Wrong conclusion. This was about understanding that you aren't done learning even if you're well learned.
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
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I don't know when shitting on the Greek civilization became a thing, but the irony that this trend comes from the same country that voted for Trump twice and made Idiocracy a tame historical documentary is not lost on me.
I hear the same about the conceptualization of zero as a numeral that operations can be performed on (a crucial turning point in human thinking) which is also laughable. It simply was not compatible with the Greek understanding of mathematics which emphasized the discrete and trigonometric but fit very well into the more abstract view towards math on the Indian subcontinent. There's a reason why human discovery has global roots.
- Hey dude, you know you had two goats? Well, I took one
- Whatever I still have one goat left
- Hey dude, you know you had one single goat? Well, I took it
- Wtf, that doesn't make sense
👆 real dialogues recorded by actual ancient Greeks
Simple rule of thumb. If it has no real world use case in your avg dudes day to day.
It ain't getting discovered.
Now you also need to have that avg dude be someone of note, power and reach so that the discovery actually goes somewhere and doesn't just die with him.
The more esoteric and rarer those two things line up.
The relation between mass & energy seems very intuitive, I've known it for most of my life!
Wdym humanity just recently learned that??
(It's a cognitive bias when you internalise some information you just learned, & suddenly get the feeling that all who don't know it are kinda dumb, like that info wasn't gifted to you by chance/random experience.)
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In the UK our £2 coins have "Standing on the shoulders of giants" written around the rim, to remind us all that no, you wouldn't have thought of that, you berk.
There's also the case of, you arnt rich, noble, and from the ruling class that gives your words enough weight to even be considered less remembered at all.
A great deal many things have been discovered and forgotten and rediscovered. Because the first few times they weren't discovered by a rich enough noble with the power and wealth to spread the knowledge or even get people to listen in the first place.
In ye olden times. It took more then just being smart, you also had to be rich as FUCK or have extremely good connections if not rich as fuck. And in many cases you needed both.
Else you would be ignored, and die with any discovery or advancements you invented in your life.
But this is about philosophy, not society.
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No you wouldn't. All this stuff may seem obvious now but it only does so because somebody figured it out before.
I mean a lot of what Socrates and Plato wrote and taught are just self justifications for the ancient Greek ruling class.
That delusion is so common that I suspect it must have a name, but I don't know what it is.
But the better a solution appears, the more a person who sees the solution believes it to be obvious, and therefore also believes that, had they tried to solve the problem, they'd have come up with this "obvious" solution straight away with no effort.
Meanwhile, the person who actually solved the problem could only come up with the perfect simple solution after a lifetime of study in the area to the point that you'd call them an expert or master, and after agonizing for a long time over this particular problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias
"Hindsight bias, also known as the knew-it-all-along phenomenon or creeping determinism, is the common tendency for people to perceive past events as having been more predictable than they were."
It's a kind of cognitive bias that assumes things that are obvious to us would be inevitably found without uncertainty, or trial and error.
"Einstein is such an idiot. I learned about general relativity in middle school"
Teaching "common sense" is so hard because kids get so offended that you think they are stupid.
Historical projections of population place the global population at roughly 162 million people. Let's say only .1% of the population was capable of this sort of thing. Although I think it's low and while these early Greek philosophers were certainly smart the key to their success was wealth and the ability to focus on their "craft". But I'll really lowball human intelligence
Anyway, at .1% of people that means roughly 162,000 thousand people would be capable. The number of those with resources to actually dedicate the time even smaller.
Today the world population is over 8 billion, but we'll use 8 billion. So at .1% that gives us 8 million people alive today that would be capable.
I really underestimated human intelligence, but the point is the same. We have so so many people alive today that there is certainly quite a few people capable of doing these sorts of things
That seems like a fair percentage estimate. What you're leaving out is society. The ancient Greeks, even the 99.9% dummies, were excited about philosophy and learning. Today, Joe Rogan is one of the most popular podcasts in the world and you can't throw a stick without hitting a dozen grifters proudly parroting logical fallacies while people clap. So yeah, there might be eight million people out there, but their thoughtful blog probably gets a dozen hits a month. Their world changing lecture was cancelled for being woke. Their exciting revelation they add to the conversation get overshadowed by someone yelling how great "Oh! My Balls!" was last night.
Bringing up Joe Rogan, but ignoring the estimated 1% of the global population with PhDs is a choice.
If we just counted phds that becomes 800 million people, but truthfully I think most capable of a masters would stand a good chance of doing this work.
Human intelligence is often underestimated by cynics imo
1% of the global population with PhDs is a choice.
If we just counted phds that becomes 800 million people
Ouch. And to follow that up with "intelligence is often underestimated by cynics imo". Simply brutal. I hate to be the one to break this too you, but having a PhD doesn't necessarily mean a person is smart. Even if it did, that 1% is sort of entirely making my above point about society.
