Part of it is just a matter of deep lore, characterization, and proper world building.

People familiar with the broader context of Lord of the Rings know Gandalf is a Maia, and basically has all kind of god-like abilities. But he was sent to aid the Free Peoples, not become their lord or hero. He was explicitly forbidden from using his powers except in vague and undefined contexts.

He notably only really uses magic through the stories when faced with higher evils like the Balrog, Saruman, or the Nazgul. At other times, his efforts are physical or restricted to advising the course of events. And of those evils he uses his powers against, only the Balrog is one that he outright defeats himself.

Thing is most people know and criticize Gandalf by his clones in subsequent fantasy, which lack explanations for why the powerful wizard doesn't do powerful wizard stuff.

To be honest I've never liked his world building. I can smell the factory fresh scent on his worlds. They're too neat and orderly. Too obviously constructed and don't feel like real places with real history or active people. This is a common problem in fantasy to be fair and the extreme level of detail of Malazan has sort of spoiled me.

That said, Sanderson imo isn't a bad writer. One thing I like and look forward to is that he's gotten better over the years. Comparing Elantis to Warbreaker is night and day almost. I think someday he'll write something I unconditionally love and in the meantime he's entertaining enough for light reading in my book.

Any sufficiently explained magic is indistinguishable from science.

Which is why I don't really agree with his soft/hard magic division. Hard magic isn't magic at all. It's macguffin powered science. Magic is supposed to be mysterious and mystical imo. It can't exist on a 'hard' scale. If I fully understand the rules and 'systems' behind 'magic' there's nothing magical about it. It's a bounded system that has become a fictional science.

Which isn't a bad thing. I can see it's appeal and like plenty of books with such things, even Sanderson's. I'm just less interested in it and generally not as impressed by munchkinry as others and find the soft/hard magic concept to be an explanation in search of a concept rather than a useful division.

Honestly, if you want to see a marvelously made 'magical' system with clear rules that maintains mystery and mystic qualities, read Wildbow's urban fantasy (Pact and Pale). The ways he writes Practioners is a highlight of some truely excellent world building, and harkins to the kind of magic you'd see in Shakespearian theatre built on pacts, oaths, and traditions rather than a fantastical conservation of thermodynamics. It strikes a great balance between magic being explainable but still mystic because it mostly runs on the momentum of 'this is how we do it and we've always done it this way so follow the proper procedures!'

We’ve found toys in west Mexico that are wheeled. They at some point at least did figure it out. As for why it never caught on, common guesses are a lack of draft animals, rough terrain, and more availability of navigable waterways.

Also the possibility that what was being traded didn’t incentivize heavy loads. Most cultures in the Americas were self-sufficient for food. Their currency wasn’t based in valuable metals. Most trade was focused on finished goods and wares, not bulk raw materials.

I’ll look for it but there’s a fantastic post right here on reddit explaining how pottery leads to metal working in a very simple and logical progression.

TLDR; pottery processes can produce copper slag. Once people started using that they just gained more knowledge about metal.

It’s a two fold question.

First; the neighboring Tarascan civilization had metal working. In all of meso-American the western side of Mexico is the only part where we find metallurgy being practiced locally. They likely imported this know from South America at some point.

It had been present in West Mexico for more than a thousand years. So, why didn’t the rest of Meso-America adopt it?

We don’t know but we can make some logical guesses.

The first is that there were no known sources of copper. Early metal working derived as a result of pottery. The process of glazing and finishing pottery can produce copper slag. So its an easy progression that pottery leads to metalworking.

Problem is that there isn’t a lot of copper to be found in the soil or pottery styles of the region so they never made the leap.

But they were adjacent to metal workers for centuries. The Aztec were even at war with the Tarascans.

And they weren’t losing.

So here we come to obsidian. Obsidian is a useful rock. Its brittle but it can hold a very sharp edge. It’ll break sure… but so what? Just get more obsidian and make a new edge.

We see a similar pattern int he near east. There were groups slow to adopt metal tools because stone tools are simple. You didn’t need an artisan to make or fix them. They’re cheaper. Anyone can make a basic stone tool.

And that’s probably why the Aztecs didn’t switch to bronze. Obsidian’s general ease of use and practicality was more valuable to them. They didn’t see the advantages si they didn’t adopt copper. Don’t adopt copper you don’t get bronze. Iron takes more skill to work and experience working iron leads to steel.

This is a fairly consistent global pattern but it was stalled in Meso-American by a lack of metal sources and the many uses and ease of use of obsidian.

We sort of can but it involves guessing.

You picked the title of the thread.

Also the article uses the words 'lost' and 'discovered.' Hansen's been working that region for 20 years. He already knew they were there.

I first heard about them in a Great Courses lecture series from 2014 which has an entire chapter dedicated to El Mirador and the region around it (edit: plugging because it's really great, Barnhart honestly makes learning fun). This technology has even been used the exact same way in the exact same region before. In 2020. In 2019. In 2018. Barnhart's lecture on El Mirado talks about it (again, 2014). The book 1491 (published 2005) talks about these discoveries.

