One fun one is that people used counting boards for all of their complicated calculations (literally "calculi" = "pebbles", i.e. counters) for many thousands of years, starting we don't know precisely when but maybe sometime before 3000 BC in Mesopotamia, and at least in Europe continuing up until only a few centuries ago (in some places until the 18th century or after) and now almost no one has even heard of them, let alone has any idea how to use one.

(For what it's worth: I think a counting board is still the best way to get small kids doing some basic calculations and understanding a positional number system: moving buttons or pennies around on a piece of paper with some lines drawn on it takes much less manual dexterity than writing, and the representation is much more direct and concrete than written symbols.)

> can do so with such thoroughness that we forget that other ways of thinking even existed.

There is a debate between Chomsky and Foucault [1] where they discuss exactly that at some point (I don't remember the timestamp, sorry). There is an argument about how most of the knowledge of a specific era is "lost" when there is a big discovery. It was a random recommendation from YouTube, and I was quite pleased when I decided to give it a watch.

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=eF9BtrX0YEE&pp=ygUVQ2hvbXNreSBhb...

I was actually talking with some small children recently about the snow white story, and I found it amazing how for them there was nothing magical about the mirror on the wall - it's just a different form factor of a google home device.

Edit: on a separate note, this got me thinking - why does the story make it a mirror? I don't recall it ever being used for its reflective property. Is there supposed to be some deeper meaning to the mirror being a reflection of the queen? Because otherwise, it could have just been a magic talking picture.

I'd like to read the accounts of contemporary curmudgeons bemoaning the way young Greeks are clamoring for mom's mirror, and how you should limit your kids to no more than one twelfth of a day of mirror time, setting the clepsydra if necessary.

Our tools define what is possible, so it's not too surprising. I've yet to dream about CLI tools or Microsoft Word fortunately

I thought you were going to go a different direction and point out that many people don’t realize how easily LLMs can act like “mirrors” and reflect their own thoughts back to them.

The Pun Committee accepts your pun and salutes you.

I get the thrust of what you say but this wasn't always the case. The idea of linear progress upwards is not universal. Many cultures placed the pinnacle age in their past, before some corruption or decay took place -the ultimate expression of such would be like the biblical story of the Fall, but it also existed on less cosmic scales. The golden age when people were better, seeing your age as decay against the valorized past is in fact more common.

Also just because others thought similar things doesn't mean it isn't true now. The progress since sometime in the 1800s has been insane. If in 100,000 years a super smart civilization, unimaginably advanced, looks at an estimated world population time series, they will be objectively impressed that those guys figured out / stumbled upon some impressive things to manage that. It's really interesting to think about just how desolate the world was even a few hundred years ago. Almost all our big cities today were little towns, except for like 1 or 2 globally. The change is undeniable. It's not all subjective and "they said X, we say X, nobody can decide if X is true, what is truth anyway, etc"

This is a very flat view - the Roman empire is born in a period of civil war, and after a relatively brief period of peace in the imperial core starts imploding and rebuilding itself in different configurations.

The art and culture was very often echoing an imagined past of yeoman landholders + citizens.(very similar to the invocation of 'Real America' today). And their foundation myth imagines that they are a continuation of the trojan civilization.

For everyone who was not at the top of the imperial hierarchy it's pretty easy to imagine that they thought civilization could be improved! Aristotle writes a defense of slavery - which implies that someone was attacking the institution. It's not a big leap to think that enslaved people could picture a world where they weren't enslaved, or that women could imagine having political/civil/property rights.

I think maybe something you are getting at is that those structures felt indestructible at the time, that in christianity associating the end of the roman empire with the apocalypse. Needless to say we aren't posting this in latin.

Since I'm assuming that Bret Devereaux [1] isn't here to raise the point, I'll do it instead: "ancient people" is a term that, as we colloquially understand it, tends to exclude most of the ancient people, namely, the peasants. Sure, a Roman would sit with their aqueducts, but for that one person in the city you need a couple orders of magnitude more people working the fields.

As I understand Bret's last post about the life of peasants[2] regarding how they saw life,

> the lives of these peasants work in a series of cycles. There’s a reason agrarian societies of these sort often do not think in terms of time as a linear progression, but instead as a set of ‘ages’ or ‘cycles,’ with the present, in a sense, endlessly repeating in a static sort of rhythm. For these societies technological and social progress, while real is often so slow as to be almost or entirely imperceptible on a normal human lifespan.

[1] https://acoup.blog

[2] https://acoup.blog/2025/10/17/collections-life-work-death-an...

IIRC the ancient Greeks did not view themselves as the "pinnacle of civilisation", but somewhat fallen from a time of heroes or a golden age in the past. This golden age is when many of their well known epics take place. Another point of interest here is that I have heard the estimated timing of the golden age to be right before the bronze age collapse, meaning that they were literally a kind of post apocalyptic society reminiscing about their past.

Is the headline actually wrong? Its literally about how they saw themselves.

At the time, they were right; it was as good as society had ever been.

I think they were much like us in many ways. They probably imagined that things could get better (even if they didn't imagine electricity or computers).

Every era probably feels like the apex of human progress because people can only measure against what they know

Roman elites were obsessed with Greek culture, in a way similar to many Americans' current fascination with the British class system (Downton Abbey, Bridgerton, Rivals, etc.)

> I bet ancient people saw themselves as the pinnacle of civilisation, much like we do now.

I think the Romans were right to believe that, and so are we today.

But the ride wasn't sa clean, steady slope up. For example there's a reason the dark ages are called dark. Most people of the time (except the few educated) didn't know there was something better in another time and another place. They probably thought that's as good as anyone's ever had.

Now we live in the first period in history where knowledge of history is accessible to almost any person. So as a regular guy you can have a good sense of where to place these times on the scale of civilization.

Lol. I had always assumed it was a stylized womb.

There's this tendency to assume ancient = primitive, but these were skilled artisans with deep material knowledge

About 3/4 into the article, “wait, it’s all about mirrors? ...Oh!”

I thought it would be about how much work went into different objects and how that made people behave, with the first example being mirrors.

Ended up being about mirrors.

British Museum actually does this with their Greek statues - shows how they were painted. The gap between "marble perfection" and "gaudy colors" is wild. Makes you realize how much our idea of classical taste is just patina.

Or even polish up the corroded artifacts and mirrors they do have. Why don't they do this?

There are stories of when near perfect mirrors entered trade. Some stories are sweet, and others rather macabre:

https://www.japanpowered.com/folklore-and-urban-legends/mirr...

Technology tends to influence cultures in subtle ways few remember a generation later. =3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Dangerous_Animal_In_T...

You also can't hear your own voice like other people do, because what you hear when you are speaking mostly come from the vibrations in your bones rather than from sound waves going through the air.

And unlike with mirrors, something we always had, be it just a pond of water, the ability to hear your own voice like others hear it came with recording devices, and is therefore very recent (19th century).

Yeah that was my original interpretation of the title too! Perhaps something like:

How did early humans understand their situation and what did they think the 'world' was like, and what did they think they should do with their lives?! I find it fascinating to think how that longing to know what it's all about has changed so much for humans over time.

Mirrors are still heaps interesting though, as is reflection/refraction/light-transport in general I'd say! But it wasn't about what I expected when I read it.

Yeah, I thought it was a more avant-garde question, like Greek philosophical literature.

It turns out the title has a literal meaning."

I often find it very spiritual to look deeply into my own eyes. It's like a viewport into my soul.

Other times I'm just removing a bit of spinach from my teeth.

I assume that it was the same for ancient mirror users.

Called it.

I'm not sure if it was AI generated, but I see what you did there with "reflected".