Dwarkesh Patel

It's the lies we tell ourselves in history books written in the 19th century that are trying to group all of these things together and make modernity special that confused us about this.

So, like, I'm working on a paper right now about the video game Civ, right?

Civ is the number one teacher of history in the world.

Right.

And it has shipped 70 million copies and 65 percent of people on Earth who have technology play video games.

Siv is the number one teacher of history, bar none, since 1991.

And what does Siv tell you?

Siv tells you that in antiquity, a turn is 50 years.

And then in the Middle Ages, a turn is 25 years.

And then once you get into Industrial Revolution, a turn is 10 years and then five years.

And in modernity, a turn is just one year.

Because in one year, as much happens now as happened in 50 years in antiquity.

And that lie is also what our textbooks tell us.

But it doesn't matter where we zoom in.

Anytime I go to a talk where any historian is zooming in on any decade in any time and place, it always feels like it's moving as fast as our present is moving.

Technologically, they were moving fast.

We just don't care about those technologies anymore.

They were constantly inventing like all sorts of things.

We just take them for granted, right?

The invention of chairs with backs, the invention of scissors, the invention of improved metallurgy so that steel could do things steel couldn't do before.