They hunted down all of the libraries, collected all of the books inside, and burned them in massive bonfires, accidentally saving a total of like 3 books which had already been shipped back to Europe as trophies. I think there are also some remaining fragments of a few others. One Spaniard wrote about it:
> We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which there were not to be seen superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.
There was pushback against a lot of the evils of colonialism - most of them unsuccessful, like this one. Maybe we can learn lessons for fighting against the institutional evils of our time.
Glad you asked. Check out the Nobel Prize winning work by Acemoglu in his book Why Nations Fail. He makes a compelling case that the encomienda system put in place by the conquistadors impoverished South America at the time and continued to impoverish its victims in the future as well.
So yes, extremely evil even by the standards of settler colonialism.
The Meso-American civilizations routinely engaged in human sacrifice. Tens of thousands of people per year were murdered. These weren't peaceful monks quietly engaging in scholarly pursuits. Even if you don't personally drag victims to the top of the pyramid and cut their heads off or hearts out, if you stand around and watch, you're part of the problem. I'd be interested in how you compare the details of what pre and post colonization looks like and why you weigh post colonization as evil.
Yes, that's probably the excuse that got the guy off the hook for burning the entire written history of those civilizations.
But it was not actually a good excuse. Burning those books was still wrong. Even people around him understood how wrong it was. We do not have to view colonialism from the stratosphere, we can judge the actions individually down at the ground.
We know why he wanted to focus on other things than the things he was actually personally responsible for, but what's your motive? Got a project of your own to defend?
Witch hunts were capital punishment inflicted on pagan worshipers, not human sacrifices, and they were several tens of thousands in the span of three centuries.
Executions in Spain, Portugal, and Italy combined are estimated to have been 1000 in total. [1]
Really crazy how we are taught from an early age the horrors of the holocaust and other genocides, and aboutour moral superiority compared to those that didn't intervene back then... "Never again. If this this happened today we know better to stop it"... And then look at tens of thousand of people being mass murdered by a genocidal civilization and complain that Spain intervened because... a priests burned books (something that I absolutely do not condone of course)?
Were we wrong to destroy half of Europe to stop Germany too? Really trilled to know future generation will talk about us as the bad guys because we destroyed German art and books as we stopped a literal mass genocide.
> We didn't "intervene" until the germans declare war on us.
Yes, that was mistake and the lesson that should be learned.
> The genocidal civilization was Spain, not the aztecs.
This is complete revisionism, Spain laid war on the Aztecs supported even by other indians, it wasn't a voluntary biological warfare. The Aztecs killed tens of thousands of people per year.
> Who is we? Who destroyed half of europe to stop germany?
The allies. Are Allied bombings considered a contentious subject now?
> Did we wipe out the germans? Did we wipe out the german language, culture, history, etc?
Spaniards did not "wipe out" indian people, the Aztec civilization went the way of every conquered civilization. Did Arabs wipe out Egyptian language, culture, history, etc or did it dwindle in importance over the centuries as a new civilization took over the other?
> and aboutour moral superiority compared to those that didn't intervene back then..
Didn't intervene? You act like it was an act of charity. We didn't "intervene" until the germans declare war on us.
> And then look at tens of thousand of people being mass murdered by a genocidal civilization and complain that Spain intervened because...
Spain "intervened"? The genocidal civilization was Spain, not the aztecs. The aztecs didn't wipe themselves out. The spanish did.
> Were we wrong to destroy half of Europe to stop Germany too?
Who is we? Who destroyed half of europe to stop germany?
> Really trilled to know future generation will talk about us as the bad guys because we destroyed German art and books as we stopped a literal mass genocide.
Did we wipe out the germans? Did we wipe out the german language, culture, history, etc? Are you really equating what we did to germany to what the spaniards did to the aztecs?
Before anyone wastes their time, this is the same start of the other bad faith argument that the enslavement of Africans was for their own good and they were better off being slaves than being in Africa.
> Aren't the people who survived Spanish colonization better off than they would have been?
"The ends justify the means" is certainly a valid metric by which to judge things, but an honest application of it leads one to conclusions such as "Mao Zedong was the greatest humanitarian to have ever lived" (as seen here: https://i.imgur.com/3QUXVi3.jpeg).
Mao is bad because he delayed the growth that China was capable of achieving and did achieve after Deng Xiaoping. 40 years after the communist revolution in 1990, China was still as poor as India per capita. In the 35 years since then, China became five times richer per capita than India. If the Chinese republicans had maintained power continuously since 1912, there's a good chance that China would be as developed as South Korea or Japan today.
It's valid to ask a similar question about the Americas. What would life be like for people today? It's probable that the Aztecs or their descendants would have taken over the Americans, since they were by far the most technologically superior. Would they have evolved into a prosperous industrialized society today?
