Academics and students should take blogging and social media seriously - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/10/26/why-academics-and-students-should-take-blogging-social-media-seriously/ <comment><USER2> > Making sure someone reads your research.

There are several motivations to write and publish, and being read (by the widest possible audience) is only one of them. Even if we put the most mundane reasons (publish or perish, publish to make money) aside, there is at least writing (and publishing) for the purely selfish reason of recording your ideas and, by doing so, making them more permanent and more real, as it were. I remember, during my academically active years, I never cared in the slightest whether anyone was going to read my papers or my book. If anyone was interested in my subject and were curious enough to discover them, they were most welcome to them; but it was entirely immaterial to me whether anyone actually did. This doesn't mean I didn't put any effort into writing those texts; quite the contrary. But writing them was a goal in itself; it was never a means to anything for which it would require wide audience.

I can't imagine this attitude is unique.

<comment><USER3> I have worked in the academic sector and been exposed to it for a number of additional years. Reading and disseminating research, and more importantly citations, are a key intrinsic metric for researchers, and a KPI providing extrinsic motivation from administration and research funding bodies.

Research impact is a huge force in the academic world these days, and research can only have impact if read, understood and scrutinised by other researchers - as well as the public.

<comment><USER4> My internal monologue when reading this:

Imagine if people got funding based on Twitter engagement - what a disaster.

Why?

Well people buy Twitter engagement from bots.

And they don't buy citations?

Oh nooo, I can see that become a trend too. We are doomed!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would love to see more academic scientists blogging, especially if they wrote "laypersons" summaries of their scientific papers. I think this would be a clear net positive for the world: scientific literacy would increase, people would learn about all the amazing things going on in academic labs, and professors and grad students could get more recognition (and maybe income?) for jobs that are quite demanding but often dont pay a ton

But I wonder if blogging / social media would be viewed as "not serious" by academics, or even make the blogger's peers think they are sell outs? I've heard of grant funding decisions getting denied because a researcher issued a press release, which one reviewer thought was too self-promotional. No idea how widespread this attitude is however

<comment><USER6> I blog about my research applying industrial engineering to life at home.

Today my website is popular, but it's hard to direct traffic when getting started. I should be the top Google result for Save Money On Food, but I'm beat out by others with bigger name websites.

<comment><USER7> I've been to your website before. I think the other issue is that there just aren't enough articles. I was also somewhat disappointed in the polyphasic sleep articles since I found them pretty lacking in content

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't think twitter really counts as blogging. It is too low signal/noise and doesn't leave enough room to seriously cover anything "academic" other than linking to real blogs and articles

For actual blogging, there are a few considerations you need to take into account. One is that academics will probably only blog if it can help their career in some way. If you are a graduate student or associate professor it's probably very low on your list of priorities - it also has a long payoff time as you build up a following whereas a good publication has much more immediate benefits. Another consideration is that for blogging to be worthwhile, there needs to be a low number of producers for every X consumers. Right now I think academic blogging doesn't have enough producers, but the size of the consumer market is limited, so I don't think it makes sense for everyone to blog

</comment><comment><USER8> Good post. A lot of people see platforms like Twitter as inherently terrible, but if you follow the right people, Twitter can be a very good platform to learn new things and talk to interesting and smart people on. You just have to carefully curate who you follow, remembering to unfollow anyone that posts bad or excessively polarizing or uninteresting content.

The same goes for blogs, which are often looked down upon more than they should be due to the negative connotations of referencing a blogpost rather than a paper in a published journal, even though there are clearly some blogs that are better than some journals.

<comment><USER9> Doesnt twitter still force tweets into your feed from people you dont follow?

<comment><USER10> Yes.

<comment><USER11> Not if you use lists. They are one of the most underrated tools in Twitter; allowing you to clean up and arrange your feed, Not having people you're not following injected into your feed is just another bonus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> While I see worth in twitter the idea that in order to succeed in academia one needs to participate in that stuff is stomach turning. It should be something we resist, not encourage.

Academia shouldn't be a popularity contest. Social media is.

<comment><USER13> Why do you feel it is a "popularity contest"?

When used in an academic context, I see it as a tool to more widely disseminate research, with the particular benefit of reaching non-traditional consumers.

<comment><USER14> I agree. Not everyone uses social media as a popularity contest. No reason why academic uses of it would need to be like that.

And trying to reach a wide audience is not the same as engaging in a shallow popularity contest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hello from the world of mathematics.

We already have ArXiV[0]. Think of it as a blogging platform. Any result worth sharing ends up on ArXiV way before it gets published, and anyone who cares about it will get notified.

This addresses all problems the author writes about: the research doesn't live beyond a paywall, and people who are interested and qualified to read your work will get notified about it.

