Language, standards, the internet, agriculture, glass, sunscreen, resilient rice, sterilization, human flight, spontaneous development of sentient life in the universe…
When you think about it all, you start to appreciate how miraculous things actually are.
https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/C...
Regardless ... people's ignorance is showing. Too many never think about the fact that people just 200-100 years ago would have considered modern technology magic.
Imagine showing off to one of these people:
Omfg you're speaking into a flat rectangle!
Omfg it speaks back!
Omfg it shows pictures!
Omfg that box speaks!
Omfg that box speaks and shows people!
O M F G YOU GUYS FLY EVERY DAY???
WHAT DO YOU MEAN, SYPHILIS ISN'T AN ISSUE ANYMORE??? AND THERE'S A PILL PREVENTING PREGNANCY ???????????
It's absolutely amazing.
Rule-based societies predate the Romans by a lot of time ; Romans weren't even that good at it, considering how often violence was used as a political tool during the republic.
Wouldn't the Code of Hammurabi have preceded that by quite a few centuries?
That's not to say there's not a grain of truth in this perspective. My impression is that Romans were notable for their pioneering work in the field of what could best be described as "civic pride" - the sense that "civilization" represented progress, the idea of the state as a kind of collective project that elevates everyone and that we should all be proud to participate in. They probably weren't the first to think like this - history is long - but they were the last to do so in a largely secular fashion in the West for a long time, and certainly directly influenced the thoughts of the Enlightenment thinkers who eventually inspired the American Revolution.
S.P.Q.R.
The Code of Hammurabi is best understood as royal propaganda designed to portray Hammurabi as a just king. The famous stele starts with a graphic depiction of him receiving the royal rod and ring from Shamash, the sun god who was emblematic of truth and justice. The laws are best understood as a statement of the kind of justice Hammurabi wished to see done in his kingdom, not a set of rules.
Rule-based society is something different: when the Law itself has a power of it's own, stronger than power of any individual or group. It was first invented in Rome and provided them tremendous advantage, until started to crumble during the Long 3rd Century Crisis.
> You may wonder why we don’t use Roman concrete today if that is the case; well, one of the reasons as to why is because, although it gets stronger over time and withstands erosion from water, when this cement is still young and has not had time to develop its strength from seawater, it likely does not have the compressive strength to handle modern use.
https://www.forthvalleyconcrete.co.uk/the-differences-betwee...
Also, Roman concrete didn't contain rebar which is necessary in many modern applications and rebar rusts which reduces the overall lifespan of the structure.
That said, apparently Roman concrete has some potential issues in structures adjacent to bodies of saltwater since the saltwater would accelerate the strengthening process.
Sorry not sorry if I just subjected you to the same.
Auctions, GPS,
Postage stamp, video games,
Public key cryptography,
Shipping containers.
iPhone, pencil,
Clocks and contraceptive pill,
Passports, batteries,
Banking, antibiotics.
Double entry book-keeping,
Canned food, air conditioning,
Razors, solar cells,
Sanitary towels.
Retirement, printing press
And the Haeber-Bosch process
Infant formula,
Exchangeable parts.
Light bulb, concrete,
Sewing machine, spreadsheet,
S-bend, cold chain,
Insurance and dwarf wheat!GPS, disposable razor, these are not impactful enough to be "black swan but good".
And things like clocks and batteries were slowly refined over many, many years, so they don't fit either.
Don’t fall into the trap of reacting with “meh” to everything. Maybe you just don’t know? Maybe you don’t realise how much modern life depends on say, the Haeber-Bosch process or the shipping container? “Oh it’s just a metal box”, a person who doesn’t understand it might say.
Not sure if that's black swan territory or not, but IMO it was a great piece of forward-thinking that made GPS useful beyond just the original military applications.
That sounds strange .. but .. there are many small corrections that need to be applied to "straight forward" triangulated fixing off of moving monuments (term from surveying), relativitic time shift being just one.
There are several recent HN threads about Kalman filters [e].
It's possible (and more or less roughly what already happens) to record GPS fixes against a fixed master station and compute the time series error twixt the naive computation and known location (or, indeed, mesh of locations across (say) Australia and generate a Kalman filter to correct and return more precise positions for moving recievers in the mesh area.
Had we not been aware of relativity we very likely would have discovered it via the time slip 'error' terms in the correction filter.
In a similar manner we have improved our understanding for atmospheric wobble, continental drip [1], and other fine effects.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_drip
[e] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...
As so often, the refinement of the technique makes it so widely available and effective that, without being revolutionary in principle, it becomes revolutionary in effect.
Telecommunications is like that. A century ago a telex from Australia to England could make it from desk to desk in under an hour. The Internet is not revolutionary in that sense. And yet it is revolutionary anyway.
I don’t know about that. Maybe it was. What I do know is that we have documented speculation about satelite based navigation the days right after the launch of Sputnik.
