I often notice comments made regarding ancient or historical locations and civilisations, when discussed by a historian in a documentary, often seem to be opinions based on pretty flimsy evidence. In some cases no evidence at all, just things could be likely maybe possibly. Relying on the fact that there's no written evidence for or against any claim.
Even if there is written evidence, nearly all past written information is also difficult to verify, and writers in the past were not necessarily unbiased or above lying and distortion.
According to the OP, there is written evidence for it, from the Victorian era, which was 400 years after cannons made castles obsolete. It's hard to fault modern historians too much if they're simply trusting the old records to be accurate. Or as we say in computer science: garbage in, garbage out.
> It's hard to fault modern historians too much if they're simply trusting the old records to be accurate.
Basically the entire job of a historian is to determine the credibility of old sources, so they can interpret all the data and come to the most accurate conclusion about what happened.
If you click through, you can see there's no 'evidence' there. He simply offhandedly, in a sentence or two, makes the same speculation about fighting, with no sources, and the whole discussion of staircases in general is based on only 2 named examples. Chesterton's fence is satisfied: he knew no more than we did.
Theodore Andrea Cook wasn't a historian. Xe was a writer for the Daily Telegraph, amongst other things, who wrote about sports such as fencing and rowing; and who was also an art critic.
Theodore Andrea Cook wasn't writing in the Victorian Era. _Spirals in Nature and Art_ was a 20th century work, in the Edwardian Era. _The Curves of Life_ was from the subsequent Georgian Era.
Theodore Andrea Cook is the earliest person found espousing this hypothesis. This is, as far as anyone has determined, Theodore Andrea Cook's own original hypothesis, based upon zero evidence. That is certainly what the text of _Spirals_ implies.
Yes, it would take not just a real historian, but someone who had done research, to answer this question. Having been up and down a few of those, it certainly seems more than just plausible to me, even taking into account the numerous recorded sieges. On the other hand it is also true that spears and shields play a much greater role than swords. Hard to imagine wielding a full-sized shield, let alone a spear, in one of those staircases, though!
I think the bigger point from the article is that by the time people are fighting hand-to-hand in the tower stairwells, the defenders have already well and truly lost: comeback from such a state was probably impossible (and if the walls were breached the defenders would almost certainly have surrendered rather than fought to the last man). So it wouldn't have really made sense to design things for this possibility.
A castle staircase takes a lot of time and effort to build. Choosing to build the staircase in one direction or the other has negligible cost. If there is even a slight or possible advantage to one direction then it would make sense to build it that way.
> If there is even a slight or possible advantage to one direction then it would make sense to build it that way
If it's true that the battle at this point is lost for the defenders -- and known history indicates this is so -- then why would the builders choose directions based on this extremely unlikely scenario, instead of on just about any other consideration (aesthetic, practical, or even random)?
I'll take a stab at guessing (mind you, this is blind guessing, happy to be corrected!): the USMC still issue bayonets because of both tradition, which is important to the military, and also because they are actually useful in close quarters battle, which still occurs on occasion, such as in urban warfare and house-to-house combat clearing, etc. The likelihood of having to use a bayonet/knife in modern CQB is probably significantly higher than the likelihood of medieval defenders recovering from an enemy army that has stormed their castle.
It's a really good explanation. Castle sieges were big events, so historically we know the outcomes. Nearly 100% of the time, the garrison has already surrendered if it's this bad. Medieval sieges come in three major flavors: ones where you sneak in, ones where you bombard the fortification, and ones where you don't let anything in or out and you wait until they give up.
If you examine a military you will find volumes of plans for incredibly unlikely situations. Once you have addressed all the likely and significant threats, you don't just stop planning--at least not any good military.
Saying that castle sieges didn't tend to involve stairway fights doesn't imply that stairways wouldn't have had defensive measures built in. That is post-hoc rationalization.
Any defenders defending a tower are obviously above the ground floor, which is where access to food and water is. So why bother fighting up the stairway, when you can just block all the downstairs exits? The castle's defenses are the walls; if attackers are in a position to go up the stairs then the castle's defenses have failed, and the only defense left is the manpower of the defenders. So instead of being "besieged" up their towers, the only realistic strategy the defenders have is to come down from the towers and join the melee. Or just surrender, because the attackers have an army and the castles only had dozens of defenders (if that). What tactical situation do you have in mind where the success of the attack depends on success in a staircase battle?
Every day the attackers besiege you is one they have to defend against potential counterattacks from your allies. And even if your castle falls you might buy your empire time to raise a bigger army and rally more allies in order to win the next bigger war. Delaying enemies could be an important function of castles.
