Dwarkesh Patel

Oh, my God.

And then Martin Luther hits hits Europe like a ton of bricks when they still haven't even figured out that this is a continent and not an island.

Right.

So in the same way that if you're in a country and it's having a tumult, you worry a lot about its tumult, even if a larger tumult is happening in a faraway country.

It's hard to bring your mind out of your epic crisis to be like, hey, this is your thing.

The other is they're inventing lots of new things and it falls into the sphere along the rest, right?

They're discovering the existence of sub-Saharan Africa, which they thought that there was basically one country's worth of stuff south of the Sahara, Ethiopia, and nothing else.

And then they're like, oh, my God.

There's a whole big thing that sticks out.

They're also discovering that the heart is a pump.

I mean, that's a bit later, but they're discovering all sorts of stuff at the same time.

So the discovery of the new world, especially when they realize how big it is, becomes a intellectual challenge where they say, wait, does this mean all the maps we've had are wrong?

Does this mean the ancients were wrong about geography?

Does it mean the world is a lot bigger than we used to think the world is?

Let's worry about that the same way we worry about revolutionizing our mathematics and figuring out that

The sun doesn't go around the earth.

These are things that are paradigm shifting.

But on the other hand, does it matter whether the sun goes around the earth or the earth and the sun when the French are invading right now and we get the defenses going and there's a giant civil war happening and we're about to be betrayed?

It does matter, but it also doesn't matter.

And so in the same way that any decade is concerned by its tumults and often fails to recognize the importance of what's around it,