Of course, putting a paper on ArXiV doesn't mean someone will read it. That's what conferences are for, for better or worse: spreading the word about your work, whether it's giving a talk, a poster, or just having a conversation over beer (non-drinkers must have an awfully hard time in this field). Mathematics is much more about people than one might think, and the best way to spread ideas is to talk to people who can be interested in them _in the real world_.

Does it mean there's no place for blogging? Absolutely not; papers that get posted on ArXiV often are too dry to understand, and lack the informal motivation and intuition behind the research. We have lost the tradition of informal writing in mathematics, and it needs to come back.

To that end, mathematicians _do_ blog, but the thing is: _it is hard_. It is very hard to express the idea in a few words, to popularize it even to the peers in your field. It certainly doesn't take 30 minutes to write anything that others would be able to read. So math blogs exist, but are rather rare.

And most certainly, Twitter is not the right platform for that.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

TL;DR: the author should take ArXiV seriously.

[0][https://arxiv.org/](https://arxiv.org/)

<comment><USER16> > mathematicians do blog, but the thing is: it is hard

I'm on the applied side of science and I think it's definitely hard but worth doing when on the applied side. I have blogged and if you're purely theoretical, I have no idea if it would be worth it. My research has a 1 sentence tagline that's awesome, but as soon as anyone wants more than that 1 sentence, they look under the covers and take a real pause as they see the writhing mass of intertwined domains involved.

To get people from sentence 1 through to a basic but sound understanding of the issues, from which I can start talking about 'where do we go from here' requires what I dare say borders on performance art. Over several years and untold presentations, I've gotten it down to about 7 minutes with the right words and pictures and audience, and the audience response will be that sort of perfect moment of hushed silence at the end, but the piles of errors and failures, reams of words never read, data never even looked at, reels the mind. I think back on all of that and cringe even as I wipe the sweat from my brow and uncramp my fingers.

<comment><USER15> It doesn't border on, it definitely _is_ performance art.

And yes, totally worth it; just wanted to point out that doing something like that is not as easy as the author of this article makes it out to be ("look, I made this in 30 minutes, so everyone else can, too!"). No appreciation for the sweat and dread you went through to get there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wait so now academics have to take social freaking media seriously ? Like society's best brains have to take something that goes by the name of Facebook (like a book for your ugly face ??) seriously. I doubt that the people who take FB that seriously so as to get their information from it have the brains to digest new knowledge. And there's Medium - the so-called publishing platform that doesn't support math equations. The only blogs I will ever take information from would be the Github pages because somebody atleast went to the trouble of setting up Jekyll or even writing their own css and putting it on Github. Not some website that has blue or greenish black colored shit painted all over their UIs.

</comment><comment><USER18> This blog post demonstrates the exact opposite of the authors intent. The post could have been reduced to 2 or 3 sentences. It is opinion supported by anecdote. A post written in 30 minutes isn't worth the 30 seconds it takes me to read it.

</comment><comment><USER19> Youtube, maybe. Put all your talks on Youtube for sure. But twitter is purpose-built to for bullshit and manufactured outrage. I fail to see how it can be useful to a scientist in any way other than to mine the firehose stream for data.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'd put youtube right up there, especially considering how many high quality introductions and how-to's are out there.

<comment><USER7> This is actually something I really want to work on. There are many very poor academic-oriented videos on youtube, most of which are either someone with a tenuous grasp of the material explaining something in poor english, or a straight copy of a long lecture.

I think there is definitely a niche for bite-sized 5-10 minute videos covering focused topics in the undergrad/early grad curriculum in Math and CS. Like this is what a doubly linked list is, this is what dropout is, this is a walkthrough of a real analysis proof, etc.

You could add links to code snippets, github repos, latex papers, etc. And use animations/editing to make the presentation concise and visually appealing. Dabbling in something like this has been on my todo list for almost 4 years at this point

<comment><USER21> The academics putting stuff on youtube is almost laughable. It really exposes their flaws outright. Their lectures are boring and dull. Heck, it even shows how poorly some of these people are at teaching. Sure, we get it, you have a PHD in physics and you're smart but who cares about that if you can't actually teach the material.

No wonder so many kids these days are flocking to youtube to learn stuff. It is because of how horrible the current education system is. We put people in teaching positions when they can't even teach in the first place.

The truth is youtube, the internet and computers are absolutely game changing technology when it comes to education. With the right tools, youtube + internet + right computer tools will be able to provide the best learning experience for the student, even beating out top-tier education institutions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Always hated the misuse of "web log" to mean some kind of diary.</comment>


The browser version of Skype drops Firefox support - <AUTHOR> https://preview.web.skype.com/ <comment><USER2> I've been using the Skype web preview on my 2012 Retina MBP because Skype.app has become unusable on it. They must have recently switched video codecs or broken hardware acceleration, a video conference with 4-6 people chews up anywhere from 200%-400% of my Ivy Bridge i7. The same sized video conference using the Skype web preview in Chrome uses ~40%.

