Dwarkesh Patel

They've read tallies.

They've read indexes.

They've made notes.

The difference between being literate and being book literate is different, right?

In the same way that some people watch television, don't watch very many films.

Other people watch lots of films, right?

You can be literate and have never read a book because there might be almost no books in the entire city in which you grew up.

if it's 1200 or 1500.

But if it's 1600, there are definitely books in any medium-sized town.

And so literacy transforms into a kind of access to scientific, intellectual, legal, all sorts of different kinds of worlds of ideas.

Now, the other person you quoted who's talking about transformations in networks of power from being less family and clan-centered to being more guild-centered, the guilds are major generators of ideas as well.

The guilds can own libraries by 1600, where if you went to a guild hall, it will have a bunch of books about its own trade.

That would not have been true in 1100.

So those changes are all real and they're all intermixing and they're all parallel to each other.

And you need all of these things together.

But one of the focuses I have is sometimes there are more steps to something than you think.

And we tell the story of the Renaissance.

In the Renaissance, they rediscovered these ancient texts and then we got science.

And that's true.

But it is an oversimplification and too wide a zoom.