I find it reasonable to assume that any civilization will gradually adapt to meet demands, given whichever constraints burden it. Europe (and the US) had opportunities (partly due to colonialism) to become industrialized and prosperous, and it has taken those opportunities. So it is with China. Africa has opportunities, but colonialism has made progress difficult. In the long term, I think cultural/societal differences are not the deciding factor, so much as the geopolitical environment shapes society. The formation of mountains doesn't much care about the contemporary scale of human construction projects, either.
You seem to be saying that colonialism advanced society even for the oppressed, but the causality of history is complicated. As far as we know, you may as well say that the extinction of the dinosaurs as it happened was essential for human proliferation. Maybe the dinosaurs would've gone extinct at some point, or diminished greatly, or maybe the dinosaurs and humans would coexist. Just because a somewhat plausible scenario presents itself does not mean it is compelling. You have brought up counterfactuals, so use your imagination seriously, instead of taking the easy way out. If you have a motivating belief on the matter, it is untoward to speak as if you are unbiased and objective.
> I find it reasonable to assume that any civilization will gradually adapt to meet demands, given whichever constraints burden it
So your theory is that civilizations are the way they are because of exogenous rather than endogenous factors? That seems difficult to reconcile with the historical record. Your viewpoint just begs the question. For example, why was Europe in a position to colonize the Americas in the first place? Why weren’t the Spanish greeted by Aztecs with swords and guns?
In the long term, I think civilizations grow along the lines of natural selection. They are neither optimal nor pessimal, but are likely to display a high degree of fitness. Environmental shocks in the short term will challenge fitness. Competition among civilizations also challenges fitness.
Why indeed was Europe technologically advanced? Why were the Americas not so much? Resources are one factor, which is why obtaining resources from other lands is valuable. But the main impetus for advancement surely isn't based on one's "skill in advancing". Most people could be trained to fix cars, if desired. Also, Rome fell, but people now live where Rome was with far greater technology. I posit that, if the indigenous peoples of the Americas were given the desire to advance to the level of Europeans, the resources to do so, and time, similar advancement would arise.
Probably not, but this counterfactual depends on the circumstances, and depends on your values. For example: people might argue about the relative harms of various kinds of slavery vs. cultural genocide vs. land dispossession and forced displacement ....
After contact there were waves of mass die-off of people throughout the Americas due to disease brought from Eurasia: are we positing that those deaths still occurred? Because they were extraordinarily destabilizing. For example, if we hypothetically imagine that the balance of disease severity was the other way around and 90% of the population of Eurasia was wiped out over a century in several waves of horrific pandemics, then history would look quite different indeed, and it's all but impossible to predict precisely how.
European states other than Spain also did horrific atrocities in their conquests and colonial projects. Are we positing that we just replace Spanish kingdom(s) with some alternative European monarchies? Or are we imagining a situation in which peoples of the Americas retained some autonomy?
Now imagine that happening once per generation for 3 or 4 generations in a row, followed by / contemporary with getting invaded by an alien army with significantly superior weapons and ships whose goal was total domination and enslavement / elimination.
So the general theory is that if you kill half of the population the descendants will be better off? What's the mechanism, and what happens if you follow that to its conclusion?
That's only about the black death, and some specific reasons for why that helped, kind of, _some_ parts of Europe. First, it definitely didn't help everyone - Norway, for example, lost all economic power and went into the 400 year night, as it's called (it was under Denmark). And secondly, it's a single case. You can't create a general rule from that. It's vastly different to compare that case to when e.g. 95% of the population died out in certain places during the Spanish conquest.
And, again, take that "rule" to its logical conclusion: How many people will inhabit the Earth after a while, and under what conditions will they live?
This is an alt history story idea I've had rattling around in my head for years. It starts off in 1492 with a dejected Columbus complaining about Isabella and Ferdinand not seeing his vision.
Jump cut 300 years later to 1776, when Europeans first learn about the New World - when an Aztec galley lands in Cornwall.
The colonization of the new world was largely an immunological accident.
When meeting Europeans, 90% of the Americans would catch some European disease and die. This was widely seen as the will of god(s) by both sides. Often the disease spread faster than the Europeans, so when they got to an area most people were already dead.
The following conquest is seen as barbaric and unjust by us modern people. But for the people of the time, it was just how the world worked. The Aztecs would have been overjoyed to conquer Spain the same way.
Possibly, although I think the Aztecs specifically was likely doomed from the start because they were a very young society and a brutal military conqueror and everybody they dealt with hated them, but you never can know. However the Aztecs were far from the only significant America Native society or civilization. There were many others, especially to the South, that we know were far more stable societies and governments producing more advanced goods and had high levels of trade amongst each other. South America was essentially in their own bronze age at the time and their gold and precious metal work was beyond what anybody in Europe was able to replicate at the time.
If Europeans hadn't made it to North America, it's likely that nobody would have invented vaccines or the internet by now. European history would have been unrecognizably different.
Because it might not have been the “Spanish”, but certain people who ruined history. So it’s not fair to blame a whole country for the actions of a few.