Defense in depth isn's about justifying in advance how every measure will win the battle; it's about giving yourself as many small, incremental advantages as possible so that the odds steadily tick up in your favor. Battles are famously difficult to predict so every advantage is sought, and even small advantages can have multiplier effects.
An interstate takes a lot of time and effort to build. And yet which side you drive on doesn't matter; it simply needs to be consistent with all the other roads you're connected to. There are plenty of countries that, through historical happenstance, drive on the opposite side of the road, and it's fine.
So in other words, just because the staircases take a lot of time and effort to build, simply means that having the staircase itself is important, not necessarily that its chirality is important. It has to have a chirality but it may well not matter which one, just like roads.
If there were evidence that driving on the right side or left side of the road slightly reduces car accidents and a country with previously no roads or cars began planning to automotize the country, then, all things considered, it would make sense to have people drive in the lane with a slightly reduced fatality rate.
If there are two choices where one presents a slight advantage but no additional cost then a rational actor will go with that choice.
The event has to occur relatively frequently for that slight advantage to become statistically noticeable. Direct assaults on castles with hand-to-hand combat occurring in stairwells were extremely rare as far as we know.
For perspective, Norman keeps were often built with a large internal cross wall, so even if troops made it through the stair door and swarmed into the room they'd still have to fight their way into the other half of the floor. By the stage these expensive and space consuming walls were defensively relevant, defenders would have already lost outer walls, viable long-term food and water supplies and much of the garrison defending it... and any real chance of holding out. But an invading army would still lose more men storming it; so it functioned as a deterrent.
I've heard this "it's a myth" argument before, but 70% of staircases is quite a large proportion of staircases spiralling in a particular direction which would offer the defender a marginal advantage to be pure coincidence. Particularly when the ratio of clockwise to anticlockwise staircases in Norman castles was about 20:1; it was later generations of castle of builders who added many more anticlockwise stairwells, in an era when individual tower defence was less importance, and builders may have simply forgotten or come to doubt arguments about the defensive advantages of clockwise spirals (the blog's arguments for why spiral staircase defence is rubbish work here of course!). Contemporary cathedrals which were not at all defensible tended to build clockwise and anticlockwise spiral staircases as matching pairs, so it wasn't like there was some other sort of massive aversion to stairs in a particular direction.
That's a bizarre line of thought to me. If you build an expensive structure for fortification, you don't usually get to the interior design and then go "Oh fuck it, this extra safety measure wouldn't cost anything, but if they've got this far we might as well surrender, so let's not bother."
Going by that logic, the president's bunker under the pentagon would've been built without a lock. After all, people don't usually have to physically drag a country's leader out of their locked bunker, right? By the time anyone's knocking on that door, usually the war is lost and the country has surrendered.
And yet, if you're designing for defense, why NOT take such a cheap and easy countermeasure as putting a lock on the door or choosing the more defensible way to spiral your staircase? You might want to buy a few more minutes to negotiate in a desperate situation; you might want at least the option of taking that futile last stand; you might be facing not an invading army but a single lunatic with a sword who snuck past the outer guards.
I imagine that it would be more difficult to gain entry to an upper floor (at the top of a narrow staircase so single-file attackers) and a sturdy door with a couple of guards outside, than it would be to gain entry to rooms on the same level. Perhaps the women were tucked away on the upper floors, in relative safety.
Fighting on the stairs would be kinda silly. Better to wait outside the doorway so that after your attackers are done running up the stairs with armor and weapons, you and your pals are waiting there at the choke point to layeth the smacketh down. The only real benefit to fighting on the stairs is that you still effectively impede progress if you're dead.
If you are the attacking army, just wait it out. You've won the siege, and any defenders up the stairs will have to either come down or starve to death. Why risk attacking up the stairs?
Yeah, just burn/smoke out the defenders. If you're already in the bottom of the building it's over, just a matter of time when. You can also take the castle apart and cause it to collapse.
I love me some history information, documentaries, and etc. But yeah I get strongly allergic to stuff where suddenly I wonder "Wait did you just logic that out in your head? Like there's no basis for that other than you observing how the thing / situation is?"
I'm sure it has been an issue forever but online especially it seems painful how much of that information there is.
Along these lines, a well established rule in Archaeology: "Was man nicht erklären kann, sieht man gleich als kultisch an" (what cannot be explained, is immediately perceived as religious)
You expect pop documentaries to contain evidence? I do not mean it as snark, it is just that evidence is something popular entertainment ia not even supposed to have.
A lot like evolutionary psychology; it seems like a reasonable explanation or story and is supported by at least some circumstantial evidence, so it must have been the way things were
Could it be them optimising their floorplan? Direction of the spiral is based on e.g. the largest possible entry or smallest obstruction(in terms of construction and visually for the rest of the room/castle?
if i were to guess it probably has more to do with left hand side driving semantics which as i understand comes from a prevalence of right-handedness and a norm of posturing the right hand for weapon use.
so, maybe they just adopted the rules of the road, and the legends that come from it.
