present is wrong, though. And not good scholarship if you don’t bring a lot of evidence along with you. The idea that modernity is “the problem” is badly suspect. So is the idea that “the central values of this era are largely those of biological competition and survival” and that’s somehow different from the past. The past has a whole lot of this group slaughtering that group and justifying it with “survival” arguments… assuming that they bothered to justify it at all. Sometimes it seems to have been just viewed as the natural order of things. Nothing new there.
It reminds me of random affluent white college students trying to address some ancestral guilt about colonial abuses by making the people who got colonized into Morally Superior Beings… which is not only wrong, but itself dehumanizes them and reduces them to props in a rhetorical play.
This feels like debating a holocaust denier. We are moving from “it did not happen at all” to “maybe it wasn’t six million Jews but only five million”. (“You did not name a single historian, Greek city state, solitary event, or personality from history” → “ancients simply did not keep accurate records … what evidence we do have shows the numbers to be always exaggerated”)
The argument by inaccurate records goes both ways. If there is a genocide today, we probably know about it, and someone at least makes a note in Wikipedia. In the past, ethnic groups could be erased with no one (other than the people involved in the war) noticing. The fact that the list of known genocides in 20th century is longer than the list of known genocides in e.g. 12th century is mostly because of better bookkeeping.
And yet, despite choosing a century randomly (if I tried on purpose, I could have chosen e.g. the 13th century with Albigenian Crusade as a good example), Wikipedia mentions “Massacre of the Latins” with about 60 000 dead in the 12th century. In a world where the population was not even 1⁄10 of what it is today, so relatively comparable with the numbers that you have mentioned. And we have no idea about what massacres might have happened in 12th century Africa.
So yes, today we have more victims in absolute numbers, but that’s because we have larger populations and stronger weapons. When you have to kill your enemies using a hand axe, I guess you get quite tired after chopping off dozen heads. With a nuke, you just press a button and thousands die. And yet, despite the other side having nukes, most Japanese survived WW2. (Which is something they totally did not expect, given their usual behavior towards defeated enemies.) The people in the past were as efficient at killing their enemies with swords, as we are with the weapons of mass destruction today.
“Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” (1 Samuel 15:3) Tell me again how civilians were not considered valid targets in the past.
You mention compelling prisoners of war to labor, as an analogy to slavery. Yeah, but that was an exception during the war. (Except for the Soviets, who conveniently kept many of the prisoners of war long after the war was over.) Now compare to a situation thousand years ago, when the slave trade was a crucial part of European economy, comparable to oil trade today. The reason entire countries converted to Christianity was to stop the unending slave raids from their neighbors. (Christians had a taboo against enslaving each other. So did Muslims. Both of them considered it okay to enslave each other, and the pagans.) Or consider Africa: the first black slaves brought to America were legally bought in Africa from the local African slave traders. Americans did not invent slavery; they just provided a huge new market for it.
Sorry, I think it is you who needs to learn history. Yes, humans suck today; the “Noble Savages” were not any better, probably much worse.
Siege of Melos: Athens demanded a tribute, Melos refused to pay, the Athenians executed the men of fighting age and sold the women and children into slavery. They then settled 500 of their own colonists on the island.
Battle of Plataea: After the battle of Plataea, the city [Caryae] was captured by the allied Greeks, the city’s men were executed and the women were enslaved.
Miletus: Persians under Darius the Great punished Miletus for rebellion by selling all of the women and children into slavery, killing the men, and expelling all of the young men as eunuchs, thereby assuring that no Miletus citizen would ever be born again.
Battle of Thebes: Thirty thousand were sold into slavery and six thousand slain in the final fighting. The city was burnt to the ground, sparing only the temples, the Cadmae citadel and the house of Pindar, out of gratitude for Pindar’s verses praising Alexander’s ancestor, Alexander I of Macedon.
The point is exactly that the shittiness seems decreasing on the historical scale, albeit very slowly.
Compare e.g. Moses and Hitler. Both of them became famous for being leaders who demonized their enemies and tried to exterminate them to the last one. Yet the latter is considered the archetype of evil, because he did the thing during the 20th century, when we expected people to do better. The former is considered a holy man by multiple religions, and his violent actions are not considered a stain on his character, because “back then, everyone was like that”.
“Childish” is the word I also keep coming back to, but hesitate to use, for fear of insulting children by comparing them to people like Sam Altman and Elon Musk.