It's pretty fair to blame the entire social and political system of 16th century Spain, which at that time was centered on religious persecution, mass murder, large-scale theft and exploitation, and quasi-slavery, leading to centuries of profoundly racist tyranny in the Americas. The book-burning cultural genocide was just the cherry on top.
(As is common for feudal occupiers of foreign lands, and by no means unique to Spain) the worst kinds of psychopaths were continually elevated to positions of authority and then granted almost complete impunity to do what they wanted, with an ideology that treated the recipients of their exploitation as sub-human.
The initial conquests and the immediate atrocities that followed them (arguably the worst period) were mainly quasi private enterprises. The state even tried to reign them in to some extent due to significant social/religious pressure at home. Of course that was largely superficial and hardly enforced after boatloads of silver and gold started arriving.
The priests and missionaries that followed them were likely the group that was most sympathetic to the natives (of course only in relative terms compared to the "conquistadors" which is a very low standard).
You're literally applying birth sin for it to make sense, because none of the Spanish people alive today had anything to do with it
Even worse, what hnidiots3 was trying to convey: 99% of the population that were alive during the time period you'd have described as "Spaniards" were entirely uninvolved in these actions, and wouldn't have supported them either, likely.
While the Mayan culture was literally doing human sacrifices - the average person living in Spain wasn't inherently evil and wanting to cause suffering to other people. Despite their culture being kinda shit.
They just wanted to live their live, which was mostly being a farmer and working.
Are you saying that the average person in Spain did not support colonialism (let's suppose after the benefits of colonialism became apparent)? Would they be horrified that Spaniards had killed "barbarians" and "savages" (as they were described) and gained great riches? Other people have brought up religion; how many Christians condemned the Crusades?
How specifically do you think the average Spaniard benefited by the crown building a colony?
Do you think the crown then went and splurged on their farmers, reducing their taxes or something? Because no, that didn't happen.
The benefits for this was entirely with the aristocracy and wealthy, not with the average Spaniards.
Going by some of the statements in this thread, if Spain-after-colonialism becomes richer and more developed, such that the average citizen's standard of living increases, then colonialism benefitted the average citizen. Benefit to the colonized peoples aside, surely many other people benefitted, even if they weren't immensely enriched.
The wrongs of religion throughout history are typically exaggerated in modern times and the Spanish Inquisition is one of the best examples of this. It lasted more than 350 years and during this 350 years a very high-end estimate of executions is 5000. So the death toll from it ranges probably from one person every ~3 months to one person every month. [1]
So for some comparison, 2-5x more people die in the US of lightning strikes each year than died during the Spanish Inquisition per year. Obviously any death is undesirable, but describing it as a horrific mass-murder is hyperbolic. It was rather more a mass public shaming campaign like the Chinese Struggle Sessions, but many orders of magnitude smaller in scale.
For that matter even the Mayans were likely sacrificing people on a far larger scale. We lack exact numbers but know that they did group sacrifice, often of children, and that this was regularly done when building new structures, or for hopes of a good crop season and the like. And I think the thing that makes human sacrifice particularly primitive in its nature is that obviously doesn't work. Whether you killed a dozen kids or not has no bearings on how your crops grow. And so they would have to, over centuries, continue to reject the evidence before their eyes.
The Inquisition was mostly about mopping up the last few practicing Jews and Muslims in the Iberian peninsula, terrorizing them into conversion and conformity.
Millions of people (on all sides) were killed in the Reconquista, over a few centuries, with many others enslaved, imprisoned, driven out of the peninsula, or forcibly converted. Those who converted to Catholicism were rewarded with centuries of further discrimination and persecution. (Disclaimer: I am not expert enough to know detailed figures here; feel free to search for expert sources if you want something precise.)
Scattered lightning strikes are not meaningfully comparable to large-scale genocidal war.
The Reconquista was a large scale genocidal war with millions dead?
Try to find a single reliable source supporting this claim. You might be surprised to find that it doesn't exist, and that it's also an example of citogenesis. [1] This is another perfect example of what I'm talking about. After Muslim armies invaded the Iberian Peninsula they created a system of government with a tiny minority of Arabs at the top with everybody else treated as distant second class citizens. They started trying to force people to convert and imposed taxes and other penalties on those who did not.
The predictable rebellions against this were the start of the Reconquista. It spanned many hundreds of years but was almost all extremely small scale. And they weren't driving anybody out in large numbers. The Arab and Berber tribes never engaged in mass migration or anything like that. Iberia remained overwhelmingly native Iberian with a tiny Arab elite. The same Spaniards and Portuguese you know of today are the ones that were there under Islamic rule as well.
How many do you think were killed then, over those centuries of conflict? Several hundred thousand? What if we include deaths due to famine? How many were forced to migrate? Also several hundred thousand?
