Why everything might have taken so long

I have read large book with scinitific exploration of how humans comes to drawing. The result may be not true, but the way how the author searched for it, impressed me. The book is unfortunately in Russian. http://kronk.spb.ru/library/stolar-ad-1985.htm

Firstly, it is based on the enormous ammount of factual material as well as analysis and rejecting of many "obvious" explanations. Factual material shows very strange picture: that humans invented drawing step by step. They started from models of animals built from their bones, later, they attached such model to a wall, later they start to make sculputers of animals from clay, which trasformed into relief sculptures, and the the relief becomes surface drawings, and later contur drawings. It took tens of thousands years.

What surprised me is that there is no way I could come to this conclusion (which could be false anyway as the book is rather old) being a laymen in the prehostoric art.

This post is a pretty comprehensive brainstorm of a crucially important topic; I've found that just reading through it sparks ideas.

Seeing this list made me think: If these factors contributed to past humans taking so long to invent things, perhaps we could try to influence them in our current era in order to accelerate progress.

Some of them are already changing, for example population growth or the trend in decreasing absolute poverty. However, there seems to be an opportunity to direct more deliberate effort into making headway in the following areas:

• Concepts: different human languages are known to have words that are hard to translate into other languages; studies have found that people with different native tongues think differently, etc. So it is possible that we are missing concepts that already exist but haven't spread universally. Not having these concepts means that we cannot think using them. (The same goes for specialized academic fields.)
• External thinking tools: human-computer interfaces and augmented reality can help here.
• Records: we seem to be getting better at this, but see also the vulnerability of digital data. In addition to finding new ways of storing data for the long-term, we also need to improve the communication of data across geographic and linguistic regions of the world. For example, a lot of academic articles are never translated into English.
• Enhancing human capabilities: genetic engineering, nootropics, cyborgization, etc. can potentially improve our mental hardware (although currently they are ineffective or risky).
• Social costs: "nerd culture" seems to be more accepted now, which I guess is encouraging. However, there are still people who oppose technological advances (like GMOs, stem cell research, nuclear energy, etc.) due to ethical concerns or just general skepticism of science.
• Value of invention; orders of invention; prerequisites of inventions; etc. : I'm less sure about how we can modify these. Perhaps the more we invent, the more we can invent, implying that invention today should be easier than at any prior point; however, it is also possible that most of the low-hanging fruit have already been harvested. Any thoughts?

There may be one more core idea that is obvious to us now but seemingly wasn't very common in many societies: Things might actually get better and the world is not about to end soon.

Most religions have the basic arc of a story: there is a beginning, there is an ending and lots of BS sandwiched in the middle. Since most civilizations didn't realize how old the earth actually is, the apocalyptic ending part of the religious story was usually projected just a few hundred years out, especially by the dominant monotheistic civilizations during the last two millenia. It seems really weird to think that so many cultures lived in the ruins of the Roman Empire and didn't seem to have the ambition to rediscover and adapt what was right in front of them, but it seems their zeitgeist was fairly fatalistic. Why build new aqueducts and a sewer system if the end is coming in a few centuries or even decades anyway?

Interesting list, but seems to have a triumphalist bias. I doubt that "50K years ago, nobody could imagine changing the world" is true, and I suspect that "hunter-gathering cultures have actually found locally-optimal ways of life, and were generally happier and healthier than most premodern post-agricultural people" was a much bigger factor than most of these.

this topic is super relevant to my fiction project! Really good summary of a lot of areas that affect progress.

Moved to frontpage.

Rope might be difficult to imagine if you weren't already using something similar from nature

I think that there are a lot of recent cases where implementation of clearly useful innovations were ridicoulusly slow. For example, cryonics was well known from 1960s (and was first suggested even in 18 century) - but still is mostly ignored. Even I knew the idea it 20 year before Michael Darwin personaly persued me that it is right.

And it gives me another explanation of slowing acceptance of the new ideas. Basically, it is based on the oversimplification that humans are neural nets mostly repating what they learned on their training dataset. If the dataset is not including many instances of cryonics, they will ignore the idea. Humans could be trained to make innovations, like combining words "uber", "crypto" and "blockchain" and call it "my startup", but it is limited type of innovations.

Some people are more able to think not based on their training dataset, but to understand the nature of the human intelligence we should study evolution of the whole human dataset.

1. People’s brains were actually biologically less functional fifty thousand years ago.

link?