Timeline for Non-electrical technology that pre-modern people would see as magic?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
28 events
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| Apr 20, 2023 at 15:21 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | And yes, malnutrition and sickness in cities was a very real problem, but we're talking about the exceptions (less than 10% of the total population) not the averages. While medieval technology was much less advanced than ours, it takes modern recreationist years of study and practice to actually do what medieval people were doing using their technologies and methods, and even still, most recreationist cheat here and there with modern tools and materials. | |
| Apr 20, 2023 at 15:21 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | More over, icecap records show that atmospheric heavy metal exposure is over 20 times as high as it was back then which is proven to inhibit executive brain function. There is also plenty of records showing that the average farmer prior to the industrial revolution had a 2500-3500 calorie a day diet. Yes, it was less diverse consisting mostly of grain, beans, and fish, but these foods make a complete diet when you don't pre-mill, vacuum dry, and freeze them. | |
| Apr 20, 2023 at 15:20 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | For starters, the quality of food HAS gone way down: wild flower analysis shows that increased CO2 in the air has caused a 30% decrease in vitamin and mineral density in plant life across the globe over the past 100 years. Modern food preservation techniques are proven to destroy Omega-3 which is the primary nutrient linked to healthy brain development, Omega-3 deficiency is the most common form of malnutrition in developed nations, but was not common in the medieval period. | |
| Apr 20, 2023 at 15:20 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | @Hobbamok Your perspective of medieval life is common but wrong. There is a modern cultural belief that medial life was a certain way, but actual historical records and improving understanding of medieval society and technology strongly contradict this image. One of the biggest problems historians often face is that bad or unusual stuff gets recorded and talked about much more often than good or common stuff which can skew the historical record which means that what we think is true is often undone through experimentation or boring administrative records. | |
| Apr 20, 2023 at 8:19 | comment | added | Hobbamok | @Nosajimiki your romanticisation of medieval life is startling | |
| Apr 19, 2023 at 16:23 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | What makes modern man different in the context of the question is just that we tell ourselves different stories, but if a thing is outside of our understanding, we are just as likely to make stuff up try to explain it. There is zero proof about why subatomic particles do the things that they do, yet tons of scientists believe in all sorts of explanations. We make stuff up to explain patterns, it's what we do. But whether the story we tell ourselves is "act of God" or "String Theory" has zero impact on if we correctly observed and predicted the pattern. | |
| Apr 19, 2023 at 16:07 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | and this all required a vast breadth of knowledge which takes years of learning. Yes, children were put to work at a young age, but it was not like the factory work of the industrial age. They were constantly learning as they worked, expanding thier skill sets, and passing those skills on to the next generation. | |
| Apr 19, 2023 at 16:07 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | @Hobbamok No, my argument is that childhood conditions are not vastly better for learning. They are better is some ways, but worse in others. Before the Industrial Revolution, people had cleaner air and healthier food than most modern people do. It was mostly in the cities where you saw rampant poverty, starvation, and disease, but your average peasant had lands to farm, animals to raise, a home, clothes, and basic tools that they made themselves from local resources, they could read the whether, control irrigation, rotate crops, manage a budget, etc. | |
| Apr 19, 2023 at 8:55 | comment | added | Hobbamok | @Nosajimiki IQ tests aren't the main point here, they were just the tool utilized by that one study. idgaf about them. I'm more concerned by your implied claim of intelligence being determined from birth (since according to you the vastly better childhood conditions don't make modern kids smarter on average) | |
| Apr 18, 2023 at 18:04 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | Literacy was also much higher than once presumed because most "literacy" statistics were based on ones ability to read Latin. While only 2-10% of people could read Latin, vernacular literacy is estimated at closer to 25-50% in most of Europe. You also vastly underestimate how many skills the average peasant had because labor was less specialized. A farmer generally had what we would describe today as many jobs. The human brain of today is the same as the human brain back then, and the kinds of problems we face are different, but we do it with the same processing power. | |
| Apr 18, 2023 at 18:04 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | So, a person with an IQ of 100 could easily be a better learner and problem solver than someone with an IQ of 120 if the 120 person only solved more problems through a greater familiarity with the kinds of questions being asked. And yes, nutrition matters, but most medieval people also were not actually malnourished, most medieval people, had better nutrition (though fewer calories) than the average American, today. Specifically, they got much more Omega-3 because of better wheat handling practices and higher reliance on fish proteins. | |
| Apr 18, 2023 at 18:04 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | @Hobbamok I studied developmental psychology in college. IQ tests are designed specifically to predict how well students will do in school by introducing them to school like problems that they may or may not already know how to solve. Yes, they are different than achievement tests which measure how well a student has done in school, but they still measure academic factors and generally ignore a wide range on intelligence factors like empathy, social manipulation, risk assessment, concentration, etc. and they don't control for what you already know | |
| Apr 7, 2023 at 14:31 | comment | added | Hobbamok | And that also skips the fact that nowadays the parents homeschooling have access to teaching resources online or in books and are at least literate themselves (aka can access those resourcees) | |
| Apr 7, 2023 at 14:30 | comment | added | Hobbamok | also didn't really break out of the general societal acceptance of superstition. Remember: They could not explain lightning. They literally could not with all knowledge available in the (western) world at that time make sense of most stuff that was happening around them. | |
