“Here be dragons” is a phrase used to denote dangerous or unexplored territories, in imitation of the medieval practice of putting dragons, sea serpents and other mythological creatures in uncharted areas of maps. (
Have you spent any time in deep culture shock? I ask not out of a desire to be rude, but because I have traveled extensively, including Peace Corps service. I often think that deep culture shock is harder to find nowadays than it would have been in past centuries; you have to do a lot more than merely change location to experience it. I also think that the experience of deep culture shock is far more intense, destructive, and creative than most people understand it to be. It really does feel like you're among aliens.
I also often think that past cultures seem more willing to describe things in terms of artistic metaphors, which people probably knew weren't "really" true, than modern cultures are (maybe because of our love for the empirical). Such past tales are probably better understood as stylized rather than perfectly accurate. If a future person saw Disney, they would think all American girls were insane Manic Pixie Dream Girls who love to burst into song.
In the case of flipping a coin the function that generate the result is quite clear. For most events that matter the function is a lot less clear. Using coin flips as example for real life uncertainity is what Nassim Taleb calls the ludic fallacy ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wik... ).
But even if coin flips would be a good model, forcasting the future is hard. Hansan should add more uncertainity into his forcasts to account for the fact.
Ancient travelers who visited distant places probably tended to conspire not to reveal that foreigners weren’t so strange. After all, travelers could get more approval from telling tall tales of strange things far away
The modern traveler holds on to this desire. Markets for exotic experiences, unrelated to local norms and behaviors, form in places perceived as exotic. It explains the existence of places like Beijing's Wangfujing area, where crowds of (Western) tourists buy exotic snacks from vendors (scorpion, silkworm, etc)--despite that these treats are equally exotic to Chinese people. They are not buying culinary experiences, but rather stories and pictures that display the strangeness of foreigners.
Strange things happen; it's just incredibly difficult to predict which ones. The examples you mention would have sounded extremely strange at the time, and they did happen, but the vast majority of thing that would have sounded equally strange at that time did not happen.
If I tell you I'm about to flip a fair coin 20 times and they will come up HTTTHTTTTTTTTTTTHTTH, you would say that's extremely unlikely. If I told you I just flipped a coin 20 times and it came up in that sequence, it would sound a lot less strange (I didn't plan on getting 11 tails in a row, but that happens sometimes).
The post suggests a narrow and limited reading history or astraw man is being set up to support a bias. Three novels about the future:George Orwell’s 1984 and AldousHuxley’s Brave New World, AnthonyBurgess’s Clockwork Orange areexamples of political dragons as powerful as mythic medieval ones. The authorsof these books configure an information matrix that shapes thinking manydecades later. Literature is warning alarm about the dangers that come withaccumulation of power in the hands of a few. Technological change lives in thatstrange land of the future. It is the dragon that can never be tamed.
If you would have told someone in 1920 how we will have computers in 2000 that are interconnected and used to swap enormous amount of porn imagery, the person would have labeled your forecast as very strange.
If you would have asked an economist 30 years ago to forecast whether something like Wikipedia could work, he would have labeled the forecast of Wikipedia is very stange.
As far as telling stories about reality, I have made multiple experiences in the last time that would seem impossible to many people I know.Most people are massively overconfident about their understanding of current reality.
No doubt tall tales tend to be more interesting than mundane reality. And, yes, far away places (both in terms of time and distance) can be more probably peopled with improbable things.
Yet, not all of this is may be due to the factors you list. Tanya Luhrman writes in her book When God Talks Back about doing visualization exercises while studying druids in England and how she ended up seeing visions. It may be that pre-modern cultures did this to people naturally, without having to engage in deliberate exercises, and so magical and supernatural things seem more plausible to them, because they have actually experienced them.