American scientist figured out the orbit of Sputnik independently from the Russians by measuring the dopler shift of the radio transmission with their radios. Then knowing where their radio is located they used an iterative optimisation process to identify the orbital parameters of the satelite. Immediately there they were talking about how if the orbit of the satelite were known they could use the same process backwards to fix their location. That was 21 years before the launch of the first GPS satelite.
Now, that is not exactly how GPS signals work, and with good reasons. But it is the first documented seed of the idea of satelite based navigation that I am aware of.
Source: https://secwww.jhuapl.edu/techdigest/Content/techdigest/pdf/...
How informative of you.
GPS does things better but we can do generally the same things without it.
Don't think about what would happen if we ripped out all GPS functionality overnight, think about what would happen if we had a decade to implement replacements.
The loss of accuracy wouldn't be that important.
> the Haeber-Bosch proces
That one's pretty great, it's probably worth including.
> or the shipping container? “Oh it’s just a metal box”, a person who doesn’t understand it might say.
Hmm, focus on cargo ships and you can see a pretty rapid revolution, but in a wider lens maybe it was more of a broad evolution. I'm not sure.
But my point was that the list was too long, not that it didn't have any valid examples.
It goes in depth on the introduction of the shipping container and how revolutionary it was. There was also a fair bit of legal wrangling to make it possible as well.
> And things like clocks and batteries were slowly refined over many, many years, so they don't fit either.
Everything started with a thought, or a discovery. What happens after is irrelevant. The event, that kicks off Dramatic Change(tm), is at the start.
> That's just a list of good inventions.
No. It isn't just a list of good inventions. Ignoring that it's not all inventions, you seem to lack the understanding of the impact. For example:
> Antibiotics
A discovery. It literally changed how humanity moves forward. One of the whitest swan moments in human history.
> public key cryptography
It took until 1975 for someone to figure this out and it changed how we exchange information, legitimize ourselves and deal with our privacy.
> contraceptive pill
The invention of the pill was an event that had massive impact on how Humanity moved forward.
> printing press
The invention of mass production of books lead to the first information explosion, dramatically changing humanity's future.
What you're doing here is mixing your ignorance of the impactfullness of some of the things on the list, with your own personal idea of what's "great", or however you want to call it.
Even if I agree that not everything on that list is equally meaningfull in terms of impact, some of them are really fucking high up the ladder, just like room temperature superconductors.
> > public key cryptography
> It took until 1975 for someone to figure this out
Sketched out in 1874 as a concept by Jevons, firmed up (sans implementation) in 1970, first implemented in 1973 (classified for nigh on 30 years by the UK Govt).
First public example (of a different schema) was 1976.
Other examples worked out in 1974, not published until 1978. etc.
I have no great quibble here, 1975 is a good approximate ballpark figure but I wasn't sure which scheme you had in mind as it's almost the only year in the 1970s that nothing particularly significant happened in public key crypto.
Clocks did not have an event that kicks off a dramatic change. We've had them for thousands of years. I don't see how anyone could disagree with that.
I could see disagreement about batteries, but even then I feel like they were quite marginal for quite a while. A slow buildup is not a "black swan but good". There needs to be quite a lot of suddenness to it all.
And I didn't even mention the ones in the rest of your post so I don't want to argue those.
If you talked about all those because I said "list of good inventions", let me clarify. It's a list of "good or better inventions", mixing ones that qualify as 'black swan but good" with ones that don't.
wat
it's called a black swan because black swans are rare. white swans are quite common. discoveries with the impact of antibiotics are extremely rare.
what, exactly, do you think the term "black swan" means. and why do you think that?
I am wondering though what exactly you think "black swan event" means since your post here makes it rather clear you don't at all understand what the term means or where it comes from either.
Black swans are not at all rare and a "black swan event" is not called that because of the rarity of black swans. Its called that because "black swan" was at one time used to refer to non-existent or impossible things in England then when Australia was discovered they found out black swans are actually extremely common, which was a very unexpected event that couldn't have been predicted from the data available beforehand. Its the discovery of black swans that was unlikely, not black swans, and its the unexpectedness of their discovery happening that is the relevant piece that makes something a "black swan event". [1]
If black swans were rare seeing one would not be a "black swan event" (ironically it would be a white swan event) because it would be possible to predict that one would could be seen, just not very often, making it not have the required unexpectedness.
Please if you are going to be pedantic try to also actually be correct on what you're being a jerk about first.
Military without GPS would be blocked. Try navigating in jungle environments where everything is green and looks the same. I've experienced both with GPS and without, that was one heck of a game changer.
[1] https://qz.com/1106064/the-entire-global-financial-system-de...
ATMs may be designed to use super precise timstamps, but they don't need to be. At all.
The interesting timing constraints are between stock exchanges... but in those situations the speed of light is a bigger factor than clock drift, even if you're just using NTP, and you can't avoid speed of light delays/desyncs.
