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2 days agoPredate rationalism? Modern rationalism and the scientific method came up in the 16th and 17th centuries, and was built on ancient foundations.
Phlogiston theory was developed in the 17th century, and took about 100 years to gather the evidence to make it infeasible, after the discovery of oxygen.
Luminiferous aether was disproved beginning in the late 19th century and the nail in the coffin happened by the early 20th, when Einstein’s theories really started taking off.
Plate tectonics was entirely a 20th century theory, and became accepted in the second half of the 20th century, by people who might still be alive today.
The diversity in preferences makes “up” impossible to define and order consistently between people. If you take a survey of a population for an ordered ranking, in desire ability as potential spouses, of a particular sample set, you might get wildly different rankings.
And then those same people might rank things differently depending on who they would most want to have a one night stand with.
Even laying out specific physical characteristics and asking about attractiveness will get those isolated features ranked differently. Heterosexual men will disagree on whether it is attractive, unattractive or neutral for a woman to be:
We’re all just looking for compatibility. What that means will vary from person to person, and what is very attractive to one person might be a huge turn off to another.
I’m generally of the view that you want to be with someone whose unique traits are positive to you, and who sees your unique traits as positives, too. That way both can fall within that stable equilibrium of both believing that they’ve married “up.”