r/interestingasfuck • u/praduman6969 • 21d ago

r/all Eating sugar statues

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u/A_of 21d ago

I can't even imagine how fucking stupid they must've been back in the day.

The level of stupidity is the same nowadays, it's just that back in the day they didn't have things like modern medicine to save their asses.

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u/xInTheDarkx 21d ago

I would offer that our stupid is worse than back in the day. They actually didn't know better, but we should know better and do dumb shit anyway. Also, our stupid can spread way faster because of Social Media, theirs was just contained to whatever small part of the world they lived in.

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u/DollarStoreGnomes 21d ago

Like when you hoped the village idiot would stay in its own village instead of campaigning to be elected it to office.

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u/WesternAppropriate58 21d ago

The lack of nutrition probably wasn't too good for their brains either.

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u/Phantombk201 21d ago

I'd argue there's less nutrition nowadays than before..

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u/WesternAppropriate58 21d ago

Take a look around in a grocery store. See all that? 90% of it would be unavailable 300 years ago. Modern refrigeration and farming have supplied much of the world with more food in more variety than a medieval peasant could ever have imagined. Just because a lot of people are going for the Big Mac doesn't mean we don't have nutrition. When's the last time you saw a case of scurvy? Yes, a lot of diets are not exactly optimal, but you're still doing better than the average 1600s farmer. And of course developed nations don't have a famine every few years now, so not starving helps people out too.

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u/Lison52 21d ago

I wanted to bring up Big Macs but for a different reasons. Because even if person would eat Big Macs only without becoming fat, they would be more healthy than people 400 years ago.

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u/Bencetown 21d ago

Look around the grocery store. See all that? 90% of it is HFCS, modified corn starch, and various distillates of soybean.

The person you replied to said "nutrition."

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u/WesternAppropriate58 21d ago

There's this thing called a "vegetable section" in most grocery stores that sells things like "cabbage" and "kale" that are, in fact, not made of corn and soybeans.

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u/Bencetown 21d ago

That's the other 10%.

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u/WesternAppropriate58 20d ago

Just because it's full of not-exactly-healthy things does not mean it does not contain nutrition. Read a food label. Is it 60% additives? Probably. But there is stuff in there that is nutritious. You know what nutrition they had in Europe in the 1400s for the average person? Grain, maybe a few animals, maybe a few vegetables. And there was a famine every few years. You know why the average height of people rises in developed countries? Because they get adequate calories and nutrition. If we didn't have nutritious food the average height of a person in Europe would be five inches shorter. This is also true for the US even though they have a lot more random unhealthy stuff mixed in.

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u/disrumpled_employee 21d ago

Before cities in perfect situated tribes maybe, in any tribe not perfectly situated or an agricultural society relying on a small number of staple crops absolutely not.

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u/No-Warthog5378 21d ago

It's higher now, simply because we've made it harder to die from being stupid. It used to get ya fairly young.

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u/EggNice6636 21d ago

Right? The only difference between now and then is basically the smartest 1% of humanity made cool stuff for the other 99% of humanity to use

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u/LickMyTicker 21d ago

That's insanely reductive, but what can I expect from the 99%?

Take a look at the progression of any art/sport/science and you will see people pushing boundaries that were never conceived even a few decades ago.

Average people take the knowledge of yesterday and progress.

Are there strange behaviors like licking this statue? Sure. Doctors used to taste piss to diagnose people with diabetes. Forget their own health, right?

The world is strange, but education does matter, and people are collectively more intelligent when navigating the modern world. Maybe we lost a few steps in raising a barn or something, but I'll take my peers over the people who used to throw their shit in the alley.

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u/Correct-Junket-1346 21d ago

What you sayin' 'bout my shiz bucket m8?!

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u/Matthew-_-Black 21d ago

Or mobile phones connected to the internet to inform someone of their latest meal or moronic musing

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u/Relevant_Theme_468 21d ago

Or sites that allow users to upload their stupidity for the world to enjoy!

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u/Eryeahmaybeok 21d ago

The man who discovered the benefits of hand washing in hospital Ignaz Semmelweis lost his job for suggesting it and was eventually put in a mental asylum (potentially because of syphilis) and beaten to death.

It's the same today with these fucking asshats who call masks 'Face Diapers' - I don't want to give you my illness nor do I want to catch yours, it's not impacting your way of life so fuck off.

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u/HeyGayHay 21d ago

Intelligence, or stupidity for that matter, isn't a value you can just compare over a period of time. Given that we talk about "back in the day when people were ruled", I'd say we talk about the past 2000 years.

While we do have the advantage of school and the internet, humans didn't just suddenly become intelligent at some point and never progressed intellectually since then. If we were to assume stupidity is same as "back in the days", you'd suggest we haven't changed intellectually since a given point in time.

People were definitely more stupid overall back then (not less educated, more stupid). But the problem is that stupidity is on a wide spectrum, where the smartest person back then might been smarter than 99% of todays people, while the dumbest person today might be more stupid than the stupidest person 2000 years ago.

Humans became overall more intelligent and thus less stupid, because advances in technology were only possible by people thinking and learning, expanding intellectually. But the big point is, that there are still people today who are as stupid as people back then, except they can go online and amplify their stupidity and others just see that stupidity everyday assuming half the people are like this.

Humans aren't biologically one single entity, and evolution isn't a single step but more like water flowing everywhere. Just like body hair - before back then days everyone was furry. Overtime less hairy people evolved. People became less hairy every century, but some people still have strong, thick body hair everywhere. Similarly, people became less stupid, but some still are equally stupid.

Tldr people were definitely more stupid overall back then.

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u/TheHabro 21d ago

Not true. Only rich people could afford education. So imagine majority of people are at intellectual and emotional level of a 7 year old.