A conjecture. Any “discovery” in the “soft” sciences related to human nature that is not wrong should be found in the ancients, and, if not there, it would be wrong.
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For ease of access these get recycled in Montaigne (who was a popularizer of people who wrote 1500 y earlier), better, the vastly more erudite Erasmus, plus the corpus Paroemiographorum of Greek proverbs, a compilation of Arabic proverbs, etc.
This is Lindy at work. I announced it to John Gray who immediately wondered if that covered such a thing as “cognitive dissonance”, an idea that seems eminently modern. Well, it is found it in Montaigne “Effect renard”, referring to Aesop (sour grapes, the grapes you can’t reach are declaed ex post to be not good.) We’ve known about it for at least 2600 years (and Aeasop was reflecting collective, perhaps more ancient, wisdom).
One exception perhaps concerns things that correspond to modernity, things to which the ancients were not exposed.
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via A conjecture. Any “discovery” in the “soft”… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
