Given that there is evidence [0] to support the idea that (spoken) language is hard-coded into the human DNA, I think language might, like dancing, be something 'innately human' and not a learned technology :)
As in, if we had a total disappearance of all humans on Earth, and then put some new humans on the depopulated Earth, they'd quickly develop a common language, if they were genetically similar to modern humans, but would take a while to start writing.
Arguably, things like counting and geometry could also be viewed as something innate in humans - our mammalian brains view the world as a 3-dimensional real vector space, and so we will instinctively have the ability to understand the concept of a 'circle', or 'seven', or a square, or even multiplication ('three groups of three people each'), but the act of writing down those thoughts, and the literate culture focusing on those concepts which stretches from Euclid to Wikipeda, Library Genesis, and Terry Tao's blog, is obviously a developed technology.
I can't help but read this and be reminded of what Steve Albini said about refusing a major label contract with Big Black:
> If you don't use contracts, you don't have any contracts to worry about. If you don't have a tour rider, you don't have a tour rider to argue about. If you don't have a booking agent, you don't have a booking agent to argue with.
> To us, every moment we remained unfettered and in control was a success. We never had a manager. We never had a booking agent. We never had a lawyer. We never took an advance from a record company. We booked our own tours, paid our own bills, made our own mistakes and never had anybody shield us from either the truth or the consequences. The results of that methodology speak for themselves: Nobody ever told us what to do, and nobody took any of our money.
If you bootstrap your business, you never have to worry about the board trying to fire you.
He also didn't make a living, and record companies took his style and used it to generate billions. His income came from his studio, production work, and being a celebrity.
I was just having a discussion about this with a friend who watched an NYU hosted debate in the 90s between the guy I can't remember from Sick Of It All and Sam McPheeters from Born Against. Born Against had been trolling Sick Of It All for ages (because it was fun), putting up posters, passing out fliers around their shows and talking about them for signing to a major label and distributor, and especially for censoring their lyric sheet in order to get sold at Walmart. Born Against was traditional DIY, on Sam's record label (Vermiform), didn't have bar codes on their records, mostly mailorder, etc.
Both were right, McPheeters was right that Sick Of It All had sold out and censored themselves in order to fit into corporate commerce, but the guy from Sick Of It All was more right. His position was that Born Against (like a Steve Albini) were rich middle class kids who were just having fun, and Sick Of It All were from working class families that they had to support. Music can be the most important thing for hobbyists, but that kind of music is just music. They on the other hand were looking for a ticket to a better life, and one that allowed them to do what they were good at and what they enjoyed.
So Born Against and their style ended up aped by the corporations, and spreads into emocore and all that shit, makes the companies billions, and Sam McPheeters ends up with zero of that. He's fine, he's writing columns for the Atlantic and doing interviews with NPR (incidentally because wealthy people pay to be close to "cool" people.) Meanwhile the style of music represented by Sick Of It All pretty much runs its course, but the members pocket a bunch of cash, and get to move on to do whatever else they want.
Purity is a privilege of the already wealthy. A lot of people chose Wordpress because it was the cheapest functional option (Free.) They were not interested in writing their own CMS, and couldn't afford to anyway.
> If you bootstrap your business, you never have to worry about the board trying to fire you.
Also in respect to Mullenweg, afaik he owns 84% of the company. This never had a chance without his consent.
> Also in respect to Mullenweg, afaik he owns 84% of the company. This never had a chance without his consent.
He has proxy agreements with Automattic's investors for 84% of the vote. I don't know how they're structured, but I saw from other discussions that they may be irrevocable.
Frenchman here, I see plenty of Hoka sneakers, usually worn by people I'd describe as "athletic bourgeois". Generally white, ~25-45+, often also wearing other "sporty" clothing, usually running focused (shirts for various marathons/long-distance runs, for example), seemingly well to do (not the lower class types with their Nike Tn shoes and football jerseys, but people who look and act like they have well-paying office jobs).
> For example, in order to maximise aggregate wellbeing, it would be necessary to hurt individuals. Executing people who are burdensome to society.
[citation needed]
With all due respect, I think this statement is false.
If you live in a society that can, thanks to advanced technology, provide for the material needs of all, which, if you live in a rich Western country, is basically already the case (remember the last time you had to actually grow your own food? Probably several generations ago), you don't need to execute anyone.