As I said, I'm not an expert; and you are right, it's not easy to find good sources for numbers about this. As far as I can tell were quite a few individual events with tens of thousands of people killed at a time. There were hundreds of recorded major battles.
The Reconquista lasted more than 700 years and the number of people killed in any given conflict is unknown, with estimates varying by orders of magnitude. Both sides tended to exaggerate casualties, including their own. It was a defacto holy war, and so large casualties on your side could be seen as a sign of great martyrdom and piety, while inflicting heavily casualties on the enemy was also framed as having God's favor - heads I win, tails you lose.
The only thing that's entirely clear is that it was very small scale for the overwhelming majority of the conflict, punctuated by a very small handful of "large" battles that would generally be considered moderate to small scale in modern times. There were certainly not hundreds of major battles. So I don't think anybody knows exactly how many were killed other than 'not that many.' Put another way - over some 700 years it's certain that far fewer people died than e.g. one large modern battle like the Battle of Stalingrad.
The greatest legacy of the era was defining, or at least solidifying, the character of Spain/Portugal and the more militant nature of Catholicism at the time. So for some context, Columbus would set sail for the New World just months after Grenada finally fell!
> had just gone through several centuries of horrific mass-murder of non-Christians in Spain,
Well it varied, but such behaviour was not strictly unique to Spain in those days. Being a Catholic in England wasn't terribly exciting either.
Then you have the witch hunts across must of Europe which resulted in probably well over 10x times more people being murdered in Germany alone compared to the inquisition and they weren't really a thing in Spain.
In a way the Spanish Inquisition was quite similar to the NKVD or the Gestapo/etc. since the persecutions were usually intended to impose ideological/social conformity (or inherently racist in how it targeted even perfectly honest Jewish or Muslims converts) rather than "ritualistic".
Of course Christian Spain is interesting in the sense that it turned from one of the most of tolerant societies in Europe to the one of the most intolerant ones in a couple of centuries.
e.g. during the Almohad invasions you had Christians, Jewish and even moderate Muslims fleeing to the Christian kingdoms which generally were much more tolerant at the time.
> Can you see how this absurd double standard may come across as racist?
That's not particularly new in Europe though. e.g. the Greeks and Romans found Carthaginian mass child sacrifices extremely abhorrent yet at the same time didn't see much of an issue with "exposing" unwanted infants. Treating violence due to economic/utilitarian/political reasons differently that doing it for ritual/religious reasons was is still pretty ingrained into western culture.
Why do people always ignore what happened before a few hundred years before? The Moors invaded Spain and were advancing into Europe and moved into what is modern day France. It also ignores that Muslims and Christians would in-fight between themselves in what is now modern day Spain.
Well... I was talking about about what was happening a few centuries ago.
Regardless why is it strictly relevant what happened 250-800 years before the Iberian kingdoms expelled or exterminated their Muslim and Jewish population?
> It also ignores that Muslims and Christians would in-fight between themselves
> Regardless why is it strictly relevant what happened 250-800 years before the Iberian kingdoms expelled or exterminated their Muslim and Jewish population?
The Reconquista partially led to the Inquisition. The Reconquista started 711 and ended in 1492. How could it not be relevant?
I feel that you are being deliberately obtuse. It is pretty obvious how they are intertwined.
I actually spoke to a friend of mine who basically knows a huge amount of history (he is at University doing some sort Masters in a related subject), because some of the replies on this subject in sibling threads are so ignorant they actually gaslite me.
Instead repeating the same thing in multiple messages you might at some point consider saying HOW do you think they are related. Because yes its obvious that they are, on its own that is saying very little.
> ignorant they actually gaslite me.
Because its very hard to understand what specific points are you trying to make?
> The Spanish state (crown, army, church) had just gone through several centuries of horrific mass-murder of non-Christians in Spain, where the most brutal and sadistic thugs were politically elevated.
That is one hell of a gloss over of the the previous 500-600 years before the Inquisition and massively over-simplifies what happened. There wasn't really a Spanish state either, certainly not as we would understand it today.
I understand it's a joke and it is partially true but also there are still direct descendants of Central and South America original peoples, and also many Spanish families that exploited the conquered lands came back to the "mother land" and kept their families there.
The Spanish crown also repeatedly sent new waves of political allies to take over political control in the Americas, to counter the consolidation of power of the descendants of previous generations of Spanish rulers. There was a fair amount of conflict and intrigue between the two groups.
Let’s not forget the slaves sent to the fields after Spanish conquest. Irish, African, Portuguese, Indian, all found their ways to the sugar canes.
That era was literally groups of humans exploiting every other group of humans they could find.
The first wave owners children found themselves going to war with the crown or being a member of the crowns second wave to further entrench the royal riches. It became extremely political.
I wasn't calling the descendants of the Mayans out for anything.
I was specifically talking about the culture. Which is synonymous with the people in the upper class, which did ritual sacrifices of peasants.
the term Spaniards however targets the average people. Which are precisely farmers.
