Essential for astronomical calculations, like forecasting the paths of Jupiter and Venus. A daily brief of "omens" was submitted to the Assyrian King at breakfast. Has anything changed in modern day? I watch the weather and traffic at 6am and likewise predict how "long and glorious my reign shall live" ;)
Romans relied on a few different omens for a lot of things which reduced to injecting randomness into a lot of decision making. I wonder if such things would be valuable to add back to modern life… roll dice to determine which tickets to add to the next sprint, legislatures have to flip a coin to trigger a floor vote for a piece of contentious legislation, that kind of thing.
I think that makes sense. If you cannot be very sure of actual evidence why rely on it anyway? But randomness might mean that every time you use the result you learn something, at least you would learn whether your rule-based default value for the control variable is systematically wrong and tilted to one direction or another.
I think companies could test their interview process this way. Fill some positions by choosing from the candidate pool at random (there could be a baseline filter to ensure a minimum level of competence) and compare the random hires with the regular hires to see how much of a difference the interview process really makes.
I've long advocated for building a candidate pool for both hires and promos from a low baseline (with the option to opt out for promo), then hire/promote randomly out of that pool. Then fire/demote based on demonstrated incompetence.
The important thing isn't that you promote the best worker; the key is that it isn't possible for the ambitious-but-incompetent to game their way up.
That goes along with my thinking. Some things are obvious but when you move away from the top topic or two you’ll always have a long list of things where it’s not so clear which should be done next, and there’s plenty which is always important to do but never the most important thing. A bit of randomness injected into that process whether you’re dealing with software tickets, national legislation, or household chores might just lead to better outcomes than relying on the judgement of a few people without enough information to make nonarbitrary decisions and might have bad biases which lead to things getting overprioritized or neglected.
Athenian democracy worked this way--you had to opt-in to the candidate pool, but then the candidate was chosen randomly from that pool.
(Also, if people are interested in randomness in antique decision making, me & my wife made a simulator of an ancient lot oracle unearthed in modern Turkey: https://sortesalearum.com)
(It's somewhat enshrined in modern-day RNGs used in simulation and forecasting models.)
Michael Schulson's 2014 Aeon essay, "How to Choose" remains at the top of my best reads of the past decade:
... It makes sense that it should have taken Dove some 15 years to realise that randomness could be an asset. As moderns, we take it for granted that the best decisions stem from a process of empirical analysis and informed choice, with a clear goal in mind. That kind of decision-making, at least in theory, undergirds the ways that we choose political leaders, play the stock market, and select candidates for schools and jobs. It also shapes the way in which we critique the rituals and superstitions of others. But, as the Kantu’ illustrate, there are plenty of situations when random chance really is your best option. And those situations might be far more prevalent in our modern lives than we generally admit. ...
Examples include swidden farmers in New Guinea, China's I Ching, the Athenian Greek elections (more a lottery than today's FPTP precise-count balloting), Renaissance Italy's Doges, and contemporary college admissions, with references for further reading.
Sortilege is a good thing. Right now we have an ostensibly democratic system where elected representatives take part in another election among themselves about which one of them gets to have pre-emptive veto power over all legislative proposals for 2-6 years (in the US).
As I noted upstream, sortition's a pretty fascinating concept.
A few years ago I'd thought that the US Supreme Court might benefit by both expansion and selecting by lot the judicial panel for any given case. This would throw far more uncertainty into the outcome of any given Supreme Court case, as well as the capacity to throw the court in the benefit of one party or the other for years at a time. That's been proposed by others.
Another possibility might be to apply a similar approach to legislation, with an expanded Congress closer to the 30,000:1 constituent to representative ratio initially in the US Constitution rather than the 616,000:1 ratio presently in place. That would result in a House of 11,000 members, however.
(I'm willing to accept that this might prove infeasible, though I'd still like to see approaches enabling greater direct representation.)
What if, as with the Supreme Court reform proposal, legislative votes were based on a subset of representatives, again allocated by lot from amongst members? Again, though outcomes would over time average to partisan representation, any given vote might, or might not, favour the majority party.
One possible consequence: given the impossibility of guaranteeing a known outcome in votes, legislation might be written to more broadly consider overall views. This could avoid exremes, though it's worth noting that extremes gave rise to both highly discriminatory and civil-rights-reform practices. Some extremes seem less bad than others.
There's also the probable outcome that the locus of control would shift elsewhere. I'd still like to see some discussion of such concepts.
if you could predict when certain phenomenon will occur, then act as if you are somehow in control of these things, you can spin up public perceptions of god-hood
If I had to take a guess: the scene being depicted in the comment could apply to any powerful king/priest of the past - imagine halls full of incense and chanting creating a feeling of mass hypnosis/hysteria (possibly intensified with consumption of psychedelics) and the booming voice of the king/priest proclaims their power over celestial objects - and it comes true due to normal celestial events/eclipses!
im thinking in the context of pre-judeo christian society.
these tablets are close to 4000 years old.
being possesed by gods was an in thing, a believe demons were a prechristian idea as well, so if witch, and demon could be interchanged somehow, i think that fits the era.
This is how the self claimed god-king of the old namely Namrod and Pharaoh misled their subjects and claimed false deity. In the Bible (Old Testament) and Quran there are stories of Pharaoh during Moses time cruelly and pre-emptively killed all the Jewish new born sons based under the heavenly knowledge that he will be eventually overthrown by a Jewish prophet. According to legends and history, he gathered this prediction information from his sorcerers with their Genie partners eavesdropping the angels conversation because in the old days these eavesdropping activities was feasible and now abruptly stopped after the Quran revelation.
