generic

squashed:

Check it out, everybody! It’s a train-wreck crossing three or four distinct academic disciplines!

Why are you guys so allergic to generalists? Academic disciplines have all kinds of crossover.

We’ve got a chart with no units purporting to convey information.

But it does convey information. I don’t know what you mean by “units.” I see centuries on the X axis and and advancement on the Y axis. Are you dismissing it because it doesn’t specifically rate spears vs. longbows or something?

We’ve got a euro-centric view of history that completely discounts the advances of the rest of the world.

It’s a knock against religion’s impact on Western Civilization. Obviously. We’re not including the Arabs and Chinese in the canon here.

And we’ve got a categorical denial that any of the significant technological advances between the fall of the Roman Empire and “the Renaissance” (or, to use the more hip term, the Early Modern Era). The compass. Windmills. Movable type. Lenses.

But the rate of discovery for those inventions was pathetic. I’d agree the Medieval slope doesn’t fall off quite so sharply, but does fall. And I’d agree it doesn’t quite plateau, but you’d be hard pressed to say it was a steeper incline than, say, Ancient Greece.

… could we at least have some actual thinking? I’m not judging—I’m just saying that a few more charts like this will make people think the Internet is dumb.

Wait, what? Are you arguing the main thrust of this chart is wrong? That ages with a strong preference for an afterlife don’t have low rates of technological advancement? The Dark Ages were dark. They were very, very dark and very, very Christian. You’re not arguing that was coincidence, are you? Because that’s what this chart is telling me. It wasn’t just the collapse of Roman infrastructure. The Egyptians were theocrats — look at their slope. If the x axis extended back to 3000 BC, you wouldn’t see much change at all.