</comment><comment><USER3> Of course the market dropped skype ever since Microsoft took over. </snark>

Seriously, I've been a remote worker for 8 years. Skype quality went down so much when MS took over. For the past 3 years, Slack and Zoom have literally picked up the slack.</comment>


Ask HN: What are your predictions for 2011? - <AUTHOR>

Both probable and far fetched things/trends that you think are going to happen. <comment><USER2> Many, many posts on HN from people who think that with all the newbies posting irrelevant content and Reddit links, HN is definitely going down the drain.

</comment><comment><USER3> Quora splashing into normal people's radars. Won't be Twitter's rise but definitely something to watch.</comment>


The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought - <AUTHOR> https://lithub.com/the-dark-ages-werent-as-dark-as-we-thought/ <comment><USER3> _> The true "dark age," of course, was the early 1940s when, simply as a side effect of industrial killing, great swathes of the past disappeared. One small yet major example—the extraordinary series of paintings of the visions of Hildegard of Bingen, made in the 1170s either by the saint herself or under her supervision, disappeared in the general catastrophe that unfolded in Dresden in early 1945. We only know what they looked like (except from black‐and‐white photos) through accurate and beautiful copies painted by a group of nuns, by sheer chance, in the 1930s._

This feels like a weird argument. Yes, the paintings were lost. But we have tons of documentation about them! We have records of their creation by Hildegard of Bingen. We have photographs and reproductions to tell us (imperfectly, but still) how they looked. We know they were taken to Dresden, and we know when -- 1945. We know that Dresden suffered a devastating firebombing by the Allies in February of that year, and we know that nobody has been able to locate the paintings since that firebombing occurred. In other words, we may not have the paintings themselves anymore, but we can construct a pretty reliable history of them -- what they were, how they were created, and when they were (sadly) destroyed.

That's a very different situation than we're in regarding post-Roman, pre- Carolingian Europe. There are hundreds of years in there where we have practically no documentary evidence for _anything._ Kingdoms rose and fell, wars were won or lost, languages and faiths adopted or abandoned, and we can't even begin to tell any of those stories today, because nobody was keeping records. Who can say how much art was created and then destroyed in this period that we'll never even be aware existed? Who knows how many geniuses there were whose insights have been lost forever?

None of this is to say that what happened in Dresden in 1945 isn't a tragedy; it absolutely was, and for lots of reasons beyond just the loss of some paintings. But the loss of something that we _know existed_ (and can even look at photographs of!) is very different than destruction so total that it even obliterates the possibility of remembrance.

<comment><USER4> The so-called dark ages are not much worse than other periods of human history when there is were no large government institutions. With the end of the Roman Empire in the west, Europe came to be ruled by local tribes, in the same way that happened throughout history. Europeans demonstrated to be as barbarians as any other group of people in the world that had no strong institutions to protect society from their immediate power urges. It took centuries for larger government institutions to form again.

<comment><USER5> Not correct. They were much worse indeed.

Remember, Romans had a fairly advanced society, and buildings, architecture, and infrastructure. Roads crossing whole regions, (the highways of the time), aqua-ducts, ways to dispose sewage, etc...

This all slowly degraded and eventually disappeared with the fall of the empire.

Stone building were replaced by mud huts, and I don't know about you, but not having running water in your town, or paved roads to the next town or port seem like huge drawbacks to life quality.

The first Anglo-saxons that came in Britania, after the Roman left lived in what you would call downright primitive huts made by either mud or wooden planks with mud in them.

That and the constant warring, in many ways, it was a huge set-back for the people there.

<comment><USER6> You can't compare Britain in the post-Roman area with Rome at the height of empire.

London in the "Dark Ages" didn't have aqueducts. But Londinium was part of the periphery of the empire, and it also never had aqueducts. There's not that much information to be gained by cherry picking the elements of the central core of the Roman Empire and asking why they weren't present in far flung areas in the post-Roman era.

Skeletons show that people were relatively healthier (at least in the periphery) after Rome had fallen than when Rome had dominated these regions.

<comment><USER7> The more primitive the society, the healthier skeletons you will find. Because in a primitive society only the healthiest and the fittest can survive. Whereas an advanced society can take care of the weak and the sick.

<comment><USER8> That's interesting. But do you have some data to back up your claim or is this just your guess? Because there are two effects at play here: on one hand a kind of a survivorship bias that you mention and on the other hand a positive effect of a healthier environment on a human body. These go against each other and I don't find it obvious to see which one is stronger.