For stock exchanges you are absolutely correct. I remember many years ago paying so much extra for the fastest internet access and sub-second delay access to our local stock exchange. Even so it was still slower (lag) when compared to those with offices placed very close to the stock exchange building/infrastruture at that time.
Lead acid got us from, what 1940 to 2005? Something like that? But the utility of Lithium Batteries has blown what was already a gigantic market even wider open.
I don't think the passport is an invention itself, so to speak.
Travel like that was never "reserved" for explorers, missionaries or high ranking dignitaries. If you had the money/resources, you could go anywhere.
Now there is a "caste" system of countries that have Visa on Arrival, Free Entry, or Visa required where you have to prove that you are financially capable, or even wanted in the country, or promise not to work or be illegally employed/compensated.
And then that alongside many countries in the developing world that still have undocumented people, no birth certificate, no identification, no tax ID, etc.
How does a country verify someones birth? Especially if someone wasn't born in a hospital? In the west, until 1950's, mostly this was done via church records. Also, are you granted citizenship by birth or only through parents? (Big deal, especially for Puerto Rican births - or countries that don't recognize foreign births in their land, e.g. United Arab Emirates / Saudi Arabia - even Japan or China, where sure you can be born there, but that means absolutely nothing.)
So, no, it isn't really a greater system for international worldwide travel - it is a system of control to ensure someones identity is who they are and that the country they are form atleast certified to some standard that their name, their picture, their birth date, their location of birth are somewhat tangibly real.
And this isn't even getting into information sharing. The above is just a standard, that now is "machine" readable and has an RFID so that collection is more easier for the state.
Context is amazing, isn't it?
Why 1800s? Why not Roman times? All you had to do is state you were a roman citizen, and you could travel - Unimpaired “ Civis Romanus sum”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civis_Romanus_sum
Borders existed but travel was not impaired, how else do you think trade and commerce worked? Do you think supply chains are a new thing?
It very much sounds like you are conflating serfdom, as an impairment to free travel - it is a different exercise. Because you did have a king, and you were a farmer in that land and in many ways you had lesser rights than a slave.
The Roman Empire was a unique example among the thousands of years of history because along with their transportation network of roads they did actually have a couple of passport-like systems in place. Now a third of the people were literally slaves, so they definitely weren't going anywhere without permission, so maybe Rome is not a great starting point for what I presume to be the argument against passports. But the Romans and other Mediterranean civilizations did check your identity when you travelled. Romans had documents they called diplomas for people on official business and several civilizations used clay tablets called tesserae as a sort of ID card, but by far the most common method was simply having known people vouch for you.
Basically nowhere in the ancient world from the Middle East to the pre-colonial Americas could you just show up in a foreign village without people asking questions that you ought better have good answers for. There are a handful of exceptions, but this has never been the norm, and even with passports and visa restrictions it is definitely far easier today than it ever was in the past. I expect it will get easier and easier into the future. Perhaps quite soon in fact as the global population begins to decline and people become more and more valuable.
Consider how the days before passports also lacked air travel available to the masses. Even cars has only just started to become commonplace. I don't see how you could possibly have travel that is so cheap, quick, and accessible to such a large population without some way to control who is coming and leaving your country? Especially with how we're quickly making different parts of the planet inhospitable, and given how rapidly populations have risen compared to a century ago.
Passports are much older than that, but in pre-WWI Europe, most countries didn't require them for travel. (Russia and Turkey did.)
Passports certainly do have a dystopian element to them, especially if they are demanded too frequently / aggressively. But on their own, they aren't particularly evil; they just identify you much like your face does.
> Before WWI there were no passports and no need for them.
This combination of ignorance and confidence isn’t a good look.
So unless private collection of personal data is completely illegal, I’d rather have a centralised ID system instead
It's an interesting and thought-provoking list though.
You wouldn't say "Boeing 737" you'd say flight.
They're saying iPhone because it's attention grabbing. No other reason.
For some reason, I'm not entirely willing to believe that my parents (who are still alive) had a less happy life than I have even though they didn't grow up with an iPhone. And it's not like modern conveniences have no downsides (e.g. increase in stress). That's not to say I would give up on these things readily, I'm just way too used to them.
I think probably most people could agree that treatments for diseases that regularly also affect young / middle-aged peolle are a good thing. It's hard to argue that someone in the prime of their life should die of some silly infection.
Unless it's too comment on 'throwaway mentality', modern consumerism, etc., the book meaning 'made the modern economy' more literally/broadly than you're referencing it for here?
The first series is my favorite podcast of all time. They're short (~8 minutes, iirc) but pack a lot of interesting info in each episode. In particular, they explore some of the second-order effects of each invention.
The disposable razor might not be a true 'black swan' like the transistor or LK-99, but some of the background and influence around the invention might surprise you! I recommend checking it out. [1]
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Things_That_Made_the_Modern... [1] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p04t8k2l
Why is disposable razor on the list but not electricity, computing, refrigeration, metallurgy, microscopy, or eye glasses?
Shoutout to 50 things that made the modern economy, a great podcast/book.