Indeed, given that in such a society, where there are no shortages of food leading to "only one of us can eat" type scenarios, I'd argue that hurting individuals would lower aggregate wellbeing, because you're hurting people beloved by other people (the elderly? Turns out their grandchildren really like them and get upset if they die? fat people? Turns out their friends really like them and get upset if they die. the disabled? Turns out their family really like them and get upset if they die).
I'll use a very specific example to explain my point, because I don't disagree with what you write: psychopaths. Psychopaths are 20x more prevalent among homicide offenders. Removing them from society would significantly reduce the number of homicides. It would make their friends and family sad, but this is a much smaller aggregate impact than a homicide.
This also illustrates the messy nature of comparing social good and bad. Who am I to argue that the aggregate sadness created by removing a psychopath from society is better than a homicide? Maybe the person murdered was disliked by everyone and had no friends?
I remain resolute in my premise, however, and there is a lot of theory on the issues of aggregate social good vs individualism. John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859) is an excellent foundation for this. This is a subjective problem to solve, meaning that the balance between individual freedom and aggregate wellbeing is different for everyone. An AI overlord would make decisions every day which individuals would disagree with, at least at the margins.
Even it's $10,000 to run today (FWIW, the featured article cites the M5 Mac Studio with 256GB unified memory going for $9,500 as "good enough to host something scary"), in a couple years it'll be like $2k to run, and in another couple after that, you'll have used $200 dollar smartphones capable of running a model powerful enough to do serious damage.
Haven't ram prices been a linear drop since 2010 before chatgpt rampocalypse? I don't think it's "still" anymore but perhaos some progress will be made in the model front
Please don't start randomly prohibiting things because you dis-approve of those things.
We have, at this point, over a 100 years of evidence showing that prohibition of psychoactive substances (alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, etc) doesn't actually do much to reduce consumption but do create an immense amount of suffering not just for anyone participating in the trade or consumption of those substances, but also anyone remotely connected to them - cf the immense violence perpetrated by drug cartels in the Americas, mostly because people living in the US seem to be in denial about their appetite for drugs.
So please, stop banning things you don't like, tax and regulate them instead. Use the tax proceeds to fund "social media rehab" clinics if you'd like.
Draconian "I don't like it, it gets banned" government wasn't a good idea in 15th century Spain, it's still not a good idea now. Let your fellow citizens make bad decisions, just ensure that the government is poised to profit from them.
Or even the tightly controlled Systembolaget [0] in Sweden, compared to the modern markets for cannabis and cocaine.
Tax and regulate lowers violence and increases tax revenue, outright prohibition/making it illegal increases violence and lowers tax revenue.
I do believe "sin prohibition" policies, for not just drugs but gambling, prostitution, etc, are one example of "low-hanging fruit", where there is a noticeably better option that is usually not implemented.
Really, for all trades usually controlled by violent criminals (so everything the Mafia/Yakuza/crime groups traditionally specialize in), I believe that the citizens of a given state will be happier if the trade is controlled by the state and not given over to criminals, which is functionally what "make it illegal" does.
BTW, Australia has shown the limits of sin taxation with our very high tobacco taxes. They got so high we induced a criminal black market in tobacco, that now is very hard to eradicate and is causing gang warfare, etc. Given we now have the crime anyway, maybe banning tobacco would have better outcomes than taxing it at this point.
I don't think it's at all obvious that a regulation-based approach could produce better outcomes than a prohibition-based approach. No doubt prohibition causes much violence and misery, but prohibition was a response to other great harms, most famously the condition of opium addicts.
Rather than rehash the arguments for and against, I would ask a meta-question: if the matter really were so clear, then why, over the last ~200 years, did every country introduce a prohibition-based stance, and why has no country switched to tax-and-regulate?
> if the matter really were so clear, then why, over the last ~200 years, did every country introduce a prohibition-based stance, and why has no country switched to tax-and-regulate?
First off, you do have countries switching over to tax-and-regulate, Canada, for example, some U.S. states, countries in Europe (Germany, Netherlands).
But to answer the question of countries going to prohibition-based instead of tax-and-regulate - off the top of my head
1) US-led world order + US deciding to ban a bunch of drugs for political reasons (I hear, from multiple sources that discriminating against Mexican immigrants was one reason cannabis was outlawed, Reagan and his whole 'War on Drugs' schtick...)
