Interesting Question

[gfish]

What was the single greatest mistake of human history?

My answer:
Classical Chinese cultural myopia. They had a 1000 year head start on the west technologically, and they pissed it away masturbating to new and even less relevant commentaries on The Spring and Autumn Annals. If they hadn't been so busy navel-gazing, we'd all be post-singularity machine intellects out exploring the galaxy by now. Curse you, Zhu Xi!

What does my side of the internet think?

Comments

[samildanach.livejournal.com]

It's interesting that we characterize this as a single "mistake". Can a culture be said to make a mistake?

These are all 20th-C centric:
What about going to the moon and then retreating to LEO instead of building a lasting infrastructure? (This may not be a lasting mistake; there are reasonable indications that China, India, and independent Western entrepreneurs will fill the gap.)

What about the continued squandering of Earth's fossil fuel reserves? I forget who said that these represent a one-shot booster to kick us out of subsistence farming, and we'd better make use of the momentum while we can. (For that matter, what about the decision to construct the Eisenhower interstate system instead of following the rest of the world in enhancing rail lines?)

What about the British government hounding Turing to his death?

[gfish.livejournal.com]

I had been trying to avoid focusing on recent history, but phrasing it in terms of the interstate system is really good. That could well have been a single turning point for the rest of human history. I certainly agree with that view of fossil fuels, and I'm going to be very annoyed if we end up slowly collapsing back to a pre-industrial level of technology because we squandered it all on SUVs.