No you wouldn’t. All this stuff may seem obvious now but it only does so because somebody figured it out before.
I mean a lot of what Socrates and Plato wrote and taught are just self justifications for the ancient Greek ruling class.
That delusion is so common that I suspect it must have a name, but I don’t know what it is.
But the better a solution appears, the more a person who sees the solution believes it to be obvious, and therefore also believes that, had they tried to solve the problem, they’d have come up with this “obvious” solution straight away with no effort.
Meanwhile, the person who actually solved the problem could only come up with the perfect simple solution after a lifetime of study in the area to the point that you’d call them an expert or master, and after agonizing for a long time over this particular problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias
“Hindsight bias, also known as the knew-it-all-along phenomenon or creeping determinism, is the common tendency for people to perceive past events as having been more predictable than they were.”
It’s a kind of cognitive bias that assumes things that are obvious to us would be inevitably found without uncertainty, or trial and error.
I think that a “solution” could have that “so obvious” bias like you’re saying. I don’t think that natural phenomena necessarily has to though. I remember many ways that physics and other sciences describe how systems behave being obvious to the point I knew the lesson before it was taught (just without the correct terminology). Density, leverage, heat conduction, etc were just describing behaviors I think most people understand through experience without needing a class. We still credit a guy getting hit with an apple as the “discoverer” of gravity. He just got the clout for something everyone already knew.
Teaching “common sense” is so hard because kids get so offended that you think they are stupid.
Historical projections of population place the global population at roughly 162 million people. Let’s say only .1% of the population was capable of this sort of thing. Although I think it’s low and while these early Greek philosophers were certainly smart the key to their success was wealth and the ability to focus on their “craft”. But I’ll really lowball human intelligence
Anyway, at .1% of people that means roughly 162,000 thousand people would be capable. The number of those with resources to actually dedicate the time even smaller.
Today the world population is over 8 billion, but we’ll use 8 billion. So at .1% that gives us 8 million people alive today that would be capable.
I really underestimated human intelligence, but the point is the same. We have so so many people alive today that there is certainly quite a few people capable of doing these sorts of things
“Einstein is such an idiot. I learned about general relativity in middle school”
I would, too! I would have invented math! All of it!
In the UK our £2 coins have “Standing on the shoulders of giants” written around the rim, to remind us all that no, you wouldn’t have thought of that, you berk.
There’s also the case of, you arnt rich, noble, and from the ruling class that gives your words enough weight to even be considered less remembered at all.
A great deal many things have been discovered and forgotten and rediscovered. Because the first few times they weren’t discovered by a rich enough noble with the power and wealth to spread the knowledge or even get people to listen in the first place.
In ye olden times. It took more then just being smart, you also had to be rich as FUCK or have extremely good connections if not rich as fuck. And in many cases you needed both.
Else you would be ignored, and die with any discovery or advancements you invented in your life.
That’s a pretty exaggerated account, there were and are plenty of poor ass philosophers and writers and scientists and mathematicians.
I agree, but how many have works that people are changing their lives over. Someone might be sitting on the best new battery idea the world will see for 3 generations but get no attention or funding.
But this is about philosophy, not society.
deleted by creator
Too bad I don’t get to sit around and think all day so I can discuss with others who sit around and think all day.
Have you tried being born wealthy? Hope this helps!
I could also had put 3 sticks of the same size on one axis and 4 on another and see that between the ends you can fit 5 sticks.
Wat
a^2 + b^2 = c^2
Oooohhhhh
I guess you wouldn’t have figured it out on your own, lol.
I’m the 11th guy
I hear the same about the conceptualization of zero as a numeral that operations can be performed on (a crucial turning point in human thinking) which is also laughable. It simply was not compatible with the Greek understanding of mathematics which emphasized the discrete and trigonometric but fit very well into the more abstract view towards math on the Indian subcontinent. There’s a reason why human discovery has global roots.
- Hey dude, you know you had two goats? Well, I took one
- Whatever I still have one goat left
- Hey dude, you know you had one single goat? Well, I took it
- Wtf, that doesn’t make sense
👆 real dialogues recorded by actual ancient Greeks
Simple rule of thumb. If it has no real world use case in your avg dudes day to day.
