Guy Beaujouan

Article

Guy Beaujouan is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 23, 2021 and March 29, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as “according to the medieval science historian Guy Beaujouan”; “sourced to history Guy Beaujouan”. It most often appears alongside Antifragile, Nassim Taleb, 2008 crisis.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: March 23, 2021
  • Last seen: March 29, 2021

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

March 23, 2021 · Original source
I've grown used to this in medicine, but I was surprised to see Taleb point out the same effect in fields like physics and engineering. For example, he argues that jet engines just sort of happened when engineers played around with airplane engines enough; physicists didn't explain how they worked until later. Engineers were already designing systems along cybernetic principles long before Wiener invented theoretical cybernetics. Medieval European architecture was done essentially without mathematics - Roman numerals (the only numerals anyone had at the time) were too unwieldy to add or subtract, and "according to the medieval science historian Guy Beaujouan, before the thirteenth century no more than five persons in the whole of Europe knew how to perform division."
March 29, 2021 · Original source
2: In my review of Antifragile, I repeated Nassim Taleb’s claim, sourced to history Guy Beaujouan, that “before the thirteenth century no more than five persons in the whole of Europe knew how to perform a division”. Here’s some discussion on whether that’s true.