Considering that alone suggests a rate 10 times higher than they suggested yeah.
But also don't assume education is equally distributed. Wealthy nations have higher percentages of the population with PhDs. Also let's not forget the economic factors. Many fields you at most need a masters degree for job reasons. There are a lot of capable people that stopped there to get a job
"Socrates was the wisest man in Athens."
Dude, the population of Athens and it's surrounding territory at the time was about 200k-250k people, a very sizable portion of which were foreigners who probably had a different primary language, and even more of which were slaves (like 1/3 to 1/2 of the entire population). Would be like talking about the wisest person in Dayton, Ohio 2500 years later in every philosophy textbook in the world becuase he realized it was better to say "I dunno" than to talk out of your ass.
If Plato is accurate then I don't know if he didn't talk out of his ass.
Much like another wise man.
It wasn't that he didn't know things. He specifically showed you how you didn't know things you thought you did. That's quiet different.
It's literally still called "the Socratic method". And it made the ancient Athenians so mad at Socrates they executed him.
If you manage to have things named after you a few thousand years from now by saying "I dunno", I'll raise my hat to you.
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Too bad I don't get to sit around and think all day so I can discuss with others who sit around and think all day.
Have you tried being born wealthy? Hope this helps!
That was Plato and Socrates's secret
Plato, but Socrates worked as a stone mason.
Well, a society with a vast management/"thinker" class (the rest, including bureaucrats, being slaves) should produce some thinkening shit.
Not as much as a society with universal individual's needs guaranteed (the tech back then just wasn't there), but more than a society with overwhelming oligarchy/feudalism rule where only a random few are allowed to think.
I'll go further, i reckon i couldve done better than "featherless biped" as the definition of a human.
Honestly they mustve said so much bollocks that people were too embaressed to write down or copy and it was lost to time.
If I recall correctly, "fatherless biped" was an attempt to define a human in the simplest, most basic form, and as short as possible.
I guess they just forgot about gorillas and other primates. Are they classified as bipedal? I mean they don't HAVE to use their arms to move around. It's just more efficient for them...
Of course, I wouldn't have plucked a chicken and presented it ad a fatherless biped, either.. So what do I know lmao
I guess they just forgot about gorillas
We often take for granted how much information we have about the animal kingdom. Gorillas are native to central Africa; it is highly unlikely Plato ever even met somebody who had seen one. What makes Greek philosophy impressive is how much they were able to accurately describe given the incredibly limited slice of what is now “common knowledge” available to them, and how durable the methods they employed have proven when provided better priors.
At the time, in Greece they thought of apes as monkeys without tails. They also had no reason to think those creatures were particularly bipedal. Or that there was any particular relation to humans. Aristotle was describing Baboons, which walk on all 4s. To Plato, a bird might be the only other creature that walked on two legs. It also has pink skin for what that's worth.
It's easy to forget that the foundation of knowledge we have is so incredibly vast it would be incomprehensible to the ancient Greeks. We learn in elementary school things that people wouldn't work out for centuries.
Imagine telling Diogenes that dolphins are foxes that learned to swim. Or that the giant skulls they keep finding aren't one eyed giants, but the skulls of ancient hairy elephants.
Plato was alive when Greek philosophers decided the earth was round, and it would be a few hundred years before somebody would make the first real calculation of its size.
I doubt Diogenes would care abt the foxes being dolphins so much as how u explained it. If u brought a series of dolphin to fox fossil records he'd accept it but if u come in waving ur hands abt and mumbling something abt dolphins and foxes he'd think ur as insane as him.
Their relationship to humans is irrelevant to being able to walk around just fine on two legs.
My last point was apes fit the "featherles biped" just as much as a plucked chicken, and just as much as we do.
It really just depends on how much knowledge they had of the existence of various primates and how they walk around. I've just seen enough monkeys and apes walking on two legs to consider them a child's understanding of "featherless biped"
My favorite bit of trivia about how much/little we knew about things, we technically discovered steam power thousands of years ago, but only relatively recently in human history figured out how to use it to do things.
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I could also had put 3 sticks of the same size on one axis and 4 on another and see that between the ends you can fit 5 sticks.
Wat
a^2 + b^2 = c^2
Oooohhhhh
I guess you wouldn't have figured it out on your own, lol.
I'm the 11th guy
Just keep asking why to everything. My nephew was basically Socrates.
I admit I am old, but can anybody explain this meme format with an expressionless person making a selfie with a statement at the top? And do I need to be as conventionally attractive as this young man here or do looks not matter?
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I think that if I were intelligentsia in a different period of human development I would go and try to discover something. But that's only because I'm in academia now so as long as I have the prerequisite material conditions my personal impulse for obtaining new knowledge would drive me
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