I do not see any double standard whatsoever, and frankly: you're brainwashed if you do.
Just to be explicit, you are now calling Jewish people "the most unhinged and narcissistic people" who have "perpetrated that endless abuse [of denouncing the Holocaust and Naziism] upon the German [..] people"?
Where do you get "jewish people" from? It's an odd but also very interesting conclusion of yours. Do you feel that the jewish people are implicated when someone says "the most unhinged and narcissistic people" and "perpetrated that endless abuse upon the German people"?
What else would you call what has been done to the German people for 80 years now and seemingly for the foreseeable future as they are very psychologically and emotionally broken people from the perpetual "blood libel" abuse that has been perpetrated against them and their children from the earliest memory on throughout all their life? Is that healthy, to forever fixate and obsess and bring up and accuse people of things that happened several generations before they were born, and perpetrated by very specific and limited people who were punished for it? Do you think the German people are uniquely due for the most utterly evil and vile practices of collective guilt?
Since you seem to assume the "jewish people" qualify as being referenced with "the most unhinged and narcissistic people", why would you think that people are collectively guilty, not even to mention across generations?
What we witnessed in Gaza is an evil that is far worse than what was perpetrated 85 years ago, will you also collectively shame and abuse and berate all jewish people of the world with constant references of how they deliberately played games of shooting starving children in different body parts for points?
You really should reexamine your messed up perspective if you want to believe yourself a good person. No people deserve collective guilt, unless they are collectively engaged in something. What humanity should make of the polling in Israel and the USA among Jewish communities about their views of whether a genocide was happening, whether it should happen, and whether there are any innocent people in Gaza, is something that may need to be reexamined. At least the Nazis lied to their populations about what was going on, because it was a totalitarian dictatorship (as you were told all your life too). What is to be made of the fact that Israel is a democracy and a very civilly engaged and politically aware democracy?
Maybe think about some of those things instead of just reading with Automatica response tricks you have been trained to perform.
I'm lost. Can you be more explicit about which "unhinged and narcissistic people" you mean? If not the Jews, was that supposed to refer to the German ruling party? German business elites? Other Europeans? NATO? Foreign immigrants to Germany? I really have no idea what you are getting at.
> "what has been done to the German people for 80 years now and seemingly for the foreseeable future as they are very psychologically and emotionally broken people"
Germany is a highly developed and successful economy which is a center of power and wealth in Europe. Its population is well educated, healthy, with a high standard of living, and generally content. From my position in the United States (so: not an expert), I don't see much evidence that modern Germans are held responsible for the events of 80–90 years go. Maybe you can include more detail for those of us who lack the context to guess what you are talking about. Who is it who has done this supposed damage to the German people, and what precisely do you think they did?
Can you elaborate about what you think makes Germans "psychologically and emotionally broken"? Do you mean because they have been economically dominating less-developed nations of Europe, and you think they should instead aim for more continent-wide integration and development? Or like, you were hoping for a German military invasion of Austria or France?
* * *
You seem to have mistaken me for a supporter of the Israeli government. You may want to redirect your misplaced lecture someplace else.
Yes, I understand you don't see it. That is precisely part of the effect from being psychologically and emotionally broken. But just mull this over, why did the "German" government just last week plunder "modern Germans" to pay another €1 billion to the supposed 200,000 remaining holocaust survivors, when they've already pay €90 billion since 1945 for things none of them did? Or did you do the holocaust and therefore you should pay?
Another point, I you are not psychologically broken, why would you otherwise tolerate a foreign government maintain 40 colonies within your boundaries with ~200,000 of their colonists? It's the level of rationalization and excuse making that is common among abuse victims, like battered wives. But like I said, I understand why you don't understand it, even though every movie and every video game you have ever watched has some kind of reference of or to nazis and often some belittlement of germans. Why is no other war ever used to belittle and degrade any other people? The US committed war crimes from 2001 to 2021. Far longer than the Nazi regime even existed in total, not to mention Vietnam, which is celebrated in many ways and people who participated in it are looked up to, and those are far more recent conflicts... yet only Germans have been abused as they have been for 80 years. I just heard a German/Nazi reference from a boomer the other day. Of course he is an idiot, but that's someone that was not even alive when the war was going on at all, yet here he is just parroting the things he was trained to do.
I would say because it highlights that even back then there was the same kind of tension as today between those who believe they are doing right, those who also believe they are doing right, and right never ending up being done in the end. It’s like ideological, metaphysical, and psychological border disputes and skirmishes, i.e., human nature.
Also, failing upwards of those who serve the dominant system is clearly not just a modern phenomenon.
Because a previous commenter wrongly said, "the Spanish made a point of seeking out all the Maya books". It wasn't "The Spanish" it were some individual actors clearly acting against "The Spanish" crown wishes.