Have you spent any time in deep culture shock? I ask not out of a desire to be rude, but because I have traveled extensively, including Peace Corps service. I often think that deep culture shock is harder to find nowadays than it would have been in past centuries; you have to do a lot more than merely change location to experience it. I also think that the experience of deep culture shock is far more intense, destructive, and creative than most people understand it to be. It really does feel like you're among aliens.
I also often think that past cultures seem more willing to describe things in terms of artistic metaphors, which people probably knew weren't "really" true, than modern cultures are (maybe because of our love for the empirical). Such past tales are probably better understood as stylized rather than perfectly accurate. If a future person saw Disney, they would think all American girls were insane Manic Pixie Dream Girls who love to burst into song.
In the case of flipping a coin the function that generate the result is quite clear. For most events that matter the function is a lot less clear. Using coin flips as example for real life uncertainity is what Nassim Taleb calls the ludic fallacy ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wik... ).
But even if coin flips would be a good model, forcasting the future is hard. Hansan should add more uncertainity into his forcasts to account for the fact.
I suspect the point of the display is more their own bravery / daring rather than foreign strangeness in its own right.
Ancient travelers who visited distant places probably tended to conspire not to reveal that foreigners weren’t so strange. After all, travelers could get more approval from telling tall tales of strange things far away
The modern traveler holds on to this desire. Markets for exotic experiences, unrelated to local norms and behaviors, form in places perceived as exotic. It explains the existence of places like Beijing's Wangfujing area, where crowds of (Western) tourists buy exotic snacks from vendors (scorpion, silkworm, etc)--despite that these treats are equally exotic to Chinese people. They are not buying culinary experiences, but rather stories and pictures that display the strangeness of foreigners.
Nothing in the argument requires the future people in question to be our descendants -- the people could be our older selves.
Strange things happen; it's just incredibly difficult to predict which ones. The examples you mention would have sounded extremely strange at the time, and they did happen, but the vast majority of thing that would have sounded equally strange at that time did not happen.
If I tell you I'm about to flip a fair coin 20 times and they will come up HTTTHTTTTTTTTTTTHTTH, you would say that's extremely unlikely. If I told you I just flipped a coin 20 times and it came up in that sequence, it would sound a lot less strange (I didn't plan on getting 11 tails in a row, but that happens sometimes).
The post suggests a narrow and limited reading history or astraw man is being set up to support a bias. Three novels about the future:George Orwell’s 1984 and AldousHuxley’s Brave New World, AnthonyBurgess’s Clockwork Orange areexamples of political dragons as powerful as mythic medieval ones. The authorsof these books configure an information matrix that shapes thinking manydecades later. Literature is warning alarm about the dangers that come withaccumulation of power in the hands of a few. Technological change lives in thatstrange land of the future. It is the dragon that can never be tamed.
Our real descendants will have real limits. But they will really exist
No.
I don't have kids, and your descendants aren't mine.
You are trying to sneak in imaginary common interests by using the pronoun "our".
The use of "us" and "we" and "our" is one of the most sneaky propaganda tricks in history.
"Worship The Tribe! Sacrifice your interests for its Grand Plan!"
No.
If you would have told someone in 1920 how we will have computers in 2000 that are interconnected and used to swap enormous amount of porn imagery, the person would have labeled your forecast as very strange.
If you would have asked an economist 30 years ago to forecast whether something like Wikipedia could work, he would have labeled the forecast of Wikipedia is very stange.
As far as telling stories about reality, I have made multiple experiences in the last time that would seem impossible to many people I know.Most people are massively overconfident about their understanding of current reality.
No doubt tall tales tend to be more interesting than mundane reality. And, yes, far away places (both in terms of time and distance) can be more probably peopled with improbable things.
Yet, not all of this is may be due to the factors you list. Tanya Luhrman writes in her book When God Talks Back about doing visualization exercises while studying druids in England and how she ended up seeing visions. It may be that pre-modern cultures did this to people naturally, without having to engage in deliberate exercises, and so magical and supernatural things seem more plausible to them, because they have actually experienced them.