Hogwash. An Egyption slave pulling a huge block wasn't any more creative than most people today. There happend to be one guy who figured out how to move enough huge blocks to build a Pyramid, but there only needs to be one such guy with a good political position to make that happen. We have people like that right now, solving problems in the modern world.
There has always been this thought that the latest generation is somehow inferior to the last. Jazz rotted your brain. Then Jazz was normal and Rock and Roll rotted your brain. Then Rock and Roll was normal and Electronica rotted your brain. And so on. It was bunk then, and it's bunk now.
Except for these kids with the Playstations with analog control sticks and egronomic controlers and games that work the first time you stick them in. They should have to play with simple D-pads on a controller modeled after a brick and cartridiges that had to be blown on for a while until the power light stopped blinking. Oh, and we were too poor to afford wires, so we had to power our Nintendo via induction.
"There is no shame in being self-taught, only in not trying to learn in the first place." -- Atrus, Myst: The Book of D'ni.
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An Egyption slave pulling a huge block wasn't any more creative than most people today. There happend to be one guy who figured out how to move enough huge blocks to build a Pyramid
Not that it has anything to do with anything, but recent archaelogical research has shown that the actual workers on the pyramids, were a) not slaves, b) well treated - e.g. better fed than average, good housing, had health care available, etc. c) proud of their work. Perhaps there were only a few architects, but architects aren't the ones who find the solutions to the many practical problems of implementing the archtitect's design and there's evidence that many of those solutions were provided by the teams of workers.
As to the "this younger generation isn't as good as we were" meme - I think it's safe to say it's always been around and has both truth and falsehood in it. One difficulty in comparing ancient inventiveness to modern inventiveness is the shoulder-standing thing. If our ancestors hadn't invented, language, writing, math, etc. we'd have a difficult time doing all the things that are supposedly smarter than the things our ancestors did. OTOH, any civilization that pays people to lie to them (advertizing) can't be the smartest bear in the forest.
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As to the "this younger generation isn't as good as we were" meme - I think it's safe to say it's always been around and has both truth and falsehood in it. One difficulty in comparing ancient inventiveness to modern inventiveness is the shoulder-standing thing. If our ancestors hadn't invented, language, writing, math, etc. we'd have a difficult time doing all the things that are supposedly smarter than the things our ancestors did.
A quote that addresses this quite well:
"Children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book, and it is clear that the end of the world is fast approaching".
Though this sounds like quite a modern lament, if oddly worded, it was found on a 4,000 year old clay tablet from ancient Sumeria.
In other words, the "good old days" were always a generation or two ago, regardless of when that generation really was, or how good it really was. Me, I'd much rather be alive today than back then in ancient Sumeria!
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Ytrew
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