Dwarkesh Patel

And it makes a world that in turn has giant wars, which he would not like, and a crisis, and Machiavelli's critique of the ancients, and then the new science and the new philosophy and eventually Galileo, none of which resembles what Petrarch imagined if he had specifically described the future he was trying to make.

But then we get to the propagators of Bacon's scientific method, meaning Voltaire and Montesquieu, who are also big campaigners for inoculation against smallpox.

And the first major disease eradications start to begin under that immediate influence.

And the science that gets us to the germ theory of disease, which gets us to modern hygiene, which gets us again to vaccines, which gets us to penicillin and the treatment for the Black Death.

Petrarch thought he would make a world which shared his values.

Instead, he made a world that doesn't share his values but that is capable of curing a disease he never imagined would be curable.

And if you showed him this future, it would be scary.

It would be weird to him because it does not embrace his values.

Our values are different.

He would be horrified by democracy.

He believed that only a tiny elite has the capacity to rule.

He would really wrestle for a long time if we had time traveling Petrarch to wrap his head around democracy as a functional system.

He really thought in oligarchic terms.

But he would see the wonders we've created and especially the fact that we can treat the Black Death.

And he would weep for joy seeing that.

He did not create a world that went as he wanted, but he created a world that went well.

And we have many examples of that, right?

Trains and bicycles come in and we get feminism because it's easier for people, especially women, to move freely and independently.

They can organize.

They can mobilize.