from Hacker News

The Eureka Theory of History Is Wrong

by Theory42 on 1/1/23, 10:04 AM with 36 comments

  • by neonate on 1/1/23, 6:33 PM

  • by 082349872349872 on 1/1/23, 12:38 PM

    There is a Strugatsky brothers short story, in which most of the inhabitants of a planet seem to have suddenly left via some portals, but there are a few who remain, highly armed, violent, and apparently seeking to prevent anyone else from using the portals.

    TFA reminds me of this story (which reminded me of the situation sketched by TFA when I had read it, except perhaps for the ratio of leavers to left behinds) but I cannot recall its name?

  • by Tor3 on 1/2/23, 9:11 AM

    The part of the article which explains how the smallpox vaccine was distributed around the world before cold storage and airplanes is just incredible.

      1) Recruit 22 orphaned boys 
  2) Inject two of them with the cowpox virus (which is the actual smallpox vaccine)
  3) Put all the boys on a ship leaving Spain for Venezuela 
  4) Scrape material from the two boy's pustules (appearing after a couple of days) and inject two more boys with that - the first two boys recover 
  5) Continue this daisy-chain approach until reaching Venezuela 
  6) Go on with people in Venezuela, arm-to-arm 
  7) Continue to Mexico and other places 
  8) Go global
    And that's how you transport vaccines without fridges and airplanes

  • by hgsgm on 1/2/23, 2:49 AM

    The article is about how (well akshually) deployment of new ideas has greater impact than the inventions themselves.

  • by amadeuspagel on 1/2/23, 1:33 PM

    The discussion of trust is too binary — people trust institutions or not.

    My trust in institutions is limited, but I got vaxxed without hesitation, because it's a specific decision, the kind of decision that has been made many times, where the relevant institutions have a track record and every incentive to get it right.

    I sometimes get the impression that people want to sell trust in institutions as an all-or-nothing package. Institution will not discuss when to trust institutions and when not to.

  • by roenxi on 1/2/23, 3:33 AM

    This article is dancing around the issue; making fast progress has been made systemically illegal. Now we have evidence of exactly how damaging the regulatory state is in the the medical world.

    1) Turns out those heartless capitalists could be producing vaccines in ~2 years. The tech is there, the regulators aren't ready for the level of risk in the COVID response as a routine thing.

    2) Turns out that people aren't going to inject themselves with uncertain technologies, to the point of irrationality. Contrast this to one of the usual response to "we need less medical regulation" which is that people are stupid and will hurt themselves with unproven products. My suspicion is that over the long term this irrational looking swarming behaviour actually turns out to be pretty good at managing risk no matter how crazy the individuals in it are behaving.

    The problem in building, construction, technology and mining is pretty consistent. We see the strategies that work in Asia and maybe eventually in Africa - if you let capitalism happen it has powerful enough results at a such speed vs. central planning that it can be rightly called a miracle.

  • by colechristensen on 1/2/23, 8:30 AM

    > WHY THE AGE OF AMERICAN PROGRESS ENDED

    Actual title? Are they testing out titles.

    Things of the genre “everything is going to shit and here’s what to blame” are not worth reading. Exposing “The decline” of whatever the target audience cares about sure is good for attention but it’s just a toxic emotional manipulation and not useful to actually enlighten anyone.

    It comes down to things always changing and having a bad attitude about the present and an unreasonable positive attitude about the past is very prevalent.