Comment by thinkingtoilet
8 hours ago
Go play a game of telephone with 20 people and see how well information travels. Now multiply that by 100 years.
8 hours ago
Go play a game of telephone with 20 people and see how well information travels. Now multiply that by 100 years.
If that game of telephone includes the sentence "I'm going to kidnap your child", I'll bet it travels faster and more accurately than you think it will.
100 years doesn't require a game of telephone with 20 people. It requires maybe 2 or 3. And for a event known to a whole town, you have multiple independent narrators which can help stabilize information.
My family has far more trivial information passed down orally that is way older than 100 years.
Mine doesn't. I know just a handful of things about my great grandparents. Things I do know about my family history didn't come from oral traditions but rather records placing my ancestors in places.
Even from what I know of my parents, I'm sure I've forgotten or misremembered a bunch of stories that they've told me about their lives. I couldn't reliably retell more than a handful of stories.
That calculation doesn't make sense.
The telephone game lacks features in the telling that are common in oral storytelling that help reinforce the content and reduces the number of errors. Repeated telling, repetition in the structure, rhyming and alliteration (which is used, or even if they're used, depends on the language), being made into a song (seems to stick better than just straight speaking), etc. If you played the telephone game with a deliberately constructed story using those elements and taught that story to the next "generation" by repetition over a period of time before they, in turn, repeated it to the next generation it would be much more reliable. It also wouldn't be the telephone game.
I'm convinced that poems are an effective error-correcting code for remembering things.
Except oral histories seemed to have been very important to people and passing them down accurately has been noted throughout history
No TV, no books. Lightly populated rural communities, without a lot of visitors.
People loved stories because they were bored.
It's not boredom. Humans have always told stories and we still tell them today. How often does the 500 mile email come up on HN, or The Story of Mel? What about the SR-71 speed check? It's an innate human characteristic to love stories and most social media is lightly disguised storytelling.
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