After a quick search I would say the latter is more important here: what we observe from the bones are things like a quality of nutrition (e.g. vitamin deficiencies) or effects of some illnesses. Inadequate nutrition signals poor living condition and illnesses affect even the most "gifted" individuals (don't forget that hardship selects also for other traits than just a good immunity).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The thing that stands out for me about this period is the lack of a "descent from antiquity". [1]

There is no well-established genealogical descent in Western Europe from antiquity to the modern era. Familial lines of descent can be traced to the very late Roman period, and from the early medieval period to the modern era. But there is a chasm that can't be crossed because the societal norms that allowed families to be traced broke down for some time and only reformed later.

To me this is a concrete symptom of a fairly severe disruption. How it's labeled is an interesting discussion, but clearly _something_ happened.

[1] See deeper discussion here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_antiquity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_antiquity)

<comment><USER10> That's not societal breakdown, that just means the inbred aristocracy doesn't go back to antiquity. Society and its rulers are not the same thing.

<comment><USER11> Still, there were families in those days with unfathomable wealth. If memory serves me well, one was so wealthy that when they sold their land after becoming Christians they caused a real estate crisis across the Roman Empire. (Source: The inheritance of Rome, Chris Wickham, one of the early chapters.) And just a few centuries earlier, Julius Caesar arguably was one of the richest to have ever lived on earth. It's sensible to expect that families with that kind of wealth to leave a trace in their ancestry. And yet with rare exceptions they did not.

<comment><USER12> The concept of wealth fundamentally depends on the society its created in.

If I am the last person on earth, i effectively "own" the entire earth, but it means nothing.

Same for a man staving to death on top of a mountain of gold.

Which makes this billionaire New Zealand apocalypse compound trend all the more ridiculous, if society collapses, being a billionaire is going to mean absolutely nothing, you would think the money would be better spent ensuring that _doesn 't happen in the first place_

<comment><USER13> More amusingly as the billionaires hide out in their bunkers someones going to be at a Goldman Sachs terminal zeroing out their wealth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I first ran into this theory in the only "alchemy" book (as in, I have no idea what it's actually about) where the author seemed immensely intelligent. Of course, I was too lazy to actually research any of his claims, but he was pretty eloquent:

"Paradoxical in its manifestations, disconcerting in its signs, the Middle Ages proposes to the sagacity of its admirers the resolution of a singular misconception. How to reconcile the unreconcilable? How to adjust the testimony of the historical facts to that of medieval art works?

The chroniclers depict this unfortunate period in the darkest colors. For several centuries there is nothing but invasions, wars, famines, epidemics. And yet the monuments --- faithful and sincere witnesses of these nebulous times --- bear no mark of such scourges. Much to the contrary they appear to have been built in the enthusiasm of a powerful inspiration of ideal and faith by a people happy to live in the midst of a flourishing and strongly organized society.

Must we doubt the veracity of historical accounts, the authenticity of the events ... they report, and believe along with the popular wisdom of nations, that happy peoples have no history? Unless, without refuting en masse all of history, we prefer to discover the justification pf medieval darkness in the relative lack of incidents. Be that as it may, it remains undeniable is that all the Gothic buildings without exception reflect a serenity and expansiveness and a nobility without equal. If, in particular, we examine the expression of statues, we will quickly be edified by the peaceful character, the pure tranquility that emanates from these figures. All are calm and smiling, welcoming and innocent. "

Dwellings of Philosophers -Fulcanelli

<comment><USER15> Etienne Gilson makes the argument for the designation: "Christian Philosophy," as folks turned to Gospels and revealed truths for inspiration. It offers a clear separation from "Greek Philosophy". As well as encompassing sub schools of thought such as Apostolic, Thomist, Neo-Augustinian and what have you.

In any case, keep the Medieval content coming as it provides the antidote to modern cacophanies. Even putting on a nice instrumental shwam performance on youtube can immediately tune the senses for quiet monastic contemplation ;)

I believe there is a very active and academically rigorous Telegram or Slack channel with >500 members devoted to the period. But I've since deleted both apps and can't recall what it was called!

The trend in Digital Humanities now of course is "collections as data" and performing full corpus linguistic and sentiment analysis.

Internet Medieval Sourcebook Full Text Sources

[https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/sbook2.asp](https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/sbook2.asp)

Reprogramming The Museum

[https://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2011/papers/reprogramming...](https://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2011/papers/reprogramming_the_museum)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The Dark Ages are something of a misnomer but there does not seem to be any question that levels of literacy, trade, and social organization were lower than the preceding Roman era and than even the latter part of the middle ages after 1200 or so. Indeed much of the 'darkness' is the result of so few written records surviving from the era, which in turn points to far fewer of them being generated in the first place.

The question for anyone trying to roll back the use of the term 'Dark Ages' is what would you call it instead?

<comment><USER17> I think "Late Antiquity" is common.

<comment><USER18> I've never heard that and wouldn't guess that it meant the Dark Ages at all.

