this feels like a rude question but i really do wanna know: past a certain ambient temperature does it get too hot for people to accomplish anything interesting? does the historical dominance of great britain over the rest of the world suggest this?
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i think if the ambient temperature was consistently hotter than maybe 80 fahrenheit then i wouldn’t be able to get anything done whatsoever, which meaningfully constrains my choices wrt where i live. at some point you must run into real biological limits
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it would be interesting to know what the weather was like where historically significant intellectuals tended to spend their time. i expect somewhat cold - lots of northern europe etc.
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some interesting stuff here, nothing directly about intellectual or creative work but everything is massively confounded by the fact that places further from the equator tend to be *richer*
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Replying to @danielcjonas and @QiaochuYuan
for diving off point:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environme
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i think about this a lot. i think a long time ago temperatures were a bit cooler in europe.
part of it is whether you're functional past a certain temperature
another part is why would you bother when it's so pleasant outside
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Also like… all tropical islands? People tend to just lounge around lol
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Egypt is definitely one of the best counterexamples, but it's also worth remembering that their resource advantage was colossal for the time period and they had an extremely stratified society that let the elites hang out in cool stone buildings built by peasants.
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