Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm finally done with Christie's And Then There Were None. Didn't have much preamble, it just goes straight into it. Seems like a book written to an audience already very familiar with her work. It was enjoyable enough, and the characters worked. I've more or less given up on the desire to figure out who the killer is beforehand in these kinds of books, and I find that it is pleasant to read them like that. I'm afraid that the only other thing which I can say is that my favourite character died.
Going to give another stab at Sayers' Whose Body?
Retrying Joel Baden's The Historical David from the start.
I started to rewatch Kings to torture myself about that what-if, and thought it'd make a good companion (since the show basically plays the legend straight).
I read that a couple years ago. It’s a great book that applies the historicist logic. I tend to be a maximalist and give the benefit of the doubt to tradition, accepting the historical-critical method; but that isn’t the dominant position in Biblical studies as I understand it; it’s considered “conservative.” To me it shouldn’t be beyond the perch to presume historicity for at least some of the figures, even if you think they’re highly mythologized; but built off a core of tradition. Not a lot of people know we have zero direct historical evidence for King Josiah in the OT, despite historians confidently concluding he existed. Anyway, JB’s multiple interviews on Mythvision is always interesting.
I mean the biggest problem is that it’s almost impossible to know what is true or false about a person who lived several thousand years ago. Most of the physical evidence would be gone just by virtue of people building over and reusing materials and land, plus the difficulty of preserving written materials for that long even under ideal circumstances.
I find it a rather interesting thought experiment to imagine just what our distant descendants would think true or false about our current era. Would they find the Trump ballroom thing likely a myth? Would we question whether or not there was a “historical Barack Obama?” Would we find historical parallels between a future president JD Vance and some mythological legend and thus conclude Theres no evidence such a man actually existed? He does sort of parallel “Mr. Smith goes to Washington”, given his poor background and quick rise to power. Obviously no one should take the historical JD Vance seriously.
One movie I really enjoyed watching years ago was The Man From Earth. There’s a line in that movie that goes (I’m paraphrasing), “The people back then [in ancient times] weren’t any more or less intelligent than we are. They just didn’t know as much…” We tend to look back on history as if the human beings who lived then weren’t really humans but were some kind of aliens. It’s why I’ve always rejected the whole “… everyone before ‘us’ we’re all ignorant and bigoted savages…” notion that pseudo-intellectual blowhards love to lead with. Of course they laughed. Of course they had sex. Of course they had institutions like the military, marriage, inheritance, etc. even Joseph wanted to divorce Mary in the Bible because he knew perfectly well where babies come from. These people weren’t gullible fools. Look around and consider all the things in the world that for all intents and purposes you lack such sufficient knowledge that you’d conclude, “This thing here works by magic.” Beneath it all you surely know there’s something mechanistic to it, but the world is still a very mysterious place.
The questions they would ask would likely be very different but I think on a basic level they’d acclimate over time. I tend to think we’ll always be slightly more well adjusted to adapt to the future than if a hard reset took place and we had to go back living in the distant past.
One of my favorite examples of the arrogance of modern humans (including myself in the past, and I'm sure in the present as well, just in different ways) is thumbing our noses at people using the awkward 12 for so many things, instead of the simple, elegant 10 of the metric system. Of course, the beauty of 12 is that it's easy for dividing things evenly among 2, 3, 4, 6, or 12 people. And also any multiple of 12 with an even number is easy to divide among 8 people, and with a multiple of 3 is easy to divide among 9 people, due to 4 and 3 being factors. When not everyone knows long division or even the concept of decimals, Arabic numerals or fractions, having such a flexible number as a standard makes a lot of sense.
Paper and video on how binary is better than both decimal and duodecimal
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Try doing complex mental computations off Roman numerals. It’s even harder. I used to wonder how the artisans and craftsmen of the time made such beautiful architecture and how they performed their measurements to calculate things. It’s always baffled me.
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