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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Yeah man the Mediterranean euro countries all
Have worse economies cause their weather is so good I suspect. I have no data to support this but maybe they just enjoying the warmer weather plus it’s too
Damn hot
To
Work
In the day
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Yeah this is just a lazy, Eurocentric take on history. The ancient Mediterranean, Middle East, India, China, on and on all seem like potential counter examples
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“historically significant” is doing some heavy lifting here, as is “intellectuals” - India has a pretty serious philosophical tradition, Greece is pretty nice most of the year, and I hear things about Mesopotamia…
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Bogatá, at 8,000+ feet above sea level and averaging 64F year round, should be the most intellectually productive city on earth.
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Historically intellectuals didn’t hail from Europe, for most of human history the most eminent scholars came from the Middle East— Arab world (first library and university), Persia, Egypt, Rome; none of which were cold.
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My dude, love your threads about introspection but this whole stream of thought from you is inaccurate, ahistorical white supremacist racial theory from a century ago. If you read this and want to have a chat, lmk. Idk what waters you're swimming in!
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