2) tradition - have you noticed that, also for the last ~200 years, basically all world leaders, from French presidents to the Emperor of Japan, will dress in the style of the English monarch George IV (and, more precisely, in the the style George IV copied from Beau Brummell)?
We ban drugs because that's what we're used to doing. Our leaders dress in suits because that's what we expect them to do.
3) naive ignorance - much as how, for hundreds if not thousands of years, "sacrifice a bull" was considered the state of the art in ensuring that there would be water for the crops, people growing up with no additional knowledge will often arrive at "ban it" as a logical way to handle a social ill, even if, as those who have suffered the negative consequences [0][1] know, "ban it" generally just makes the problem worse.
Source [1] notes
"Analysts estimate wholesale earnings from illicit drug sales range from $13.6 to $49.4 billion annually".
Not the illicit part. The market is there, even if outlawed. Dozens of billion of dollars per year, and if you tax-and-regulate, all of a sudden you've got billions in tax revenue to help you "respond to social harms, such as the condition of opium addicts".
Why does "there's lots of evidence that shows this is harmful" get reduced to "You don't like it?"
I'm not taking a stance here. I'm just noticing the rhetorical move you made. There is lots of evidence that some of those things are harmful. Cocaine, gambling, and alcohol have all destroyed many lives.
I'm not in favor of banning those things, or banning social media for that matter.
It is intellectually dishonest to reduce the arguments for those things to "oh you just don't like them."
things that directly harm other taxpayers - murder, physical violence, theft, false slander/reputational attacks...
prohibiting things that harm the individual should not be the role of government, IMO. Government, in the liberal/Enlightenment tradition, is there as a protector of your 'rights' to life, liberty, and property. While it has a duty to protect you from things which could harm you (eg junk food/sugary drinks), it also has a duty to let you do what you choose to do, even if it's 'bad' for you (eg eat junk food and drink sugary drinks).
Hence the compromise - you can smoke cigarettes and drink Coca-Cola, but the makers of cigarettes and soft drinks have to warn you beforehand, and the transaction may be more taxed than things like basic foods.
In countries with public health care and social security, harm to the individual is direct harm to other taxpayers. You must wear seat belts or wear bike helmets because the rest of us don't want to pay your rehabilitation bills.
My point (I'm the one you originally replied to) is that the effects of negative social media are on par with these things. Political violence, violence against minorities and specific genders, and worse. "Even" hurting the way children grow up and think should not be controversial to ban for children. Part of society's function is to protect kids as they grow.
I don't think likening it to Coca Cola, or even alcohol, is the same at all. And I did not ask to ban social media. I asked to ban harmful expressions of social media.
> the effects of negative social media are on par with these things. Political violence, violence against minorities and specific genders, and worse.
I hate to break it to you, "humans hurting each other over tribal distinctions" is not new. Look at literally all of world history. If you want a very well-documented example, look at the treatment of the descendants of former slaves in the southern United States 1865-1965. People don't need social media to start lynching each other.
> "Even" hurting the way children grow up and think should not be controversial to ban for children. Part of society's function is to protect kids as they grow.
Yes. Tax and regulate doesn't imply "unrestricted access".
Children are already 'protected by society' from alcohol, cigarettes, pornography, and a host of other things, I'm totally okay with Instagram/Reddit/et al. being "18+" as well. But there's a difference between "18+" and "illegal".
> I don't think likening it to Coca Cola, or even alcohol, is the same at all. And I did not ask to ban social media. I asked to ban harmful expressions of social media.
That's true, you specifically said
"I'd like to see addictive algorithms, content, and doomscrolling banned entirely"
but I feel like that definition basically bans all popular social media: 'addictive algorithms, content and doomscrolling' would describe basically the business model of all major ad-supported social media sites (Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok). Basically the entire 'web 2.0' business model is "have users create content, push the stuff that keeps people staring at the site the longest as much as possible so we can sell more ads".
And I don't believe that a blanket ban on Facebook/YouTube/et al. would be a net improvement.
Good points :) I think you and I likely largely agree, I just expressed myself poorly.
> I hate to break it to you, "humans hurting each other over tribal distinctions" is not new.
I know! But I have a hope in society, in our improvement as a species, that war and conflict grows less and less common. And I believe that should be a social aim.
> But there's a difference between "18+" and "illegal".
