Considering how in the dark even modern humans are about the nature of the world, and about themselves, the fact that we act from a place of relative naivety about everything from what’s in our food to who other people seem to be (including our neighbors) should give us pause. Many ancient peoples had better insight into the elements of the world that most closely surrounded them, for lack of alternative experience, relatively speaking.

I suspect, rather than being a holdover from the dark ages, or a relic of misplaced respect, popular admiration for some old dead guys is more of a result of misguided envy for those who lived in more well-charted times.

Hindsight is as close to 20/20 as your spectacles allow, after all.

At the same time, I find it unfair to use that fact to make them look less capable than they were. Regarding the circumstances and the society they lived in, they were incredibly smart people, and incredibly rational.

That thing about getting murdered for telling others about the truth, though: I’d think that that is a statement about the society which Plato knew, and about a frequent reaction to somebody trying to spread information which questions everybody else’s world view — and we’re is still not a point where such things are embraced. See Climate change, and the way whistleblowers still being more likely to be punished than whatever they blew the whistle on to be dealt with. So there *is* some fundamental human trait which Plato was correct about. (and which, seriously, we should deal with rather sooner than later, or else…)

Taking what he said to Carol at face value, it appeared no. It appeared he expected arcanometrics to function as a kind of black box/chinese room for the game’s code, that takes in player input (and admin overrides/instructions) and spits the same values (text strings for character dialogue, your PC’s current location and inventory) that a normal game would produce via mundane coding methods. The Bough of Graia aftermath would appear to be the point where he first voiced the suspicion that the “simulation” arcanometrics was running might have some kind of life of its own.