Grant Sanderson: belief

Transcript context

…Is it surprising to you that prehistoric humans don't seem to have had just basic arithmetic and numeracy? To us with the modern understanding that kind of stuff seems so universally useful and so fundamental that it's shocking that it just doesn't come about naturally in the course of interacting with the world. Is that surprising? You're right that it's so in our bones that it's hard to empathize with not having numeracy. If you think, “Okay. What's the first place that most people think about numbers in their daily lives?” It's linked to commerce and money. Maybe in some ways the question is the same as, is it surprising that early humanity didn't have commerce or didn't deal with money? Maybe when you're below Dunbar's number in your communities, a tit for tat structure just makes a lot more sense and actually works well and it would just be obnoxious to actually account for everything. Have you come across those studies where anthropologists interview tribes of people that are removed enough from normal society that they don't have the level of numeracy that you or I do? But there's some notion of counting. You have one coconut or nine coconuts like you have a sense of that. But if you ask what number is halfway between one and nine, those groups will answer three whereas you or I or people in our world would probably answer five and because we think on this very linear scale. It's interesting that evidently the natural way to think about things is logarithmically, which kind of makes sense. The social dynamics of as you go from solitude to a group of 10 people to a group of 100 people have roughly equal steps in increasing complexity more so than if you go from 1 to 51 to 102 and I wonder if it's it's the case that by adding numeracy in some senses we've also like lost some numeracy or lost some intuition in others, where now if you ask middle school teachers what's a difficult topic to teacher for students to understand they're like logarithms. But that should be deep in our bones right so somehow it got unlearned and maybe it's in the formal sense that it's harder to relearn it, but there's maybe a sense of like numeracy and a sense of quantitative thinking that humans naturally do have that is hard to appreciate when it's not expressed in the same language or in the same ways. Yeah, I have seen the thing from Joseph Henrich where there's still existing tribes where they're in this kind of situation. They can do numeracy and arithmetic when it's in very concrete terms, if you're talking about seeds or something but that the abstract concept of a number is not available to them.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.