<comment><USER19> It's a real term of art. Some of the distinction is geographic. Taking about "late antiquity" usually means discussing what was happening in central Italy and the Eastern empire, where most people imagine the "dark ages" in western and northern Europe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Most of the time historians use the phrase 'Dark Ages', nowadays, they mean the time from roughly the mid-sixth century to about Charles Martel, where there are only a handful of written and architectural records remaining, almost all from the margins of Europe. His examples are mainly before or after that time period.

But even accepting his much more broad time period - and one of his examples is more than 100 years after the time period he himself defined at the beginning - he offers very little evidence that isn't extremely well known to anyone with a passing knowledge of that time period. Plus, his examples are literally hundreds of years apart. It's pretty disingenuous to claim the society that produced the tomb of Childeric I is the same society that produced some paintings roughly 800 years later.

<comment><USER21> There's probably more records remaining than we realize because of the rampant recycling of old parchment.

<comment><USER22> Or they started using papyrus, which does not age well.

AFAIK the 'Dark Ages' refer to our lack of records only, and the rest is misunderstanding.

<comment><USER21> What was the prominent writing material in that age? Parchment has been around since basically forever since, like vellum, it's just animal hide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Those were the dark ages because previously there was a highly developed civilization with its sophisticated culture, art, science, technology and liberties, and then the western world sunk into an era where almost all of it was temporarily forsaken. It fell into the darkness and chaos (at least from the point of people who lived in the Roman empire). Barbaric tribes raided the lands, many local wars again started since there was no central rule anymore, Catholic church imposed insanely strict rules - pushing art and science knowledge and skills of humanity hundred of years back. Ideas of health and sanitation and hygiene that Romans cared a lot about were practically non- existent, so diseases ravaged the population. And then came the plague and killed more than half of the population and the rest mostly fled to country- side leaving many fortified cities completely uninhabited. It doesn't mean that people were stupid or that they didn't craft pretty things back then, of course they did and the conquering tribes also had their primitive culture and crafts, but it was very limited and heavily sanctioned by church, unlike before, and almost all art was reduced to just religious themes or simple decorations. In Byzantine Empire there was even a brief period of iconoclasm, when it was forbidden to show any humans in paintings, like in Islam. So, yes, maybe it wasn't the world from Mad Max movies and there was no Orcs, but it wasn't that far away from it as the author makes it sound. Just compare it to the renaissance (which was still lagging behind classic era) and you'll see how dark it really was.

<comment><USER24> I agree completely.

Perhaps it could be argued that the Roman Empire was simply ahead of their time, but we went from engineering marvels (of their time) such as the Roman aqueducts [1], the Pantheon [2], or the Colosseum [3], which held 50-80k spectators in 72AD, to very little of note for 100s of years following.

What I find intriguing is that the Roman Empire even 'discovered' steam power in the first century [4]. Unfortunately, they seemed to have only saw it as a toy, rather than realizing its full potential. It's fascinating to me to think about how far ahead we could be had the Roman Empire not fallen.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pont_du_Gard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pont_du_Gard) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome) [3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colosseum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colosseum) [4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile)

<comment><USER25> Roman metallurgy was really not at a point to make practical use of steam power on a scale that made it more effective than using slaves. Crucible steel, a bare minimum, wouldn't come to Europe for over a millennium. They simply did not have the materials engineering to build useful pressure vessels.

People get weirdly romantic about how easy these ideas would have been to implement; there's this weird conception that we should have been able to go from late antiquity Rome to early industrial revolution England in a matter of a couple centuries.

This ignores two things. First executing seemingly simple ideas can still require incredible expertise in a range of fields. Nuclear bombs are conceptually simple but building them still seems to require the economy of a nation state.

Second, Roman knowledge wasn't lost. It was all still there in the Byzantine Empire yet strangely they weren't sending rockets to the moon in the 1200's. The centres of knowledge simply migrated, and in every place knowledge grew and expanded. Whether work by Byzantine or Muslim scholars, science wasn't put on pause and without their contributions, we would not have advanced to where we are today.

<comment><USER24> Nowhere did I say it would be easy.

Just as far as anyone can tell, they never realized the 'toy' could have a real world use.

Had they thought of an application, they could work on making it possible. They thought it was just a parlor trick.

>Second, Roman knowledge wasn't lost. It was all still there in the Byzantine Empire yet strangely they weren't sending rockets to the moon in the 1200's.

Seriously, what the fuck, why are you attacking me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Taking nothing away from the article itself, this bit rubbed me the wrong way:

> A simple little mental test is just to quickly imagine a European scene from > that era. Now: was the sun shining? Of course not.

It strikes me like one of those "follow the ball" scenes in which a multitude of other things happen, but you're not paying attention because you're focusing on the ball. The state of the sun didn't matter for the details I was imagining. If I had been asked "Now: was it nighttime?" the answer would have been the same: no, of course not. I wasn't thinking about the sky.

