Re:Studying the demise of historic civilisations
by crimsonalucard on Tuesday March 05, 2019 @11:53AM
(#19311871)
Still I'm looking for quantitative data, not anecdotal. Things like energy usage measured in joules or Green house gas emissions by weight or climate change by temperature.
A philosophy book offers conjecture not evidence.
Re:Studying the demise of historic civilisations
by onion2k on Tuesday March 05, 2019 @04:53PM
(#19314609)
You want data about energy usage in joules from 100 years before James Joule was born? That's going to be tricky..
Re:Studying the demise of historic civilisations
by crimsonalucard on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @12:28AM
(#19316579)
I want all the data we can get. Frankly a philosophy book or anecdotal musings about human behavior are not data. It's just a predictive conjecture about how a human will behave in a certain situation and is rarely accurate.
When I said "relatively new" I meant "in the past 300 years or so". When I said "any old philosophy book" I meant "one written 1500 years ago". I didn't make my frame of reference clear; that was obviously a mistake on my part. Saying things like "new" on a tech forum has a very different meaning compared to "new" in terms of history and philosophy. 300 years ago people were born in to a strata of society and couldn't work their way out even if they wanted to. Social mobility in the middle ages didn't exist (with a few notable exceptions like demonstrating valour in warfare.)
More recently (in the past 50 years) there have been some quite extensive studies of happiness, and envy is almost always found to be a confounding factor. Why that is seems to be the case is an interesting evolutionary question - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.0161...