Dwarkesh Patel

And then he goes to a pub and gets drunk in the company of uncultured countrymen.

And then he goes home and he

gets dressed in the court robes, the court finery that he would wear back when he was an ambassador to popes and kings, and attired thus, he then enters his library to hold commerce with the ancients.

He loves this the way Petrarch wanted him to love it, but he observes these wars, and he observes virtuous princes like Guido Baldo de Montefeltro, who does every single thing you're supposed to do

And he has all the Plato and he has all the libraries and he has all the art.

And he gets betrayed and his city taken away from him and loses everything.

And he watches terrible people like Cesare Borgia and Julius II make terrible choices and succeed.

And he says, okay, well, clearly...

Petrarch was wrong that just reading the Cicero would make successful rulers like the Caesars.

But I still feel in my heart a deep power in the classics.

So, he says.

What if the libraries are what we need, but we need to use them differently?

And he proposes what we would think of as political science.

We observe historical examples.

We say, okay, here are five examples of battles that happened next to rivers.

We'll put those examples side by side and see what decisions the commanders made to try to figure out which one worked better.

We use history as a casebook of examples of what worked and what didn't.

And we imitate what worked and we avoid doing what didn't.

Instead of

feeling that reading about good men will make us good.