To be precise, he said "I know that I know not." That means he said he doesn't know everything, not that he knows nothing.
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
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We read portions of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics in Ethics 101, and I felt this way about everything we went through. Yes, demonstrating admirable traits will lead to a virtuous life. That's almost true by definition. Oh, but you still might not achieve a happy life even if you're a good person? Well, that's because you also need to be lucky! Oh, and generosity is apparently 2 different virtues for some reason.
I'm sure he had other works, but reading his "insights" made me wonder how this could be the guy everyone wouldn't shut up about. We also studied the stoics, epicurians, nihilism and existentialism, Kantian ethics, consequentialism, the role of divinity, and probably other topics I can't remember. Literally all of them were much more interesting than Aristotle's eudaimonia ramblings, so I was quite annoyed that he took up almost half the class and made everything else rushed.
Aristotle also believed that women were defective men, that some people are naturally destined to be slaves, and rejected atomic theory.
I feel like you can change this absolutely imbecilic image to “the hole left by everyone just accepted Aristotle’s idea that you can just think everything from first principles and don’t have to do any experimentation” and it’d actually be somewhat accurate.
okay. the renaissance seems to begin right around the time a dude in turkey invented a steam engine to rotate kebab.
coincidence? who cares. kebab.
donar kebab is +seventy billion science points
we need to add a mod to Civ that lets you research steam powered kebab, it is a wonder and gives +70 billion science points but you are unable to invest in science for 450 years after researching it. i don't know how science in Civ works but this makes sense.
I feel the same way about Seinfeld or Shakespeare. They're boring because people haven't shut up about them and everything is made out of derivative works inspired by them. Seinfeld invented the modern sitcom format and editing (they weren't the first they were the first to be massively popular doing all of it together)
I don't know when shitting on the Greek civilization became a thing, but the irony that this trend comes from the same country that voted for Trump twice and made Idiocracy a tame historical documentary is not lost on me.
Pretty sure this is just a self-aware joke that a lot of scientific and philosophical breakthroughs seem obvious after the fact.
No you wouldn't. All this stuff may seem obvious now but it only does so because somebody figured it out before.
I mean a lot of what Socrates and Plato wrote and taught are just self justifications for the ancient Greek ruling class.
That delusion is so common that I suspect it must have a name, but I don't know what it is.
But the better a solution appears, the more a person who sees the solution believes it to be obvious, and therefore also believes that, had they tried to solve the problem, they'd have come up with this "obvious" solution straight away with no effort.
Meanwhile, the person who actually solved the problem could only come up with the perfect simple solution after a lifetime of study in the area to the point that you'd call them an expert or master, and after agonizing for a long time over this particular problem.
I think that a "solution" could have that "so obvious" bias like you're saying. I don't think that natural phenomena necessarily has to though. I remember many ways that physics and other sciences describe how systems behave being obvious to the point I knew the lesson before it was taught (just without the correct terminology). Density, leverage, heat conduction, etc were just describing behaviors I think most people understand through experience without needing a class. We still credit a guy getting hit with an apple as the "discoverer" of gravity. He just got the clout for something everyone already knew.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias
"Hindsight bias, also known as the knew-it-all-along phenomenon or creeping determinism, is the common tendency for people to perceive past events as having been more predictable than they were."
It's a kind of cognitive bias that assumes things that are obvious to us would be inevitably found without uncertainty, or trial and error.
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I hear the same about the conceptualization of zero as a numeral that operations can be performed on (a crucial turning point in human thinking) which is also laughable. It simply was not compatible with the Greek understanding of mathematics which emphasized the discrete and trigonometric but fit very well into the more abstract view towards math on the Indian subcontinent. There's a reason why human discovery has global roots.
- Hey dude, you know you had two goats? Well, I took one
- Whatever I still have one goat left
- Hey dude, you know you had one single goat? Well, I took it
- Wtf, that doesn't make sense
👆 real dialogues recorded by actual ancient Greeks
Simple rule of thumb. If it has no real world use case in your avg dudes day to day.
It ain't getting discovered.
Now you also need to have that avg dude be someone of note, power and reach so that the discovery actually goes somewhere and doesn't just die with him.
The more esoteric and rarer those two things line up.
True that it takes a degree of imagination. We can draw a fairly direct line from Brahmagupta, Al-Khwarizmi, Fibonacci, Piero della Francesca, to Leonardo da Vinci describing the East to West transfer of zero and the decimal place value system.
It often comes down to what a culture considers "useful".
Same with Issac Newton. One had to be the first to write that stuff down.
Leibniz proved that.
I probably also would have figured out gravity existed without having an apple hit me in the head.
In the UK our £2 coins have "Standing on the shoulders of giants" written around the rim, to remind us all that no, you wouldn't have thought of that, you berk.
There's also the case of, you arnt rich, noble, and from the ruling class that gives your words enough weight to even be considered less remembered at all.
A great deal many things have been discovered and forgotten and rediscovered. Because the first few times they weren't discovered by a rich enough noble with the power and wealth to spread the knowledge or even get people to listen in the first place.
In ye olden times. It took more then just being smart, you also had to be rich as FUCK or have extremely good connections if not rich as fuck. And in many cases you needed both.
Else you would be ignored, and die with any discovery or advancements you invented in your life.
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The relation between mass & energy seems very intuitive, I've known it for most of my life!
Wdym humanity just recently learned that??
(It's a cognitive bias when you internalise some information you just learned, & suddenly get the feeling that all who don't know it are kinda dumb, like that ~~into~~ info wasn't gifted to you by chance/random experience.)
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Too bad I don't get to sit around and think all day so I can discuss with others who sit around and think all day.
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"Socrates was the wisest man in Athens."
Dude, the population of Athens and it's surrounding territory at the time was about 200k-250k people, a very sizable portion of which were foreigners who probably had a different primary language, and even more of which were slaves (like 1/3 to 1/2 of the entire population). Would be like talking about the wisest person in Dayton, Ohio 2500 years later in every philosophy textbook in the world becuase he realized it was better to say "I dunno" than to talk out of your ass.
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I could also had put 3 sticks of the same size on one axis and 4 on another and see that between the ends you can fit 5 sticks.
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