It's not an accusation. It's common for articles, and the academics who want them published, to engage in some bluster about what they've 'found.' People get more excited about 'new discoveries' than they do about 'we knew this was here 100 years ago but we never shot radar at it!'

It's worth investigating. I think the main reason he hasn't just said it is because it's a highly speculative thing with his current data set. El Mirador is where most of his work is but El Mirador is not as old as Highland sites like Kaminaljuyu.

It would be a bit frowned on for him to make that speculative a claim without more data. Issue is collecting data in this field is very time consuming and very expensive.

EDIT: He also apparently did say it and has been frowned on outside my knowledge.

To clear a few things up: (copied from another thread)

This isn't in Yucatan. Hansen's work primarily deals in the Peten and the most famous city in his area of interest today is the Maya city of El Mirador.

This also isn't really 'new.' Hansen has been arguing the need for increased archeology in this region for nearly 20 years. The crux of his interest is that the cities of the Mirador Basin are older than the Classical Maya, but display remarkable sophistication. He's never come right out and just said it exactly, but he's been angling for a long time that greater study of the largely unexplored and surveyed sites could lead to a general rewriting of early Maya history, when their culture first emerged and how sophisticated it was before the Classical Maya.

Mayanists have an ongoing, low key, debate about where Maya civilization began; in the Highlands, or as Hansen wants to argue, in the Peten. (EDIT: I got my geography wrong)

He's not wrong that there's interesting sites there that could force a reconsideration of things. He's not wrong that it's underexplored either.

This article is wrong in acting like this is new. Lidar has been getting used in this region for a decade. 1491 even has a chapter mostly dedicated to the myth of 'sparse human settlement' that uses the earliest studies to discuss how littered in human alterations the American landscape was when Europeans arrived.

There's a 12 kilometer highway for example that connects El Mirador to another Maya settlement in the region; Nakbe, where most of El Mirador's stone was quarried.

This is more a case of Hansen trying to drum up interest and support than a truly new discovery, but then again I'll bet lots of people reading were unaware of all this before so *shrug* Dude's doing what he's gotta do.

EDIT: I also now feel obligated to link to this information another redditor shared with me, which I didn't know and I find so disappointing.

It's a bit over-sensationalized in the article.

The part of Israel's history that gets tagged with ???s mostly concerns the period before the burning of the first temple in 586. From 586 onward, Israel's history is fairly well attested and can be cross-referenced.

What's generally questioned is the depiction of the kingdoms of David and Solomon as very powerful and influential states, mostly because you'd think if they were the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Hittites would have mentioned them and the archeological record doesn't support such a state existing. There is at best 2 or 3 references to Judah in their records despite them talking about this region a lot. It was a really important region for the big empires of the age.

But there's been growing evidence for years, sporadic as it is, for an proto-state Judah. The Tel Dan Stele sure seems to reference a 'House of David.'* It's generally speaking, taken for granted that Judah existed before 586, existed for a good while, and was possibly/probably a regional power. What's questioned is if it was really as strong a kingdom as the Bible suggests it is cause we'd expect to see evidence for such a state where we're not finding it.

Put another way, it's not really a question of whether the Kings of Judah existed or not. It's mostly a question of if the Bible is an accurate record of their history. There's no real reason to doubt these men existed. We accept king's lists at face value all the time. There's contradictory evidence though as to how powerful and important these kings were regionally and in the broader political network of the Near East of the ancient world before 586.

As the OP article suggests, this discovery is mostly about chronology, which is a very fucky and hard to detail subject because until people started recording dates it can be really hard to gauge when things happened in relation to other things. We have to fallback heavily on things like wood rings, geological events, and cross references to try and nail down the timeline of human history before the 6-5th century BCE.

This find is cool because it purportedly has a date (said because this will be investigated and confirmed) which is a pretty big find. Biblical Scholars have argued for a long time that parts of the Bible come from now lost royal records, and old stone carvings are useful for supporting that especially if their old. I do note however that the OP article fails to explain how these inscriptions were dated.

Their having a date isn't the same thing as being written on that date (the oldest date given in the Maya world is hundreds of years before the inscription itself was chiseled). They kind of skip over that in this article and simply claim the age of the inscriptions.

*(there are people who question the translation but they're more and more a minority and alternative translations have not been convincing)

Ultimately the problem facing programming is that getting good at it means being good at math and having fine attention to structure and detail.

As a person alive today, people alive today don't like math, structure, or detail :P

The Narrator of the first Magnus Chase book is... I don't know the words. I don't like being rude but the cadence of his speech and the way he pronounces things as a whole combine to make it sound like he's trying to narrate someone with a severe mental handicap. He notably did not reprise his role as narrator for the second or third books. I don't think the character is supposed to come off like a young Asgardian Forest Gump. That was all the odd way the narrator read the story.

This.