Right. Yes, I think I'd support 18+, but even for adults require the companies don't use addictive algorithms. That may seem inconsistent, but the reason is, gambling already exists. Addictive social media algorithms are new. It is much easier to prevent something new, than to deal with something millennia old. And I genuinely think wiser - that is, act to prevent it before it becomes something like gambling and alcohol.
> but I feel like that definition basically bans all popular social media
Yeah. It kinda does. But social media didn't require this in the past: it's developed it. So I feel it bans negative forms, not social media per se. But that said...
> And I don't believe that a blanket ban on Facebook/YouTube/et al. would be a net improvement.
This is a really interesting comment! Why? (Not saying I disagree, for Youtube at least. But I'm really curious about this.)
> I know! But I have a hope in society, in our improvement as a species, that war and conflict grows less and less common. And I believe that should be a social aim.
Generally agree with this, and when things look bad politically, I take comfort in looking back on life 300 years ago and celebrate that things have gotten better since then (the average French citizen now can read, write, and has access to universal health care, the average French citizen 300 years ago was a barely literate peasant).
> Right. Yes, I think I'd support 18+, but even for adults require the companies don't use addictive algorithms. That may seem inconsistent, but the reason is, gambling already exists. Addictive social media algorithms are new. It is much easier to prevent something new, than to deal with something millennia old. And I genuinely think wiser - that is, act to prevent it before it becomes something like gambling and alcohol.
> Yeah. It kinda does. But social media didn't require this in the past: it's developed it. So I feel it bans negative forms, not social media per se. But that said...
Hmm... I think focusing on the features may miss what is generally the root cause of addiction - the environment. Not sure if you're familiar with Rat Park
but I believe generally addiction issues are best solved via solving the environmental problem that leads people to becoming drug addicts, namely a lack of other ways to have fun, not by banning the 'addictive' activity, be it drugs, alcohol or gambling.
To use a personal example, when I was an edgy 16 year old back in the mid-late 2000s, I went on 4chan a lot. Arguably, I was addicted, given that my 4chan time got in the way of homework and sleep. Now ~2007 era 4chan did not have an algorithm that optimized for engagement and ad revenue. It did not have infinite scroll. The only thing it had was a high volume of users submitting content, but that was enough to keep me staring at 4chan instead of doing more important things.
A ban of "addictive algorithms and infinite scroll", which is similar to what you're proposing would not have blocked 4chan, or helped me live a healthier and more economically productive life.
However, I'm totally okay with taxing "addictive features". If the Aussie gov't wants to tell Meta "hey, we notice you do things like 'push teenage girls to suicide to sell more ads', so we're taking a cut of everything you make in Australia, which we will then use to enact various initiatives which help the mental (and physical) health of teenage girls", I think that's great.
Also relevant - I got on Facebook around the same time/age (~16, mid/late 2000s) I got on 4chan, and the latter has really been nothing but a positive presence in my life. Despite having moved between countries and continents, I have an easy way to find and reach people I've not seen in years, if not decades.
> This is a really interesting comment! Why? (Not saying I disagree, for Youtube at least. But I'm really curious about this.)
YouTube has become television 2.0. Basically everything bad that can be said about YouTube is "bad parts of cable television, amplified". However, it's a great way to learn basically anything.
Facebook/Instagram are really good tools to help small businesses find customers. I have a friend launching her personal coaching business right now, and Instagram is how she finds and stays in contact with customers.
As mentioned above, Facebook can also act like a 'global phone book', enabling people who have lost touch due to circumstances (moving away) to get and stay in touch.
More generally, basically all the major social media platforms are popular because they give people who don't have a bunch of technical knowledge, who might not understand how to write up an HTML website, host it, and register a domain name, a platform to express themselves online.
A Facebook or Instagram profile is the internet's version of the Model T. It makes having an online presence accessible to the unwashed masses, and, being something of a techno-optimist, I believe creating a world where anyone can communicate with anyone will lead to what you called "our improvement as a species", and make "war and conflict" less common, because we'll be too busy arguing online to actually be killing each other :)
Does it harm other taxpayers if people are manipulated to believe that voting for Neofascists will make things better?
Social media addiction is definitely much more detrimental to society than drug addiction, imho. Drugs aren't used by foreign adversaries to sow discord and chaos. We should not treat drugs and social media the same.
