Graeber and Wengrow argue that Kondiaronk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondiaronk#Oratory) should be well regarded in the history of the Renaissance but has been left out due to anti-indigeonous bigotry.
And as an associated commentary of this academic-ese paywall, this article titled "The truth is paywalled, but the lies are free" https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2020/08/the-truth-is-pay...
Riveting bleeding edge research in the humanities - we now use one term instead of another for the same thing.
”This is what the Renaissance is for Palmer: an aspiration. Amidst constant danger and intrigue, the unremitting suffering of disease and premature death, and profound political instability, men and women dreamed of improving their lot on earth.”
… not only dreamed, but took constructive action to improve their lot.
>If you needed to do security research
>If you needed to summarise a document
>If you needed a task runner, which LLM would you use? Why?
>How have the behaviours of each one of the LLMs changed? The more detail they can provide about emergent behaviours and how it has changed across the different iterations, the better.
Basically, are you into this as much as the author is into it is his hiring signal. Mkay.
The Renaissance might have been a golden age in certain fields, but it was a thoroughly unpleasant era in other fields. For example, people started burning "witches" at unprecedented rates. And nobody at the time was even aware that they were in a "golden age" of any kind.
The Renaissance was a messy pivot, where peoples' relationship with the future changed.
They started looking backward in order to move forward. Before that, the dominant logic was rooted in the authority of tradition. Basically, "This is how it's always been done, so this is how we'll keep doing it." The idea was that the past had already figured things out. But people's relationship with the past shifted. People began entertaining the idea that, actually, maybe we could do better - that new ideas might solve problems the old ones couldn't.
For example, Petrarch didn't just have a nostalgic relationship with Cicero's works. He thought the ancients had something we'd lost, and by digging it back up, we could think more clearly. But it wasn't in deference or tradition, it was through a the lens which new consequences became possible. You see the same thing with Brunelleschi, who looked at Roman ruins and said, "Cool, now let's use this to invent perspective and change how we visualize space forever." Even Machiavelli, when interacting with the works of Livy and Tacitus, wasn't trying to restore a Roman republic, he was trying to figure out how power really works in the modern state.
The Renaissance was looking backward on the surface, but what made it revolutionary was how it looked back. It didn’t simply copy like the ancients had done since forever, it reinterpreted. That reinterpretation cracked open the door to modernity and the idea that the future didn't have to be like that past, but rather that it's a set of contingencies and possibilities.