It's worth noting that while Germany was not 'unified' until the 19th century, the regions of Germany had long histories together both of war and cooperation and political connection. The Holy Roman Empire had a long history and its final phases were integral to the formation of Germany.

It's not that Germany was more unified exactly, so much that Germany came into being with a history that made unification into a nation state a smoother process.

Italy in contrast had a long history of division, factional regionalism, and was rapidly unified without that same history of cooperation and political partnership. Its history of distinct and independent city states, dukedoms, and kingdoms didn't carry the same experience of working together into modern Italy like modern Germany.

I guess we could say Germany was more unified, but I think that boils the history down a bit too much.

Quite literally, there is today a not-so-insubtantial push against over reliance of Athenian sources in Greek history. Which is inconvenient, because especially for classical and archaic Greece, nearly all our contemporary written sources are Athenian.

That said, most of it probably isn't lies. Hearsay yes. Biased yes. But even Herodotus engaged more than once in telling a story in his work and then gave a long explanation of why he didn't think it was true. The standards might have been much looser then, but there's not always an explicit reason to think ancient writers were outright lying.

They were just telling the story from their own POV, with their own sense of how the world worked and what was or wasn't true.

There's definitely been a pushback in academic circles in favor of Herodotus as 'more reliable' rather than less. Most of it hinges on pointing out he did engage in source criticism at several points of his work (example, the size of the Persian Army was debated by Herodotus as much as modern historians), something he wouldn't do if he were solely interested in sensationalizing events.

These scholars would argue Herodotus calling some accounts into question and not others is indicative of what he honestly thought to be true.

Most likely it's a parable about Persian impiety.

The Greeks, at least those from Greece, generally assumed the Persian elite to be unmanly and impious. The idea that Xerxes would whip the seas probably isn't intended to suggest his irrationality or craziness, but his rage and hubris.

It's almost certainly a story he picked up somewhere. It's the kind of folk myth that still gets invented today about past wars. Herodotus traveled around to collect stories for his history and it's more likely many of the fanciful tales he tells were stories related to him by others rather than things he solely made up on his own.

Herodotus spends too much time casting judgement on some of the stories he tells, explaining which ones he thinks are true or false and why he thinks that, to be a mere fanatic for narrative.

Per another comment;

Herodotus' account is pretty favorable toward the Persians in many respects. He sings high praises of Persian culture and art. He's not completely free of Greek biases, but he had a much more circumspect attitude on the Empire than the Athenians or the Spartans. Unsurprising since he grew up mostly under Persian rule (more Greeks lived in the Persian Empire than in what we call Greece).

Herodotus wrote narrative embellishments, but a lot of people overlook that he examined the stories he collected and cast judgements on them. Herodotus would often tell a story and then explain why he thought it was or wasn't true. People tend to only note he told the story and forget he was analyzing his sources more than they realize.

Propaganda and badmouthing the Persians wasn't quite his deal. If anything he wrote the most Persian favorable version of the history out of all the Greek writers who survived the Classical age.

A lot of people who know of Herodotus but never read him miss this.

Herodotus came from Halicarnassus, on the Ionian coast and grew up under Persian rule. More Greeks lived in the Persian Empire than in what we now call Greece.

His account is actually pretty favorable toward the Persians in many respects. Badmouthing the Persians was an invention of latter Greeks, not Herodotus.

To be honest, I think this is already generally true.

For every famous 'lying' politician, there's 20 or 30 you've simply never heard of because they're too busy working to get on TV. A lot of the betrayals or let downs people complain about are really idealism running headfirst into reality and the expectations people had of the political system were unrealistic.

More like people need to learn to live with the things they can't really do anything about instead of obsessing over how things 'should' be.

Should be won't be a realistic outcome, not even in a dictatorial one-party system because the people who rise to the top in such systems are not anymore competent, rational, or knowledgeable than the bulk of the population. What gets to the top of a one party system is ruthlessness, not competence.

The problem is that people who are ignorant, incompetent, and only interested in what they can personal get are usually elected by people who are ignorant, incompetent, and only interested in what they can personally get.

And the great irony of it is, that those very same people are so terrifying in the things they want to do that they basically force us to make sub-optimal (but realistic) choices, or we just get disillusioned and become uninvolved.

So really at the end of the day we're basically left with choices on the sliding scale of ignorance, incompetence, and self-interest, and can rarely if ever make the choices that actually make the most sense. That's how we've ended up with science, technology, and innovation largely being motivated by profit-motive, since it's the one thing most people can get behind.

I feel pretty confident that that is not a new thing.

People (including those of us making this observation probably) have always been dumber than people want to believe.

I'd also point out most of us in my experience only engage recursive thinking sporadically. I'll spend hours thinking about a book, but I don't think about a song for more than a 3-4 minutes it takes to play. I'll bet the farmer down the road is way more introspective about farming than I'll ever be.

TLDR: "I heard you like AI, so we made some AI that will use your AI that will make you more AI!"