<comment><USER27> _Now: was the sun shining? Of course not._

Interestingly, if we're talking about 535-536, it may well not have been! Or at least not very well.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535%...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535%E2%80%93536)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> One should be aware reading it that the 'dark ages were not dark' is in this day and age a revisionist argument aimed at diminishing the role and impact of the European Renaissance in shaping our modern art and culture.

Not saying that this particular article is necessarily an example, just wanted to bring an attention to the fact that the this topic is (unexpectedly) political presently and everything presented on it might turn out to be as neutral and scientific as reporting on other hot-button issues of today.

sapienti sat

<comment><USER29> > that the 'dark ages were not dark' is in this day and age a revisionist > argument aimed at diminishing the role and impact of the European > Renaissance

What's your evidence for this claim?

> this topic is (unexpectedly) political presently

What are you talking about?

<comment><USER30> It's not that people are diminishing Europe's role, it's that Europe's role wasn't as big as euro-centric historians claimed.

The two most prosporous civilizations in human history had their richest periods during the European Dark Ages into the Renaissance but China and India are not even mentioned usually (when only 5 people could do long division in Europe, Indian mathematicians were discovering the basics of calculus, many centuries pre-Newton & Leibniz).

Truth is most of the knowledge "discovered" by Europe during this period was mostly translated from old Chinese/Indian/Greek texts (math/science/etc) and made available to Europeans via Persia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> My guess is the older brother was named by the younger brother, the Enlightenment. They were "dark" because they were fundamentally anti- enlightenment; further it was hard to see through them to the classical period as they tried to burn most of those books. Personally, I think it's a fine name. The inquisition! What a show!

<comment><USER32> No, the term is by Petrarca from early Renaissance.

<comment><USER31> Ah -- makes sense -- same idea though s/Englightenment/Renaissance/g

<comment><USER33> Note also that the Spanish Inquisition operated during the Renaissance - <USER2> Enlightenment era, not the dark ages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> For an opposite perspective, Bryan Ward-Perkins' "The Fall Of Rome: And the End of Civilization" is a readable-by-the-layperson argument that the end of Roman authority in Western Europe resulted in significant falls in trade, health, literacy, cultural achievement, and more: [https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Rome-End- Civilization/dp/0192807...](https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Rome-End- Civilization/dp/0192807285/)

</comment><comment><USER35> "The Dark Ages" is also a Eurocentric view of history. What was going on in the Islamic world? In China? The Dark Ages of Western Europe were the brilliant Tang dynasty in China; and the explosion of Islam across the Middle East and across to India, bringing with it tremendous scholarship and economic prosperity.

<comment><USER36> Also, we should rename the Thirty Years' War to "Thirty Years' War in Europe but mostly peace elsewhere", and then we can can call World War I and World War II simply War I and War II - if we assume by default that every event is global (maybe we should add "except Switzerland,etc..." there too...)

Just joking: IMHO if someone knows what dark ages was, usually know where it was... It is that simple!

<comment><USER35> It's not that simple, though. A lot of people - a _lot_ of people - have no idea that during the "Dark Ages", huge swaths of the rest of the world (larger than Western Europe) were going through a Golden Age. It took me rather a while to realize that myself.

And, since WWI was fought in large part over colonial resources and Japan was involved, and since Japan was a major power in WWII (and China was involved as well, if only as Japan's victim), I'm pretty satisfied with "World War" as descriptors.

<comment><USER37> When you read that chapter in K-12, the textbook was no doubt very clear to put the Dark Ages in context of European history... you, and many other students, simply forgot. An elaborate or nuanced name wouldn't have helped retain time/location.

To be fair, other regions of the world have never heard of "the Dark Ages". History is too big for the layman to avoid simplification.

(although, renaming it "the Lost Ages" seems like it would help clarify things)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I would love to see a reasonable explanation for the rapid development of Western Europe. The henge circles all across the world (including the new world) show an advanced mathematics and astronomy for thousands of years before the rise of settler empires say parity ~9000 BC. Jump forward all the way to the late 1800s and despite the glacial pace of social change in Russia they are still designing one of the best rifles and bullets in the world, in use for 100+ years. The success of social organisation must stem from some mixture of accelerated development due to geographic sheltering and island vs mainland conflict- with the island empires (Spain, Portugal, Dutch)proving they don't need to fight landwars if the can control global shipping lanes. The interplay between Japan, China and Korea reminds me of England, France and Germany. Russia plays a role as a cultural glue between these two remote spheres but because of its size proves to be ungovernable. South East Asia gets ignored much like Eastern Europe. Italy, Greece, India, Iran and Egypt great middle civilizations are paralyzed by their ancient past insular and corrupt. Most of Africa, America and Eurasia are mysteries because of contact contamination.