It ain’t getting discovered.
Now you also need to have that avg dude be someone of note, power and reach so that the discovery actually goes somewhere and doesn’t just die with him.
The more esoteric and rarer those two things line up.
True that it takes a degree of imagination. We can draw a fairly direct line from Brahmagupta, Al-Khwarizmi, Fibonacci, Piero della Francesca, to Leonardo da Vinci describing the East to West transfer of zero and the decimal place value system.
It often comes down to what a culture considers “useful”.
“Socrates was the wisest man in Athens.”
Dude, the population of Athens and it’s surrounding territory at the time was about 200k-250k people, a very sizable portion of which were foreigners who probably had a different primary language, and even more of which were slaves (like 1/3 to 1/2 of the entire population). Would be like talking about the wisest person in Dayton, Ohio 2500 years later in every philosophy textbook in the world becuase he realized it was better to say “I dunno” than to talk out of your ass.
It wasn’t that he didn’t know things. He specifically showed you how you didn’t know things you thought you did. That’s quiet different.
It’s literally still called “the Socratic method”. And it made the ancient Athenians so mad at Socrates they executed him.
If you manage to have things named after you a few thousand years from now by saying “I dunno”, I’ll raise my hat to you.
The socratic method, which, as the name suggests, he did, is about asking probing questions to expose gaps or contradictions in their knowledge which reveal their ignorance. Both to themselves and oftentimes to other’s, as well. He didn’t stump them with his own knowledge. He only asked questions until they stumped themselves.
He found that wisdom was found in humility. “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” That is what I paraphrased as “I dunno”. Understanding that you do not and cannot know all things is a core principle of his idea of wisdom and his methodology.
“Only tasked questions”
Yeah and Einstein “only wrote some equations”?
The point is the questions he asked, just like the point is that E=mc^2 really isn’t as simple as it seems, but has a world of theory behind it.
Socrates knew to ask the right questions.
I’ll go further, i reckon i couldve done better than “featherless biped” as the definition of a human.
Honestly they mustve said so much bollocks that people were too embaressed to write down or copy and it was lost to time.
If I recall correctly, “fatherless biped” was an attempt to define a human in the simplest, most basic form, and as short as possible.
I guess they just forgot about gorillas and other primates. Are they classified as bipedal? I mean they don’t HAVE to use their arms to move around. It’s just more efficient for them…
Of course, I wouldn’t have plucked a chicken and presented it ad a fatherless biped, either… So what do I know lmao
At the time, in Greece they thought of apes as monkeys without tails. They also had no reason to think those creatures were particularly bipedal. Or that there was any particular relation to humans. Aristotle was describing Baboons, which walk on all 4s. To Plato, a bird might be the only other creature that walked on two legs. It also has pink skin for what that’s worth.
It’s easy to forget that the foundation of knowledge we have is so incredibly vast it would be incomprehensible to the ancient Greeks. We learn in elementary school things that people wouldn’t work out for centuries.
Imagine telling Diogenes that dolphins are foxes that learned to swim. Or that the giant skulls they keep finding aren’t one eyed giants, but the skulls of ancient hairy elephants.
Plato was alive when Greek philosophers decided the earth was round, and it would be a few hundred years before somebody would make the first real calculation of its size.
I doubt Diogenes would care abt the foxes being dolphins so much as how u explained it. If u brought a series of dolphin to fox fossil records he’d accept it but if u come in waving ur hands abt and mumbling something abt dolphins and foxes he’d think ur as insane as him.
Their relationship to humans is irrelevant to being able to walk around just fine on two legs.
My last point was apes fit the “featherles biped” just as much as a plucked chicken, and just as much as we do.
It really just depends on how much knowledge they had of the existence of various primates and how they walk around. I’ve just seen enough monkeys and apes walking on two legs to consider them a child’s understanding of “featherless biped”
My favorite bit of trivia about how much/little we knew about things, we technically discovered steam power thousands of years ago, but only relatively recently in human history figured out how to use it to do things.
