Dwarkesh Patel
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Machiavelli then thinks about why it failed.
We're still only halfway through Renaissance.
Shakespeare's grandparents have barely been born.
We have a lot more time to go.
So what do we need?
We need new ways of thinking about it.
And we're reading the ancients, so we have bigger libraries.
We have the printing press now.
We're having libraries in smaller towns.
More and more people can read.
It's easier and easier to get an education.
More people are starting to learn about science.
It also is important that they're inventing micro technologies of book production like footnotes.
And glossaries in the margin that explain the hard vocabulary.
So that when Petrarch's successors like Ficino was young, you had to be a masterful Latinist to read these agents.
You had to have an enormous vocabulary.
There are no dictionaries.
There are no glosses.
There's nothing to help you.
Only a tiny slice of expert classicist could actually read this stuff.