Similarly, people sometimes claim that we should discount our own intuitions of extreme historic importance because people often feel that way, but have so far (at least almost) always been wrong. And I’m a bit skeptical of the premise of this particular induction. On my cursory understanding of history, it’s likely that for most of history people saw themselves as part of a stagnant or cyclical process which no one could really change, and were right. But I don’t have any quotes on this, let alone stats. I’d love to know what proportion of people before ~1500 thought of themselves as living at a special time.
My read is that Millenarian religious cults have often existed in nontrivial numbers, but as you say the idea of systematic, let alone accelerating, progress (as opposed to past golden ages or stagnation) is new and coincided with actual sustained noticeable progress. The Wikipedia page for Millenarianism lists ~all religious cults, plus belief in an AI intelligence explosion.
So the argument seems, first order, to reduce to the question of whether credence in AI growth boom (to much faster than IR rates) is caused by the same factors as religious cults rather than secular scholarly opinion, and the historical share/power of those Millenarian sentiments as a share of the population. But if one takes a narrower scope (not exceptionally important transformation of the world as a whole, but more local phenomena like the collapse of empires or how long new dynasties would last) one sees smaller distortion of relative importance for propaganda frequently (not that it was necessarily believed by outside observers).
Interesting finds, thanks!
Similarly, people sometimes claim that we should discount our own intuitions of extreme historic importance because people often feel that way, but have so far (at least almost) always been wrong. And I’m a bit skeptical of the premise of this particular induction. On my cursory understanding of history, it’s likely that for most of history people saw themselves as part of a stagnant or cyclical process which no one could really change, and were right. But I don’t have any quotes on this, let alone stats. I’d love to know what proportion of people before ~1500 thought of themselves as living at a special time.
My read is that Millenarian religious cults have often existed in nontrivial numbers, but as you say the idea of systematic, let alone accelerating, progress (as opposed to past golden ages or stagnation) is new and coincided with actual sustained noticeable progress. The Wikipedia page for Millenarianism lists ~all religious cults, plus belief in an AI intelligence explosion.
So the argument seems, first order, to reduce to the question of whether credence in AI growth boom (to much faster than IR rates) is caused by the same factors as religious cults rather than secular scholarly opinion, and the historical share/power of those Millenarian sentiments as a share of the population. But if one takes a narrower scope (not exceptionally important transformation of the world as a whole, but more local phenomena like the collapse of empires or how long new dynasties would last) one sees smaller distortion of relative importance for propaganda frequently (not that it was necessarily believed by outside observers).