If the answer is a universal religion plus a sea faring civilization gives you world power it still makes me wonder why it took until the late 1400s to kick off. Had the Romans avoided debasing their currency and managed their bureaucracy better couldn't they develop an ocean crossing trireme by the 800s maybe 1000s? So much time has gone by and humans are still just stumbling around unable to organise or understand the emergent forces their complex networks generate. The loss of life due to famine, disease and war in the previous millenium is at a shocking scale of proportionality to the existing populations affected by it. A mistake is being made by not teaching history thoroughly, say 2-3 years of intensive world history for all children. You could introduce a lot of concepts as they emerge in context from religion to agriculture to mathematics, music and politics.

<comment><USER39> > I would love to see a reasonable explanation for the rapid development of > Western Europe.

Rapid and development in what sense? This topic is sort of contaminated by the fact that most askers of the question have a circular definition that refuses to countenance the concept that Western Europe might have been far from dominant (e.g., in areas such as quality of life or health).

In terms of how Western Europe came to politically dominate the world, this essentially boils down to them deciding to arm their trading fleets and have them act as a military force against competitors, and then snowballing the resulting profits into more powerful navies (and armies) that the other countries couldn't keep up with. The technological gap often wasn't near as wide as people usually assume it to be, and there are several instances of Western powers getting their asses kicked by natives, but the Western powers could afford to keep up the pressure for decades or even centuries if need be, whereas the native peoples had less ability to recover from attrition. At the same time, European powers were also able to achieve highly centralized states that prevented them from collapsing due to internal struggles mid-snowball, which is generally the historical case for large empires (see: Aztec, China, Inca, Rome).

<comment><USER38> Specifically in the power to kill at a distance. From cannonball to bullet to firebombing and nuclear airburst. The advancement made seems unreasonable and curiously asymmetric. Communicating instantly across the globe sure, even travelling to other celestial bodies fine. But the idea that a small group of people thousands of miles away can decide to evaporate millions without any warning or reasonable form of defense would seem insane to anyone from the pre nuclear age escalating retaliation keeping global peace is an absurd tragedy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Some time around the early 500's, the Roman-British people pushed back against the Saxon invasion. We know this from archaeological and numismatic finds.

Yet we have no idea who the hell led this beyond the legends of King Arthur.

Dark enough for me.

<comment><USER41> I just finished Michael Wood's In Search of the Dark Ages. It's pretty amazing how little and how limited the evidence we have to inform us about the better part of 500 years of British history.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> What a bizarre perspective on the issue of whether or not the "Dark Ages" are incorrectly named.

The author seems to think that the term stems from the extent to which historical buildings were lost or re purposed. With that kind of logic, you could similarly say that abandoned towns are the height of civilization.

In other words, a very muddled thesis, followed by muddled, ill fitting justifications.

</comment><comment><USER43> I think the most plausible explanation is the lack of slaves that stems from the steady downfall of the Roman empire. When Germanic warlords were pretty much forcing their way into the empire they actually accepted the life style of Romans. But a few hundred years later they switched to feudalism. Why, though?

I think that the Roman empire was founded on a source of cheap labor, slaves. It allowed for massively productive agrarian complexes and thus fueled trade and literacy. But when the empire got into trouble, the price of slaves must have risen massively. The consequence must have been famines and less labor for anything else than crops, in particular less professional soldiers.

<comment><USER4> You can only maintain slaves if you have a powerful army capable of defeating other civilizations and maintaining them captive. That's how ancient empires did it, it is also how Europeans and Americans did it in the new world. During early middle ages each location had armies that were good enough only to barely keep their own survival. So, slavery was out of question as a practical way to get labor. They had to organize their own society into social classes to guarantee that someone would do real work. Instead, Romans could just start another war or trade the already existing slave population.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> People say this but we have very little knowledge of (and literature from) the time period before and during Beowulf.

However, it would be fair to argue that the Dark Ages ended during the High Medieval period, rather than the Renaissance.

</comment><comment><USER45> Something bothers me about the author's notion that we don't have stuff from the "dark ages" only because it was ground up and recycled. Okay, but we do have stuff from _before_ that time, that somehow survived the same conditions.

</comment><comment><USER46> What I find fascinating is that a good number of people discussing this could probably have equally interesting discussions on Java or algorithms,which won't be same on your average history forum...

</comment><comment> La-ang Synopsis: Not as dark as we thought, but still dark..lmao

</comment><comment><USER47> tl;dr: they had nice jewelry, so it wasn't really dark

I don't understand why people feel the need to whitewash this, aside from a preexisting religious motive or mindlessly being contrary. Civilization went backwards after Rome fell. It took centuries to rediscover and reincorporate those parts of Western culture.

I worry that too many people secretly want to go back to being serfs.