I agree on your stance of 'tax and regulate' for drugs, but it should also be accompanied by heavy prevention efforts: people need to learn very early on how to have a healthy relationship with addictive things, whether it be gambling, alcohol, drugs, gaming, TV, or social media. This way they can protect themselves, in freedom.
The problem with social media is that it is very new, very broad, and in part quite innocent (just communication with friendly people). Even if we could magically update the education system to teach people how to not be manipulated by social media, we are way too late to prevent the terrible effects they are having in adults and seniors. We need a way to educate or protect those in a non-authoritarian way. Otherwise the slide developed societies find themselves in today will hit rock bottom again very soon.
> Social media addiction is definitely much more detrimental to society than drug addiction, imho. Drugs aren't used by foreign adversaries to sow discord and chaos. We should not treat drugs and social media the same.
If you'll forgive me doing the cliche HN "well actually"...
Well actually, FARC, revolutionary armed forces of Columbia, used cocaine traffic to fund their political activities.
> I agree on your stance of 'tax and regulate' for drugs, but it should also be accompanied by heavy prevention efforts: people need to learn very early on how to have a healthy relationship with addictive things, whether it be gambling, alcohol, drugs, gaming, TV, or social media. This way they can protect themselves, in freedom.
Agree with this, but I believe the "healthy relationship with addictive things" often comes from "a health life + environment", which can be facilitated with tax money from taxing addictive things.
> Even if we could magically update the education system to teach people how to not be manipulated by social media, we are way too late to prevent the terrible effects they are having in adults and seniors. We need a way to educate or protect those in a non-authoritarian way. Otherwise the slide developed societies find themselves in today will hit rock bottom again very soon.
One idea which I'd like to see attempted would be "government social media".
Rather than argue politics on Twitter and TikTok, have the government of $COUNTRY put that country's text of laws online, put the budget of the government online, and let people propose changes. Create an upvote/downvote mechanism like on HN and Reddit to filter through to proposed changes, have the government enact the most popular ones.
Why bitch about your president on Twitter when you can literally create a proposal to impeach them on your country's official social media site?
Make account creation dependent on showing a valid national ID, so each citizen has one profile, and therefore one 'vote' on each proposal (upvote or downvote), and see if that isn't a better system than "laws will be made by a guy you get to choose every couple years, basically without any input from you, while rich people will buy ads of social media sites to confuse you into voting for their preferred candidate".
The featured article/podcast has the person presenting define "ultra-processed foods" as industrial hyper-palatable foods.
However, it focuses more about how the foods were marketed, and in particular, that the same marketing playbook developed by tobacco companies to market Marlboro and Camel cigarettes was then used to sell Kool-Aid and Miller beer.
Basically, the execs at Phillip Morris and R. J. Reynolds realized that beer, Kool-Aid/sugar drinks, Oreos and cigarettes were more or less all the same type of products - affordable, habit-forming small luxury goods people enjoyed putting in their mouths, and applied the expertise they'd developed on one type of this market (cigarettes) to the rest of it.
I am a software developer and researcher with half a decade of experience and a Master's degree in mathematics. I have ample experience with Golang in a professional context often on backend services like REST APIs and programs interacting with databases and message queues, am fairly proficient with a variety of other languages and technologies, and am comfortable working on a variety of domains, from accounting/financial management/CRM software, to IaaS products, to scientific and mathematical software and language apps. I enjoy learning, and am always open to learning new things, especially if they happen to ignite my curiosity.
I like free or open-source software, systems programming, web services and the infrastructure required to run them at scale and would love an opportunity to continue to contribute to and learn about them. I enjoy mathematics and quantitative research like biology, engineering and physics. I enjoy writing, and in particular writing documentation for software, educational content, and research.
I am happiest working with people who are open-minded, conscientious and kind, and I try very hard to always embody those qualities.
I am open to both full-time employment and contract work.
I am a French citizen and can work freely anywhere within the EU.
Compensation for in person work is location-dependent, and more expensive than full-remote work, due to the extra work involved (physical, moving things around in meatspace work, not just pushing bits around cyberspace). That said, I do really enjoy being in nice offices and hanging out with the team while working, and also really enjoy occasional "team in-person meetups" even when working in a full-remote context.
If I'm not mistaken there is a tax on secondary residences in France.
I am not an accountant, but my understanding is there is a "taxe d'habitation" from which primary residences are exempt, but which must be paid on secondary residences.
