HOROSCOPES

I've never met anyone who believed in horoscopes. I studied in a school of a 3rd world country with lots of C and D students, - all of them were smarter than that. Yet newspapers kept printing horoscopes as long as I remember. My only rational explanation for that phenomenon: government psy-ops to convince everybody that majority is that dumb, majority asks for horoscopes. The imaginary stupid masses are such a convenient political tool. Yes, of course, we understand, we would've done it a while ago, but do you realize that people aren't ready for this? People aren't ready for this because government wants them to not be ready for this. That's why public schools struggle, that's why even the best ones teach a lot of "not true facts".

In Egypt they used incomprehensible Hieratic script - hieroglyphs written in cursive. Hard to read, hard to write, need a long training to master it. You can imagine what it was like to master calligraphy in China. Yet nobody tried to simplify any of that. The caste of government officials enjoyed their special status. The higher the bar to become one of them, the better: their jobs are safe. Before I've learned of these examples I always wondered why many technologies in IT are so over-complicated. With 20 year career behind my back I can claim enough expertise to state this. Each time some new hype technology appears it makes things even more problematic, while, surprisingly, using the same argument of lazy/incapable majority .... To make it simpler for the lazy/incapable majority you need to know half a dozen different programming languages to make a button on a web-page do something. It's not a problem for a trained professional, yet it raises a bar too high for anybody who wants to do some practical programming. This is just an example of how little our society really changed since the "ancient" times.

"Ancient" is quoted because they weren't really ancient. The idea of multi-thousand year long civilizations that preceded us is so untouchable with modern science for a reason: it "proves" that Western civilization is exceptional. If it was not for the "Dark Ages" ... It is also a "proof" that people, in general, are stupid. Unless some exceptional, one in a million, Genius is born, nothing is going to change. They love to promote genetic nature of intelligence. Advertising themselves to females, I guess? Or to the government? This "advertisement", as well as the enormously elongated History where people couldn't come up with simplest inventions/discoveries for millenia is a direct insult to the humanity. Nobody's THAT stupid, and thus nobody's THAT special. There are no Geniuses in Science, just celebrities.

We all got same neural network in our brains, about 3 pounds of it, plus/minus. It's all about motivation and training. Progress never stopped anywhere. What we see in non-European cultures is either an illusion of European supremacy (Persia and Middle East were still ahead of Europe in 1600+) or a lack of motivation: who is going to work when you can hunt/gather with same productivity? The motivation comes when free land/prey runs out. In Africa and Americas it didn't even start to run out by 1800. Native Americans are not as "ancient" as advertised, they probably got there 1000 years ago or so: population was still scarce even in the areas where they practiced agriculture. How else would Spain subdue them so easily?

China somehow ignored Taiwain until 1683 (bottom left). Thus thousands of years of Imperial History is a myth. Chinese started from a very small core and colonized/conquered the whole region as separate tribes just about few hundred years ago. State in its modern borders is 200+ years old, established after Ten Great Campaigns (1735-1796) and suppression of White Lotus Rebellion (1794-1804). That's why they speak very different sounding dialects. Unified Standard Chinese language promotion started only in 1913. After several decades of propaganda, schools and Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), in 1984 only 50% of China could speak Standard Chinese, in 2020 it's already 80%. Nation of China has just been created.

Similar can be said about Japan, it only started colonizing Hokkaido in 1869 (top right). Japanese speak badly broken Korean, use same writing system based on Chinese characters (Korean Hanja vs Japanese Kanji). Given how small Japan is and shortage of land there, colonization of Japan itself hardly started any earlier than 1500+. I guess Spain/Portugal established a colony and started bringing in Koreans, later Dutch/British "intervened".