</comment><comment><USER48> Dark ages are mostly about to relative lack of written texts from the period due to widespread illiteracy. There are more texts from V century BC left than from VII century AD, for example (in the Western Europe, that is).

</comment><comment><USER49> Much more in-depth article on the same topic: [https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark- ages/](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages/)

</comment><comment><USER50> This seems like a perfect example of someone who needs to read pg's essay "write like you talk": [http://paulgraham.com/talk.html](http://paulgraham.com/talk.html)

I don't get an intelligence vibe from this style of writing - it mostly just sets off my bullshit alarms.

<comment><USER51> That's good advice but it's also highly dependent on culture and time. It's food advice because the English-speaking culture of today values writing that sounds like speech. It may not have been good advice at all for someone writing in 1920s France. And beyond that, it's really hard to apply this sort of advice to a translation.

<comment><USER50> I'd argue it's good advice for people that value clarity over sounding smart.

I'd guess there were people that valued this in most times and cultures.

<comment><USER52> The quoted text isn't at all unclear (especially taking into consideration the fact that it's a translation).

<comment><USER50> The quoted text is verbose and tedious. It uses a lot of complex words to convey little information, both of these things negatively affect clarity.

You may have a preference for purple prose, but it's silly to pretend that the quoted text is clear.

I'm suspicious when people write like that because it can be used to hide bad reasoning behind unnecessarily complex word choice and sentence structure. If you care about sharing ideas it's better to write simply.

<comment><USER51> Someone in another time and place may well find complex word choice and sentence structure easiest to understand in written form, and is wary of writing that uses plain language because it can be used to hide bad reasoning behind simple-sounding words and sentence structure.

For you, and the culture you're in, what you say is true. It is far from universal.

<comment><USER50> I guess I don't agree.

I'd be willing to bet that simpler is generally easier to understand than complex. Maybe some exceptions exist, but I'd suspect they'd be outliers.

<comment><USER51> How much do you suppose a person would get out of Up Goer Five if they didn't already know about Apollo and such?

<comment><USER50> That's fair - at the extreme end it is probably harder to understand.

Though going back to the first comment it's also not how people talk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Recently I watched a documentary about the Arthurian legend. Essentially nobody has been able to prove or disprove the existence of King Arthur. That part of history in Britain is pretty much a blank as to who was running things and how things worked.

</comment><comment><USER54> I've wondered recently if historical prominence and quality of life are anticorrelated: if the civilizations we think of as biggest and greatest are the ones that were the worst to live under. Or, more provocatively, if civilization is just relationship dysfunction on a grand scale.

What is civilization? It's centralization of power, increasing specialization of roles, usually higher population density, greater interconnectedness between people, a dominant ideology & discourse, and subordination of individual will to collective power. We look at the Romans or the Mongols or the Aztecs or the Pax Britannia or Pax Americana as great civilizations because there is something _there_ that us, as observers centuries later, can point to and hang our minds on.

But what does life look like for individual humans under one of these civilizations? The Romans practiced slavery on a grand scale; the Mongols conquest, the Aztecs human sacrifice; the British colonialism; and the Americans capitalist exploitation.

There is a movement, today, that life should be more focused around local communities, person-to-person interactions, individual freedom, authenticity, and a return to human-centric ideologies. What would such a society look like to future historiographers? Communications would revert to person-to-person interactions rather than massively published tracts. Much of it would be ephemeral; Snapchat or Whatsapp rather than the WWW or Twitter. There's no need to fix communications into a tangible medium or distribute it widely when the audience is a single human being at a single moment in time. Large infrastructure projects would essentially become impossible, as getting the required cooperation from different interests without a monopoly on coercion becomes unrealistic. Think of NIMBYism on a society-wide scale. Trade might continue, but rather than organized supply-chains, it reverts back to supplying individual wants.

To an observer a millenia in the future, it would look like a collapse of civilization, because there would be no big entities that they could look at and say "That's how people lived back then." But to the individual human living in the moment, it could instead be viewed as a return to freedom, community, and person-to-person relationships, all of which are valued highly by nearly everyone (particularly today). Both viewpoints are true; the difference is in the scale that the observer observes them.

<comment><USER55> When you don't have large civilizations typically most people will be subsistence farmers, so you don't have much time to pursue other interests. You might not have warfare on a grand scale but you still have it. But now you don't have professional soldiers to protect you, so if someone comes knocking you have to take up arms yourself or abandon your home. Travel is dangerous without maintained roads and patrols. Without that you don't have easy communication which means a lack of ideas being spread.

This isn't a refutation, but I can think of plenty aspects of life improved during a pax. I don't think going wildly in either direction is ideal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I view the dark ages as just a big recession following the collapse of Rome. It's not that nothing happened. Often very important things happen during recessions. It's just that there was little macroeconomic growth.</comment>