Of course, this can be gamed via starting a real estate company which buys the secondary residence, claiming that it is for "business purposes", but the basic idea of using taxation to prevent the accumulation of real estate by the wealthiest individuals is present.
Right, but it's still kind of a joke because that's just what you would pay on any normal investment's appreciation. Land is treated as a commodity that can't go down in price.
Not the person you're answering to but the way I interpret their statement is
"my ancestors came here as immigrants in search of a better life 300 years ago. I honor that by helping those doing the same today."
Being American, especially back in 1776 (250 years ago!), was not about ethnicity, but about an ideal - a group of men on the North American continent decided that " that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." [0], and then literally put their lives on the line to protect that ideal.
America is, and has always been, a nation of immigrants. What unites it are the common values - in theory, the idea that everyone there has the right to live free and pursue their happiness, as opposed to the idea that everyone should serve the king because that is the will of God, which was the dominant idea in Europe in the 1700s.
With that view, I can see that supporting people who come to the US so they can be free as continuing what the original poster's ancestors started 300 years ago.
Do you think you are telling me something I haven’t heard before? I don’t mean that with attitude, I’m actually asking. Because you are just telling me the standard mass schooling version of the story. I used to believe this version myself, until reality presented me with enough contradictory observations that I felt the need to justify it for myself, and not simply take it as received wisdom.
Have you gone through and read the quotes from the well known figures that contradict the story? There are a lot.
The standard explanation is that they had some weepy romantic morality deep at heart which they tragically were unable to live in their flawed time.
Sure, that’s one possibility. Another possibility is that they did not anticipate people in the future so drastically taking what they said out of context, and so they weren’t sufficiently precise as to represent themselves in a way that made it through to today’s context with its meaning intact.
To me, the latter just seems like it probably happens all the time in history and so why not here?
And, to be clear, in this case what they would have meant in modern context is - all men are created equal does not refer to literally all humans on earth, it means that the born aristocrats are no better than anyone else and they shouldn’t get special privileges for it. That’s it. The duke’s son is no more deserving of government enforced privilege than the commoner’s son, because the commoner’s son may be more capable. That’s it. Not that all the races of the earth are the same. They just didn’t think that, men in the 1700s did not think that way. People in 1910 didn’t even think that way! The founders didn’t think they had to qualify “men”, they were just referring to the “men” of their group, one “man” of their group is not born higher than another “man” of their group, and this aligns with what we now know about population genetics, which is why it actually works better in some ways (I.e. if take a high performer, his sons are more likely to be high performers than the population, but you can only extend that so far, it doesn’t reliably persist past a couple generations and in some cases you get unlucky right away in the first generation).
And I haven’t seen this framing refuted, despite it being so, so much less of a just so story than the mainstream framing, and being successfully non-contradictory with the other extremely racist by today’s standards views and actions of the founders and their contemporaries, unlike the mainstream framing.
One big example of contradictory views that is not from the founding fathers era but is a good starting point. Did you know that Lincoln wanted to send them back? He didn’t want to free them and have them later integrate into our society. He wanted them gone, relocated, good luck see you later. He didn’t think that Africans and Europeans could live together, he didn’t think it could possibly work because they are too different by nature. But oddly that isn’t mentioned anywhere in the school curriculum. Lincoln is a hero, the man who freed the slaves. Well of course he was flawed, etc, but he had a good heart and he worked towards the good. Except what is good is defined by the current moral regime, which was entirely different from the one at that time. Lincoln would probably be shocked and appalled at how he is portrayed today. If he could only see what has become of New York City or Philadelphia, we could power the nation with his grave-spinning, which would surely be hypersonic in its rotational velocity.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar
As in, if we had a total disappearance of all humans on Earth, and then put some new humans on the depopulated Earth, they'd quickly develop a common language, if they were genetically similar to modern humans, but would take a while to start writing.
Arguably, things like counting and geometry could also be viewed as something innate in humans - our mammalian brains view the world as a 3-dimensional real vector space, and so we will instinctively have the ability to understand the concept of a 'circle', or 'seven', or a square, or even multiplication ('three groups of three people each'), but the act of writing down those thoughts, and the literate culture focusing on those concepts which stretches from Euclid to Wikipeda, Library Genesis, and Terry Tao's blog, is obviously a developed technology.
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