A 12 year old ted talk with moral philosopher James Flynn. He also mentions how university students in the 50s would go to their parents and grandparents and try to argue using hypotheticals, which never worked. I also noticed that “concrete thinking” is common among children, which is probably our human default.
When you think about it, it makes sense that most people thru history wouldn’t need to bother with hypotheticals, those ideas would be so far removed from their reality that it made no sense to bother thinking about it.
Now people can’t describe anything concretely, so they can never check if their abstractions are even accurate.
The idea of concretizing problems is something ive been thinking about a lot recently, and its surprising how simple yet unnatural it is. When you think about it an abstraction can help aid understanding and can bring us closer to objective reality, but a false abstraction actually is alienating from reality, nature, each other, ourselves.
Also there’s a lot of really smart people who are able to name an abstraction, name the specific concrete occurrence that is contained in or broadly explained by the abstraction, but can’t conceive of or explain any of the steps in between.
We all just out here vibing “trust me bro” and dont even realize it
Does he talk about the rise of idiocy due to the same complexity?
No
If you’re interested in human intelligence, don’t miss Joseph Henrich’s book, “The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter”.
It has a few fun examples where historical people follow seemingly absurd complex instructions/traditions that are actually beneficial, while nobody ever designed them or knows what they do. It puts logical thinking into perspective.
