50% of human experience has happened after 1309 AD.

From The funnel of human experience by Eukaryote. I often mention often in these posts the importance of alternative perspectives and the insight which can arise from viewing things from a different frame, especially when you keep it in the language of numbers.

It turns out that if you add up all these years, 50% of human experience has happened after 1309 AD. 15% of all experience has been experienced by people who are alive right now.

I call this "the funnel of human experience" - the fact that because of a tiny initial population blossoming out into a huge modern population, more of human experience has happened recently than time would suggest.

50,000 years is a long time, but 8,000,000,000 people is a lot of people.

[snip]

So humanity in aggregate has spent about ten times as long worshiping the Greek gods as we've spent watching Netflix.

We've spent another ten times as long having sex as we've spent worshipping the Greek gods.

And we've spent ten times as long drinking coffee as we've spent having sex.

[snip]

2) The Funnel gets more stark the closer you move to the present day. Look at science. FLI reports that 90% of PhDs that have ever lived are alive right now. That means most of all scientific thought is happening in parallel rather than sequentially.

This last one is especially interesting. There is a lot of concern that our rate of innovation might be slowing down. In field after field you see smaller and smaller incremental discoveries compared to 1700 or 1800 or 1850 or 1900 or 1950. What is going on? We invest far more, our base of educated people is far larger, our infrastrucutre of discovery is much greater. So why the slowdown (if, indeed, it is real).

Eukaryote's observation about sequence versus parallel might be a contributor. Saliency can be hard to extract in a noisy system and parallel systems tend to be a lot noisier than sequential systems. An intriguing proposition.

This made me think about the phrase “living memory”. The world’s oldest living person is Kane Tanaka, who was born in 1903. 28% of the entirety of human experience has happened since her birth. As mentioned above, 15% has been directly experienced by living people. We have writing and communication and memory, so we have a flawed channel by which to inherit information, and experiences in a sense. But humans as a species can only directly remember as far back as 1903.

Many Gramscian's in academia complain about Eurocentricity but Eukaryote's calculations shed some light on the issue.

50% of human experience has happened after 1309 AD.

Many historians have noted the longevity of Roman, Greek, Persian, Chinese, Hindu cultures and have especially remarked how productive those empires were compared to those in Europe until very recent times.

Eukaryote's observations take on especial relevancy when you realize that by 1300, India had fallen into a longterm slough, as had China. The modern era only began circa 1480 (first global transportation) or 1650 or 1750, depending on which technological/institutional transition you regard as most critical. The point is that Europe's primacy occurred at the very time that the pace and volume of history picked up.

Of course, there are all sorts of interdependencies in these phenomena but it also explains why there is such a Eurocentricity to history. Europe happened to be the biggest player just when things really began hopping. The relative accomplishments in the centuries and millenia before then don't matter all that much because, in an era of slow change and small populations, the aggregate "volume" of history just wasn't all that great.

The big technological strides occurred just when European population was exploding, hence the Eurocentricity of history.