There are no detailed architectural diagrams documenting how the pyramids were built either. There were some papyrus scrolls discovered in 2013 which provide log information but still to this day, no details are known to exist.
A citation is needed to disprove the information that you refer to as "religious fabrication". Lack of information in Egyptian records is not a citation.
I know it is not satisfying, but essentially all of modern biblical scholarship no longer consider these (among others) are factual. This is held by believers and non-believers in the field alike. There is not a single paper to cite, its the result of decades of research with the field slowly settling on this as the result of hundreds of papers, studies, and books. In particular, you won't find a paper entitled "Modern Biblical Criticism rejects X", as it is not original research and worthy of publication. A book like Thomas Romer's "The Invention of God" goes through a bunch of the pro/con evidence and various theories and proposals put forth. And here is a paper by Romer that just summarily states that modern research has abandoned the documentary hypothesis, but doesn't really offer support for that as it is a well known point within the field that doesn't require re-litigation: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03820791/document
Yeah but a source which is itself derived from an earlier source (Torah) but the earlier source lacks the relevant details is a shut and dry case of fabrication.
It is only controversial to say this because it is a religious document.
(Lest you think I’m taking sides, the Jewish account of exodus doesn’t line up with archeological evidence either.)
There's a lot stated in the article. There is absolutely no evidence for a Hebrew peoples invasion of Canaan. The cities mentioned in the Bible were excavated, but there is no record of any sieges. The transition from Canaanite to Israelite settlers is gradual over hundreds of years, and likely represents a transformation of the same culture and not an actual displacement of people. None of the places mentioned in Sinai that have been identified show any evidence of any people whatsoever having visited until hundreds of years after the absolute latest possible dates. "The conclusion – that Exodus did not happen at the time and in the manner described in the Bible – seems irrefutable [...] repeated excavations and surveys throughout the entire area have not provided even the slightest evidence." (Finkelstein and Silberman, 2002).
On the Egyptian side, basically no excavations or inscriptions anywhere match up with the biblical story. There were semitic-speaking slaves in Egypt, yes, but not chattel slavery as commonly depicted, but rather something more akin to domestic servants and feudal peasants. And they were never expelled, as there are ongoing references long after into the Ptolemaic kingdom. The only exodus on record of semitic peoples is the Hyksos, who weren't slaves but rather conquerors and the fifteenth dynasty of Egypt. When the Hyksos were eventually defeated, they were expelled and driven out as far as Syria. Maybe that was the origin of The Exodus? But if the story changed from a slave rebellion ("let my people go!") to a dynastic struggle by the ruling class, are we still talking about the same story?
Finally there's the question of when the story was written down in the first place. It is interesting to note that the first few prophets of Israel make no mention of the Exodus whatsoever. It is not part of the shared zeitgeist of early Israel. It is only a few hundred years later that the references to an Egyptian origin are made by some of the northern prophets, and then the story spreads to the south. The Exodus itself isn't written down until Babylonian captivity much, much later, at which point a liberation story starts sounding quite a bit like Mary Sue fan-fiction.
Probably the histrorians were looking at the wrong place and perhaps the original Mount Sinai is not the one that's widely accepted. Any knowledge be it science, history, etc need to be revised and aligned to the newly discovery with more robust evidences.
Please check this documentary on the new evidences regarding the Exodus [1].
[1]The Real Mount Sinai - Shocking Exodus Evidence in Saudi Arabia:
Do you realized that most of ancient mathematics revolved around religions and one of the very first books on algebra was written by Al-Khwarizmi to accurately calculate inheritance for Islamic jurisprudence? [1]
Anyway I was directly replying to my parent poster not to the article mentioning that if anyone especially kings that can sort of reliably predict the future they can claim divinity.
Time will tell whether it has zero correlation with Egyption sources and whether it's almost certainly invented.
A simple search on Amazon on 'Egypt' and 'Exodus' returned several results of books written by the scholars including the following books [1],[2]. There is also a link to the video documentary regarding the Real Mount Sinai in my other comments.
[1] Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition:
A simple google search reveals youtube videos and books on how the world is flat. It ain't flat.
swrc is not a valid source of biblical scholarshp, Douglas Petrovich publishes fringe theories and is not someone you want to be citing for biblical research. To wit, he argues that the tower of babel is the only reasonable explanation for the number of languages we have in the world. He is self proclaimed inerrantist and creationist[1]. Why? Because God talked to him and told him it was true. This is not scholarship. That linked video (mine, not yours) is pretty interesting - he talks about being rejected in academia, colleagues won't speak to him, etc. He unfortunately interprets this as rejection of the Christian God, not because his 'research' is shoddy and unsupported, and takes it as proof that he is right. I don't say this to mock him, he is in tears at the end, but to point out he isn't doing scholarship and isn't considered a reliable source in academia.
Please do not conflate the case for Jewish settlement in Egypt with the flat earth theory. The former does not have enough convincing evidences yet to be found while the latter is straight up denial of the truth despite the numerous clear evidences.
Please check videos of the Real Mount Sinai as explained in the Bilble (Old Testament) as being shared in my other comments and other sites.
We have plenty of records from other societies indicating how absolute rulers did and didn't schedule their days. A king has a potentially limitless amount of stuff to do and also the power to set his own schedule as well as servants to help him stick to it. Whether he slept a lot or a little and whether his schedule was biased early or late was almost certainly a matter of personal preference and convenience. An absolute ruler also has to consider the signal being sent. Being awake and dressed in time to attend morning colors with regularity sends a message that a ruler might deem worth the effort to send.