I'm guessing that his 1st person description of the human sacrifices carried out by the Mayan and establishing a connection between those and the need to erase the culture that enabled them and that he - wrongly or not, we can't know anymore - saw as enabled by those books had some weight there...
The Spanish crown didn't have in mind to destroy other people books, but then again, they also didn't have in mind that they casually, recurrently and nonchalantly offered human sacrifices to their "gods".
Probably the order of priorities for the Spanish crown was books < human sacrifices.
It's complicated in the sense that there were both people trying to burn and destroy anything and those trying to preserve the books and the language doing their own stuff in parallel.
They could have an exhibit like that, perhaps describing how they were trying to make amends, donating money to projects promoting pluralism and diversity, opposing authoritarianism around the world, helping the descendants of those they harmed, etc.
But they're not going to, because the people in charge don't sincerely care about the topic.
As for Iraq: I don't see much evidence that US actions there were "best-intentioned", or even well-intentioned.
Imperial hubris. Surely the US can simply decide to own the oil and poppy fields with no consequences, right?
It's not like people aren't still frothing at the mouth to repeat the same mistake in Venezuela or Palestine or Yemen. Maintaining empire requires shows of force. There's always profit to be made along the way. It motivates itself
One fun one is that people used counting boards for all of their complicated calculations (literally "calculi" = "pebbles", i.e. counters) for many thousands of years, starting we don't know precisely when but maybe sometime before 3000 BC in Mesopotamia, and at least in Europe continuing up until only a few centuries ago (in some places until the 18th century or after) and now almost no one has even heard of them, let alone has any idea how to use one.
(For what it's worth: I think a counting board is still the best way to get small kids doing some basic calculations and understanding a positional number system: moving buttons or pennies around on a piece of paper with some lines drawn on it takes much less manual dexterity than writing, and the representation is much more direct and concrete than written symbols.)
The abacus is a standard part of elementary education in several Asian countries, for precisely the reasons you mentioned regarding numerical intuition. In American education, a student might only learn about the abacus from a brief paragraph in their history textbook.
Even today, there are average people in the Chinese countryside who know how to calculate the solution to a set of linear equations with counting sticks (a technique known as fāngchéng - 方程). My point being that usage of mechanical calculation assistance is indeed a useful skill, and would probably be beneficial in American/western education as well.
A sliding-bead suanpan or soroban is a practical and very portable tool for doing basic sums and differences, but after working with my own kids I don't think it's as good as a teaching tool as a counting board is, and I expect it's probably not as effective for doing more advanced calculations either, compared to a flat counting board where counters can be positioned arbitrarily, and where it's easy to add as many additional counts as you want by just making some more lines on a new piece of paper.
The real advantages of a counting board are (1) it needs no special equipment beyond a pile of pebbles, pennies, buttons, or other tokens; (2) it can be easily modified to apply to different number systems or specific calculations (though it's perhaps not as conveniently flexible as symbolic writing); and (3) there are many different representations of any number, and the game of calculation is about starting the problem off immediately with one version of "the right answer" already on the board and then performing various meaning-preserving operations to simplify the representation until arriving at one which is convenient to interpret or compare. This seems quite different psychologically from the use of a soroban (disclaimer: I'm not an expert) which is more about performing a sequence of steps in a pre-determined algorithm to obtain a correct answer, with intermediate steps not showing a representation of the same number because the soroban has only one unique way to represent any particular string of digits. I think the more flexible and representation-agnostic tool better promotes an essential skill which only increase in use as people get to higher levels of mathematics and other technical subjects. The soroban might be better for an accounting tool but the inflexibility is a deficiency for a teaching/thinking tool.
We use a variant of Steve Stephenson's counting board, which we call "button arithmetic" as an activity. Stephenson (since deceased) was a retired engineer turned high school teacher who got very interested in counting boards in the 2000s. He made some YouTube videos here:
Some of Stephenson's historical speculations are somewhat implausible, but it's fun to think about, or try to invent your own alternative ideas, and overall I think ancient calculation methods are underestimated by many modern scholars.
With my kids (now 9 and 6), we haven't bothered with Stephenson's floating-point-with-exponents system, but we do base ten arithmetic using horizontal lines for powers of ten and a vertical line to separate positive/negative. The space between two lines represents (as in medieval Europe) five times the previous power of ten.
I went to a fabric store and examined every type of button they had in bulk, then bought a bunch of my favorite type: some round metal ones, somewhat smaller than pennies, symmetrical on top/bottom, with a slightly domed shape that makes them much easier to pick up than coins. But pennies also work okay, as do carefully chosen beach pebbles.
I think counting boards are quite helpful for kids, a powerful and flexible tool that they can grow into. They can get started with it at age 3–4, before having the manual dexterity to write numerals.
> The abacus is a standard part of elementary education in several Asian countries, for precisely the reasons you mentioned regarding numerical intuition. In American education, a student might only learn about the abacus from a brief paragraph in their history textbook.
IIRC, Montessori schools use them, or something like them.
