Comment by jasim

That's what struck me most about the article, as well. Russell's essay is very flattering, until you realize the we that he terms "the best men of the present day" are probably not the we of Hacker News.

In particular, when Russell writes about "the philosophical radicals ... who were just as sure of themselves as the Hitlerites are[, who] dominated politics and ... advanced [the world] rapidly both in intelligence and in material well-being," he is very likely writing about people who would definitely be a Hacker News they, given what I know about his politics and given statements like "if at any future time there should be danger of a Labour Government that meant business, [the British Fascists] would win the support of most of the governing classes."

So, if this essay leaves you with a warm and fuzzy feeling about your "wider and truer outlook" and the feeling that you are being oppressed because of your "skepticism and intellectual individualism", well, congratulations! You've discovered the power of emotional rhetoric.

This just strikes me as post modernist / relativist bullshit. You're claiming that the real problem is not a population largely persuaded to vote against it's own interests inside a voting system which fundamentally empowers party insiders at the expense of the population.

No the problem is ALL OF US, we're just as emotional as these manipulated people!!11 Stop worrying about the broken voting system, the owned press and mislead population. Instead worry about your own emotionally driven mind.

It appears like a wise argument against HN hubris but you're really trying to derail people from a clear view of a problem and instead move the debate into introspection.

This is why liberal intelectuals are so paralyzed. Yes of course we're emotional too. And yes we can be swayed. But life is not black and white. The best of us has managed to develop a resistance to this kind of rhetoric by a life of study, debate, examining common rhetorical tricks etc. And it's not just different values that drives us. It's values that has carried us through a century of carnage into a much better life. We need to stop apologising and invoking bullshit relativistic cultural arguments and show some pride in basic values like equality for women, freedom of speech etc. I kind of think that's the central point that Bertrand Russell is making we paralyze each other by focusing on any potential error instead of realising that the things we value is mostly aligned and has been refined over a long time. We can trust most of our values.

Don't you think it's possible that through diligent study of human interaction and how the mind works you could gain a better understanding of how biases are formed and reinforced and stand a chance of recognizing when your own rational decision making is being bypassed? And in fact there is a large group of people (mainly the nerds, as it happens) who are working daily towards exactly that? And haven't they earned at least a little bit of the right to call themselves more rational than the person who has never even thought in these terms for a single moment of their life?

>It's never me who's swayed by emotions, it's always less rational people, and if only those people could get their shit together, like me, we'd be in a much better place.

That is true, though I would amend it to "even if they got their shit together, like me, we would still have a long ways to go in that regard. But it sure would help if everyone knew what confirmation bias was so that politicians and the media couldn't so easily use it to convince people of things that might not be true!"

The question I was pondering in the comment was whether the tragic cycle of progress and destruction is true or not. I'd love to learn otherwise - but data paints a bleak picture. It took just about twenty years after the 'war to end all wars' for the second World War to begin. Even though there isn't a World War at the moment, UN recently published a report stating that the displacement of humans due to war and persecution is at an all time high in recorded history (http://www.unhcr.org/558193896.html). The question so is whether we are we simply doomed to repeat history.

But as you noted, there is a degree of hidden bias in my statement. I will be more careful in such thoughts in the future. However, one cannot think about the world in a completely detached manner without making any sort of personal value judgements. We have to ascribe some degree of validity to people's opinions and decisions, and to where we personally stand in that spectrum. It is just that such judgements should be made after deliberation, and not slip in as a patterned thought as I have erred here.

We should indeed recognize that we are all prone to the effect, but here you have replaced one sweeping generalization with another.

I think this post is the biggest indicator of the problem, as set out by Russell.

> The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

I think you are projecting the narriative of Progres (TM) onto the accurate facts you are presenting.

i.e. the Catholic Church did not invent checks and balances. They used to have those in the Old Republic, but those were abandoned after the Roman Civilization reached the appex of its, let's call it cultural vitality. I see the authoritarism of the Caesars as a symptom of Rome having run out of fresh ideas, they "jumped the shark" if you will.

I agree the Middle Ages were not some sort of dystopian hell. There was a Dark age after (or more precisely, around) the time when Rome fell. Those were hungry and dangerous times, and the people that survived were more impoverished (both in the material and the intelectual sense) than their forefathers, but survive they did. The Middle Ages is what resulted when the survivors rebuilt society out of the wreckage.

I agree that many former Roman institutions were repurposed during those times, but I do not see this as a way of purposeful progress. Rather, those obsolete institutions were salvaged and repurposed by the new Medieval society for its own needs. Superficially they look like a continuation of the same, but they were successful because they had a different cultural sensitivity, they had fresh ideas now, with their own new values and their own expectations of how things should be. And they pushed those in directions that no old Roman philosopher would've been able to imagine.

I think people tend to conflate Middle Ages with "Dark age" because the Middle Ages ended in a relatively mild collapse. The (Christian) Reformation and the Enlightenment allowed much of the cultural treasures of the past age to be preserved, but also caused warfare, famine, dislocation of whole nations, etc. Again, hungry and dangerous times, and again the survivors picked up the pieces and build the world we know today.

Our world looks superficialy like a continuation of the Renaissance, but it is not. The Renaissance is the apex of the cultural vitality of the Middle Ages, and our own World's foundations rest upon many of its repurposed ideas and institutions. But it had ideas and values of our own, and our forefathers took that in directions that no Scholastic monk would have ever imagined.

So, you can see, we are no closer to a future of endless joy, anymore than any other society that inhabited this planet ever did. We are going our own way around the cycle, and clearly we have ran out of fresh ideas ourselves.

