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Comment by AlotOfReading | Hacker News Reader

Writing might be helpful for intellectuals, but it's certainly not necessary. Socrates has a whole argument about written argumentation being a sign of a weak mind.

Moreover, we have records from some of these precolonial intellectual traditions in the Americas. The nahua genre of huehuetlatolli is an excellent example in many ways. The selectively preserved bits we have resemble something closer to Confucianism than mathematics, but keep in mind we have a narrow selection from a single genre in a much wider landscape.

In what's now US territory, proto-writing systems (emoji are a modern example of these) existed. There were also intellectual traditions associated with them, particularly among southwestern groups like the Puebloans. Those are relatively closed to academics for a variety of historical reasons and consequently understudied, but we know they existed.

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So first Socrates had opinions but is certainty not an authority on the development of humanity through time. Also ironically we know what he supposedly said and are still talking about it because his words have been written down.

They have been written down because there was in Athenian society enough surplus/inequality for those guys to hang out and talk and be influencers (while their wives and slaves were doing all the hard work) and produce some kind of paper/parchment.

Just like the Aztec empire (from whom we have the huehuetlatolli) who also had production surplus thus social classes thus the leisure of an intellectual life.

Both have benefited from 10000 years of settled human history painstakingly modifying the landscape to create that surplus and yet they still didn't have algebra so there's no shot this collection of tribes 12000 were conceptualizing the law of large numbers or whatnot.

Maybe I overreacted but I feel like this kind of blurb in article sounds good but is is completely misleading in that it crushes developmental history into a simple narrative to pander to a crowd of people lacking curiosity when it goes beyond knowing that colonialism is bad

So sorry I may have been talking past you to my make point but thank for your substantiated comment, that was interesting information

It's all good, I take a much more expansive view of technological development than most people.

Regarding algebra, we know very little about precolonial mathematics. Maya mathematics we've figured out from the calendar system and has zero plus the basic operations. Aztec mathematics seems to have had the same, and we're pretty sure they understood fractions based on how they recorded land area (recording field dimensions) and unit conversions between different length measures. Our knowledge is limited by the very small amount of preservation there was, not because they didn't invent other mathematics.

Similarly people in what's not the US had leisure time for things like experimentation, hobbies, and pet birds. We know they had preferences on certain numbers (3 & 4 acted as their equivalents of lucky 7, for example).

I guess you meant "what's now the US*

I stand corrected then and I am putting my soapbox away

And indeed the Nahua people had writing.

It's not about where you come from. It's about whether writing is useful or even required for some aspects of civilization to develop.

It's a matter of some debate whether they had true writing. Michael Smith, over of the most notable experts in them, leans against the true writing argument because there are sentences possible orally that can't be communicated in writing. That would make it another form of the proto-writing I mentioned.

Plus, many of the groups around them did not use the same script despite having comparable levels of technological development. The Maya, who did have true writing, were not massively more advanced technologically.

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