The abacus is awesome, and fun to learn. My parents bought me a miniature one on a trip to San Francisco when I was 8 years old (first time visiting Chinatown). It came with an illustrated pamphlet and I started practicing with it and figured out how to use it for basic math. I'd recommend it for any kid.
American schools do use "manipulatives" to introduce counting and numbers, addition, subtraction, etc. They might use checkers, or popsicle sticks, or anything small and easy to hold/move.
The use of various kinds of mathematical manipulatives and concrete materials is great (including base ten blocks, cuisenaire rods, ten frames, number lines, dice, balance scales with weights, geoboards, pattern blocks, multi-link cubes, etc.). I'm a fan of all of them. But I think the counting board, per se, is a sadly neglected tool, not least because it gives a nice connection to the past.
Chinese CO₂ emissions per capita are only about 60% as much as the USA, but in the past 25 years US per capita emissions have dropped by about a third and Chinese emissions per capita have almost tripled and are still rising rapidly. Considering that China is about 4 times as populous as the US, this is a huge problem for the world. (US emissions are also a huge problem; we all need for them to decrease very quickly.)
Much as I wish to be optimistic, one year does not a trend make. As per the link:
The shallow decline in 2015 and 2016 was due to a slump that followed a round of stimulus measures, while zero-Covid controls caused a sharper fall in 2022.
We might be on the right path, but also the very rapid decarbonisation of primary energy and transport may be overwhelmed by growth in other sectors like cement, metal oxide reduction, or beef.
(Or not, there's at least theoretical paths to make those examples better, this is just meant to moderate hope rather than to deny it entirely).
China was exiting poverty and heavily industrializing during that period, along with building up massive amounts of infrastructure that could save some emissions over time, though of course also things like coal plants are included in the infrastructure numbers. But if we look at absolute instead of per-capita for some odd reason, an aspect to also look at is that a lot more of those CO2 emissions are from China manufacturing for the US and the world than vice versa.
If we focus on rates of growth, China is building much more solar and nuclear than the US per-capita. And they don't have as much available domestic gas which with shorter carbon chains makes much less CO2, and that's the big problem. The US has twice as many natural gas reserves as China, with 1/4 the population, so, post-dissemination of fracking technology, that's largely down to geographical luck.
There's going to be big spikes in data center energy consumption in both countries. It's still somewhat marginal at the moment at a little over 4% here and less there but it is going to be a main driver of energy consumption growth going forward.
Banning China from leading nodes may result in doubling or more their consumption in this area as a direct US policy outcome.
China has been a developing country for most the time of the past 25 years. It is indeed a huge problem if it is still rising rapidly. But it is also not fair to limit China’s per capita growth for most of the past two decades
If they are still at 60% of USA unless your opinion is that Chinese people don't deserve air conditioning as much as Americans, you don't really have a point.
Air conditioning is a relatively small part of global CO₂ emissions (3%); you should be more worried about heating.
I would expect air conditioning to also be among the easier energy uses to match with solar power as we go forward. Better building design and more efficient AC devices also make a huge difference.
There's many ways to achieve improved quality of life. Our fancy-insulated new German house with triple glazing and a heat pump used an average of 250 W grid power last month, despite our PV being (1) a Balkonkraftwerk and therefore only 800 W peak, (2) summer's over, lots of clouds now, and (3) in a very sub-optimal location due to a builder's skip. (Still, the neighbours have trimmed the hedge last weekend and the skip has now gone…)
There's easy ways and hard ways, the point is a country which has done the easy way cannot tell another country with less impact per capita they need to do it the hard way before cleaning up its act. Or you can but you're huge hypocrites.
The easy way isn't the same from one year to the next.
China is currently building out all of this renewable energy and EVs, when the early industrial powers didn't, not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because it is now the easy way.
Everyone is going to have a bad quality of life, to the extent they're able to live at all, if we don't act quickly at massive scale in a coordinated fashion.
I think it's possible to get a careful dark roast, but often "dark roast" coffee mainly tastes like burned toast. It's still warm and caffeinated, but it's not really that enjoyable. There's a reason so many people make this kind of coffee very watered down or drown it in cream and sugar. Maybe it feels historically connected to cowboys brewing coffee in a sock over a campfire or whatever, but is that connection really so valuable?
I just prefer the taste and it reminds me more of Turkish coffee, which is my favorite way of preparation. And also black coffee reminds me of various cultural things like diners, detective fiction, etc. Like this quote from Phoenix Wright, the game:
“Blacker than a moonless night. Hotter and more bitter than hell itself… that is coffee.”
Lighter roast coffee just isn’t a thing I generally enjoy, to me it feels like a different drink, an over-complicated consumer product, not the kind of thing one would write quotes like the one above about.
A bit like grilling vs. sous vide with meat. Grilling has a whole culture to it, whereas sous vide feels soulless and overly technical, even if it produces great flavors.