| Apr 7, 2023 at 14:28 | comment | added | Hobbamok | Those FEW that got actual apprenticeships got a deep-dive education in their craft and in that craft only. Even those with a university education back then had a ore narrow-minded education than a slightly motivated highschooler simply because there wasn't that much of a range in subjects to study (Goethe's Faust studied all there was in terms of subjects, don't forget that). And for those (again FEW) that were actually schooled at home (not the middle, but the upper classes, the middle class were those who got a decent apprenticeship) | |
| Apr 7, 2023 at 14:26 | comment | added | Hobbamok | @Nosajimiki no. IQ tests aren't that good of a thing but they're not US standardized testing. They're pretty independent of school systems. And the study that you're trying to pick apart so hard is just the first one I found out of many. And your reference to homeschooling is a joke because that is NOT what happened in medieval times. kids were malnourished (a point you have brought 0 arguments against) and were sent to work about as soon as they could work. | |
| Apr 4, 2023 at 17:59 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | they perform much better than those who go through the industrial school system in most situations. So, yes the poor and neglected children from the pre-modern world may show less signs of academic intelligence and capacity, but from the middle-class up, you would expect a greater than modern average total intelligence since they followed the "home school" model of education. | |
| Apr 4, 2023 at 17:59 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | population of children who do receive apprenticeship like education (aka: homeschooling) directly at the family level, and these students actually show much higher levels of general intelligence performing on average a whole grade level above other children of thier age than those who go through public or private school systems. Also, when they do move on to higher education and eventually the professional world, | |
| Apr 4, 2023 at 17:59 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | there are a lot of well researched confounding variables that the method did not account for. Yes, students who go to school tend to perform better than those that do not, but the largest group of those people who don't go to school are socioeconomically and psychologically disadvantaged students who are neglected and do not get any apprenticeship or alternate education. This group suffers from much greater deficits than neglected children who go to school, and this is why those numbers are misleading. However, we do have a subset in our | |
| Apr 4, 2023 at 17:59 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | @Hobbamok IQ is often misperceived as "General Intelligence", but it is not. IQ is literally just a measure of how well one is able to function in the current school system. If you use school to teach math, history, and language skills, and you use tests that measure for math, history, and language skills, then the results will show that school improves your knowledge base in those areas, but they don't test what other skills you've developed or not developed instead. The other problem is that the attached study is cross-sectional, not experimental; so, | |
| Apr 4, 2023 at 7:24 | comment | added | Hobbamok | @JohnO why are you falling for their "ohh but reeeeal learning is better" when it's proven that no, school, despite the limitations of our large classes and generally antiquated teaching methods just makes people smarter for their entire life. Who cares about them being able to figure out a TV remote? These things are purposely designed to be useable by even the biggest idiots around. But make a but of a spectacle about it, NOT let them interact with it directly and it's magic. | |
| Apr 4, 2023 at 7:21 | comment | added | Hobbamok | @Nosajimiki you missed my point. This isn't about information. It's about kids being sat down and "forced" to think for the majority of their childhood. Yes, the medieval peasant kids ALSO learnt a lot of stuff, but that was a side effect of DOING said stuff. It made them smart in regards to farm stuff, but with less general intelligence. I don't know why you are arguing with pure facts. nature.com/articles/s41539-022-00148-5 what you're saying sound nice, sure but I am just factually right and there are studies on top of studies to back me up | |
| Apr 3, 2023 at 0:57 | comment | added | John O | @Nosajimiki I'd go even farther. Give that medieval man the remote control and lock him in the room with the tv for 12 hours, and he'll know that some buttons do some things, and others do other things. If he's allowed to leave, and others are allowed to enter, the group will be even smarter collectively. They'll have it mapped out in a week. If they speak the language of the videos being played, then they'll realize that the people in the videos cannot hear them. If the videos repeat, they'll start to wonder if they aren't "live", but some kind of less animate repetition. | |
| Apr 3, 2023 at 0:52 | history | edited | John O | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Mar 31, 2023 at 19:33 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | This made "class sizes" very small which is also proven to improve learning performance. All lessons were visual, verbal, and kinesthetic which significantly improves retention over a lecture environment. While you might think a Medieval man is dumb for not knowing how to turn on a TV, he'd likely think you are far more dumb for not being able to tell a horse nettle berry from a cherry tomatoe. His ignorance might be inconvenient in our world, but your ignorance would literally kill you in his. | |
| Mar 31, 2023 at 19:33 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | @Hobbamok Just because medieval children did not (typically) attend schools, does not mean they were not exposed to just as much information. A farmer had to spend years learning about crop rotation, irrigation and drainage, fertility, animal psychology, reading the whether, identifying different plant species, learning about different blights, trapping, carpentry, basic math and literacy (yes, most peasants knew how read and write in thier vernacular languages). The difference is that they learned purely by apprenticeship which is arguably a better learning environment than a classroom. | |
| Mar 31, 2023 at 18:30 | comment | added | Hobbamok | Counterpoint: If you are living in a developed country you are likely objectively smarter than 99.999% of medieval people. Intelligence is massively impacted by food availability/ quality and early education. The fact that we all had to sit down in school, aka an actively thinking-enhancing environment for up to 12 years in our childhood did massive things for our cognitive abilities. Same goes for modern food security (which isn't as universal as we like to believe but still better than medieval times). Plus most people stick to what they're raised with. Which back then was superstition. | |
| Mar 31, 2023 at 2:12 | history | answered | John O | CC BY-SA 4.0 |