I will not pretend to be subtle, our times will be on the down slope and depending on how fast this proceeds we ourselves or our children may end up in one of those dark ages (no uppercase, thank you very much) where hungry and dangerous is the norm. And then others will come and pick up the pieces. I guess what I expect to acomplish in life is to leave behind some cultural artifacts in good working order; and I hope that, one or two centuries from now, some smart guy will pick those up and push them in directions that I'd never be able to imagine.

> Complexity and complacency kill.

Clearly it's not as simple as "complexity is bad." Ask any engineer: complexity often enables performance and efficiency. A modern V6 is far more complex than a 1960's car engine, but smaller, lighter, more powerful, and more fuel efficient. Complexity is just a fact of life that needs to be managed.

Indeed, the story of our civilization is progress driven by ever-increasing complexity, facilitated by technological innovation. Amazon is far more complex than a local mom-and-pop. It's also far more effective at getting products to people quicker and more cheaply. Going back in history, Great Britain's financial system was vastly more complex than what contemporary countries had, but it enabled the tiny nation to build and control a vast economic empire.

Complication kills, not complexity. Complex systems are made up of simple independent pieces. Those pieces work together naturally often leading to new behaviors. Because they are independent, they can also adapt easily to changes in the environment.

Complication is different. Complicated systems have dependencies that are more tightly bound together. Because of this, they can't adapt as easily to environmental changes. Consequentially, this creates conflict between system and environment that can often be destructive or violent.

Or at least that's my social hypothesis. I based my idea on the Rich Hickey "Simple vs. Easy" talk on software complexity. I think his ideas could be generalized to societies as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI8tNMsozo0

>The only way out is probably strict technocracy run by benevolent AIs - but it's not one that anyone is going to be willing to accept, as by doing so one loses much of what it is to be human.

This is along the lines of Plato's philosopher kings, who he insisted were the only hope. This is fascist crap. Benevolent Philosopher kings don't exist, and neither do benevolent AIs.

There was, in fact, rule by philosopher kings in Plato's generation, by a gang of thirty who learned from Socrates. Unsurprisingly, they were brutal fascists. An AI regime would be the same.

This is because there is only one way to ensure human needs are met, and it isn't technocratic anything. It is to ask people and empower them to get what they need directly. I.e. democracy, in as direct and total a form as we can manage efficiently.

> the "Dark Ages" weren't "dark."

I don't know. With the cognitive relativism of our times, we want to make sure each civilisation, and each of its ages, are "equal". They certainly can be equally interesting for studies, but if we take a simple way to measure its effect on the human race by checking out how many books that are still read today have been written during these periods, you'll see that ancient Greece and Rome (and ancient China, and French enligthment) have been periods of great fertility, while for the normally educated man it is hard to find more than 2 or 3 books from the Middle Age that are still read and having influence nowadays.

So, at least following a few similar criteria, the Dark Ages were "dark". And it is not very surprising: when all the intelligensia spend almost all its brain power in obscure religious debates, you get very few results.

Rome disintegrated, and if the sacking of a once glorious capital by the various tribes of Europe isn't a "fall", I'm not sure what is.

The Dark Ages weren't "dark" in the sense that many understand them, but they were a period of fragmented power, small empires, and warring dynasties - much as much of the Roman period was, but the fact that their structure disintegrated is undeniable.

In their case, it all tied back to lines of communication and an increasingly inefficient taxation system, which lead to declining revenues for Rome, rot at the fringes, and eventual atomisation.

Indeed. The only reason to still consider certain parts of the Middle Ages as "dark", particularity the early portion, is the due to the lack of contemporary sources. The Merovingian Kingdoms of the seventh century, for example, are genuinely hard to study because we've lost so much.

The term "dark" should not be used, as it still much too frequently is, as some negative value judgment that covers a thousand year period which encompassed hundreds of different societies and cultures spanning an entire continent.

It is understandable why people think this way, since European history (at least in the United States and Canada) is still largely taught in a way that skims over the Middle Ages: check out how awesome Greece and Rome were, then, well, the Middle Ages when they had these grand churches, but who cares because then came the Renaissance when everything was cool again.

I've taught European Medieval history survey courses at the university level and one of the most difficult challenges was getting this idea of a horrible "dark" age dispelled from the students' minds. This is not to say that everything was somehow great or that all ages are "equal" in "value" (whatever that really means), but you can not begin to study a period of history without facing your own preconceptions of it (and, really, your own society).

There's been a lot of recent interest in this topic. For example: http://www.amazon.com/The-Fall-Rome-And-Civilization/dp/0192...

Summary is that though Rome didn't fall overnight, there was a massive economic collapse first in the west and then several centuries later in the east (the latter coming on the heals of a devastating outbreak of the plague).

Great question. They aren't.

Imagine polling this forum to identify their heroes and then poll a non-technical forum. Then contrast the two lists for macho qualities. You can probably do this simply by counting the sports heroes.

Admitting that one is not immune to biological influences is really what matters. In this respect, nerds are more mindful. Also, nerds historically belonged to the out-group. Again with mindfulness, we will hopefully sympathize with the out-group even if our recently elevated social status is permanent.

It's a question of scale. Small groups will go through the same stages of civilisation as a much larger group, but more rapidly. There's a "rotten spot" between very small groups and very large groups where things are particularly unstable, which we have stayed largely abreast of through telecommunications, but it doesn't make us immune to those forces, just more easily dented and less easily broken.