Can you be a bit more explicit? Do you have a specific person in mind as a model of this "guy in the desert" that people keep calling a "dumb yokel" but who actually a power-grid savant or whatever? Aside: alongside your hero, there are some extremely kooky people living out in the CA desert.
Considering how much the Texas state government has been illegally trampling its own residents’ rights recently, mostly for the sake of private corruption, and backed by incredibly bad faith anti-social rhetoric, perhaps reflexive anti-Texas-elected-officials-ism is a reasonable baseline position.
This hasn't changed in at least 2 decades: I was getting zapped by Apple metal laptops circa 2004. But I have never encountered this problem when using a grounded plug.
It was also a lot worse for me when plugged into outlets in an old house in Mexico, especially when my bare feet were touching the terracotta floor tiles; it's not really an issue in a recently re-wired house in California with a wood floor, using the same laptops, power strips, etc.
If you are having this issue and you currently plug a 2-pronged plug into a grounded outlet, try using Apple's 3-pronged plug instead, and I expect it would go away. If you don't have grounded outlets, then that's a bit more complicated to solve.
That's what confuses me, I am using the cable with three prongs, it is grounded. I am beginning to suspect some other appliance I am plugging into it that is responsible of the build-up of charge, but then why is it not finding its way to the ground... something doesn't add up but has been my experience consistently.
A further problem is that Wikipedia is chock full of nonsense, with a large proportion of articles that were never fact checked by an expert, and many that were written to promote various biased points of view, inadvertently uncritically repeat claims from slanted sources, or mischaracterize claims made in good sources. Many if not most articles have poor choice of emphasis of subtopics, omit important basic topics, and make routine factual errors. (This problem is not unique to Wikipedia by any means, and despite its flaws Wikipedia is an amazing achievement.)
A critical human reader can go as deep as they like in examining claims there: can look at the source listed for a claim, can often click through to read the claim in the source, can examine the talk page and article history, can search through the research literature trying to figure out where the claim came from or how it mutated in passing from source to source, etc. But an AI "reader" is a predictive statistical model, not a critical consumer of information.
Just the other day, I clicked through to a Wikipedia reference (a news article) and discovered that the citing sentence grossly misrepresented the source. Probably not accidental since it was about a politically charged subject.
> many that were written to promote various biased points of view, inadvertently uncritically repeat claims from slanted sources, or mischaracterize claims made in good sources.
Yep.
Including, if not especially, the ones actively worked on by the most active contributors.
The process for vetting sources (both in terms of suitability for a particular article, and general "reliable sources" status) is also seriously problematic. Especially when it comes to any topic which fundamentally relates to the reliability of journalism and the media in general.
A future problem will be that the BBC and the rest of the Internet will soon be chock-full of nonsense, with a large proportion of articles that were never fact checked by a human, much less an AI.
Wikipedia is pretty good for most topics. Anything even remotely political somewhere however, it isn't just bad, it is one of the worst sources out there. And therein lies the problem, its wildly different levels of quality depending on the topic.
Wikipedia is bad even for topics that aren't particularly political, not even because the editor was trying to be misleading but rather was being lazy and wrote up their own misconception and either made up a source or pulled a source without bothering to actually read it. These kind of errors can stay in place for years.
I have one example that I check periodically just to see if anybody else has noticed. I've been checking it for several years and it's still there; the SDI page claims that Brilliant Pebbles was designed to use "watermelon sized" tungsten projectiles. This is completely made up; whoever wrote it up was probably confusing "rods from god" proposals that commonly use tungsten and synthesizing that confusion with "pebbles". The sentence is cited but the sources don't back it up. It's been up like this for years. This error has been repeated on many websites now, all post-dating the change on wikipedia.
If you're reading this and are the sort to edit wikipedia.. Don't fix it. That would be cheating.
> If you're reading this and are the sort to edit wikipedia.. Don't fix it. That would be cheating.
Imagine if this was the ethos regarding open source software projects. Imaging Microsoft saying 20 years ago, "Linux has this and that bug, but you're not allowed to go fix it because that detracts from our criticism of open source." (Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft or similar detractors literally said this.)
Of course Wikipedia has wrong information. Most open source software projects, even the best, have buggy, shite code. But these things are better understood not as products, but as processes, and in many (but not all) contexts the product at any point in time has generally proven, in a broad sense, to outperform their cathedral alternatives. But the process breaks down when pervasive cynicism and nihilism reduce the number of well-intentioned people who positively engage and contribute, rather than complain from the sidelines. Then we land right back to square 0. And maybe you're too young to remember what the world was like at square 0, but it sucked in terms of knowledge accessibility, notwithstanding the small number of outstanding resources--but which were often inaccessible because of cost or other barriers.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, the temperature commonly varies dramatically between some places which are a quarter mile apart. And one side of a hill can be persistently foggy while the other side is usually sunny.
> We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which there were not to be seen superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.