Plato was alive when Greek philosophers decided the earth was round, and it would be a few hundred years before somebody would make the first real calculation of its size.
Closer to 150 than “a few hundred”, don’t mind me, just nitpicking a little.
I think geological time, planetary formation & the Big Bang etc would probably be harder to explain and for the greeks to accept than evolution, even though it requires pretty much geological timeframes as well.
I guess they just forgot about gorillas
We often take for granted how much information we have about the animal kingdom. Gorillas are native to central Africa; it is highly unlikely Plato ever even met somebody who had seen one. What makes Greek philosophy impressive is how much they were able to accurately describe given the incredibly limited slice of what is now “common knowledge” available to them, and how durable the methods they employed have proven when provided better priors.
I don’t know when shitting on the Greek civilization became a thing, but the irony that this trend comes from the same country that voted for Trump twice and made Idiocracy a tame historical documentary is not lost on me.
Pretty sure this is just a self-aware joke that a lot of scientific and philosophical breakthroughs seem obvious after the fact.
I admit I am old, but can anybody explain this meme format with an expressionless person making a selfie with a statement at the top? And do I need to be as conventionally attractive as this young man here or do looks not matter?
It makes me feel old too, lol. I think some people make them with streamers or content creators (maybe?) or just because they need an image, since people are more likely to share something funny if it’s not just text. It’s a little weird, but whatever.
I think you just discovered looksmaxing
I could have easily discovered that either.
We read portions of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics in Ethics 101, and I felt this way about everything we went through. Yes, demonstrating admirable traits will lead to a virtuous life. That’s almost true by definition. Oh, but you still might not achieve a happy life even if you’re a good person? Well, that’s because you also need to be lucky! Oh, and generosity is apparently 2 different virtues for some reason.
I’m sure he had other works, but reading his “insights” made me wonder how this could be the guy everyone wouldn’t shut up about. We also studied the stoics, epicurians, nihilism and existentialism, Kantian ethics, consequentialism, the role of divinity, and probably other topics I can’t remember. Literally all of them were much more interesting than Aristotle’s eudaimonia ramblings, so I was quite annoyed that he took up almost half the class and made everything else rushed.
Aristotle also believed that women were defective men, that some people are naturally destined to be slaves, and rejected atomic theory.
I feel like you can change this absolutely imbecilic image to “the hole left by everyone just accepted Aristotle’s idea that you can just think everything from first principles and don’t have to do any experimentation” and it’d actually be somewhat accurate.
okay. the renaissance seems to begin right around the time a dude in turkey invented a steam engine to rotate kebab.
coincidence? who cares. kebab.
donar kebab is +seventy billion science points
we need to add a mod to Civ that lets you research steam powered kebab, it is a wonder and gives +70 billion science points but you are unable to invest in science for 450 years after researching it. i don’t know how science in Civ works but this makes sense.
I feel the same way about Seinfeld or Shakespeare. They’re boring because people haven’t shut up about them and everything is made out of derivative works inspired by them. Seinfeld invented the modern sitcom format and editing (they weren’t the first they were the first to be massively popular doing all of it together)
Just keep asking why to everything. My nephew was basically Socrates.
I think that if I were intelligentsia in a different period of human development I would go and try to discover something. But that’s only because I’m in academia now so as long as I have the prerequisite material conditions my personal impulse for obtaining new knowledge would drive me
This is the Manosphere™ mindset. They suffer from constant Dunning-Kruger. Ask them about climate change and they’ll suddenly be smarter than climate scientists because they watched a few YouTube videos.
I don’t think this meme is about science, but rather about “thinking about thinking”
I know, but it’s the same type of thing dudes in the bro camp do. They obsess over stoicism, Rome, etc. Their ego makes them think they’re thinking on some other plane of existence. Then it starts leaking into science and social topics.
Same with Issac Newton. One had to be the first to write that stuff down.
Leibniz proved that.
I probably also would have figured out gravity existed without having an apple hit me in the head.
deleted by creator