I'll admit that Discworld is the first place I heard it. It's a perfect example of the sort of idiom authors should think about though, rather than using overly modern terms.
I love the word sunwise. In Swedish it's "medsols" and "motsols", sunwise and counter-sunwise respectively.
And speaking of, let's start another myth. Swedes always dance around the christmas tree or maypole sunwise because it's an ancient dance to evoke the sun after months of darkness.
I see the point, it just clear to me that you were referring to midsummer. To me as an old Englishman a Maypole means the old celebration of spring on Mayday.
There we go; now something to falsify against. If the left or right is a defensive choice, we should see the reverse handedness defending attackers going down. Great point.
Clockwise upward staircases do actually have one advantage (in certain locales). Going upwards your forward travel distance is less than going downwards. This is assuming people generally walk on the right hand side. It just feels easier to traverse stairs as close to the inside as possible.
> It just feels easier to traverse stairs as close to the inside as possible.
I would expect that depends on the design of the spiral staircase.
In a spiral staircase, you want to go up about 3 meters in a 360° turn because you need a bit over 2m of headroom and some space for the stair itself.
That means that, 1m away from the center of the staircase, the slope will be about 50%. The ideal staircase has more or less “step width + twice the step height = 63cm” [1], so that would give a good step width of 31cm and a step height of 16cm.
However, 2m away from the center, that same stair would have a slope of about 25%, and the ideal step would be 41cm wide and 11cm high or thereabouts.
3m from the center you’d have a 16% slope, and the ideal step would be 45 cm wide, 8cm high, etc.
Now, in ‘standard’ designs [2], step height can’t change with distance to the center, so the designer has to pick one, and thus has control over the distance from the center where it’s easiest to step.
[1] https://www.practicalarchitecture.com/blog/the-geometry-of-a.... Of course, that’s a heuristic, and the ideal will be different for different persons, but what’s important is that simply scaling up a staircase in order to get wider steps is not a good idea.
[2] very wide stairs can and sometimes do have steps that are sloping upwards. I don’t think these are non-standard, but can’t think of a better word now.
I don't think spiral staircases generally get even 1m wide, it's not trivial for two people going in opposite directions to pass each other. You walk on the middle of the step as there isn't much room to the left or right to go to.
Also, in the context of “it just feels easier to traverse stairs as close to the inside as possible”, I think spiral staircases that are less than a meter wide aren’t relevant. On them, the only option is to walk in the middle of the stairs.
I like this theory. Since most people are right-handed, and the right leg does more work than the left when walking up a counter-clockwise spiral staircase, it makes sense that spiral staircases would be designed counter-clockwise.
Actually more dangerous traveling downward on the inside, where a small misstep will have you miss 2-3 treads, as opposed to the outside where the same misstep won’t have you miss any.
I don't think there was so much traffic on these stairs that you ended up forced to one side the whole way.
The forward distance travelled is also trivial in terms of effort compared to the height displacement upward. Most people can walk for 10 minutes without breaking a sweat, but way fewer would feel fine walking up stairs for 10 minutes.
Not to mention, you can simply have a convention that the downward walker on a spiral staircase favour whichever side is best.
The article states that they likely built neither because nobody wants to be fighting for their life 1:1 on a dank staircase with poor visibility. It's actually the much more logical option. Even if attackers are in the stairwell, why wouldn't you retreat to the top where you can accumulate real advantages?
I think these staircases evolved to make it impossible for rapey male ducks to impregnate the castles. Ancient sources agree with my theory, so it must be true.
In support of your theory: no medieval castle ever laid duck eggs that hatched.
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(An earlier version of my comment ended with "... ever laid duck eggs.", evidencing both my deep ignorance of medieval warfare and the biology of egg laying!)
> Sieges often didn’t involve much fighting at all, as simply waiting outside the castle till the people inside ran out of water and food was a much easier and less bloody way to win.
Currently reading Plutarch. Twice already he's mentioned sieges where the attackers waited for the besieged to run out of water. The grueling wait is compressed in history.
My favorite siege weirdness is circum- and contravallation. Caesar's seige of Alesia perhaps being one of the better examples. The man built a wall around the already walled fortification of Alesia... then built a wall behind him to keep the besieging army safe from Vercingetorix' allies.
That's a wall around a wall around a wall. Like a frickin' onion.
My favorite siege story is Alexander being taunted by islanders who thought themselves immune to being under siege and attacked.
They slowly stopped laughing as they realized the Macedonians were filling in the shore front to make a kilometer long 200m wide causeway to march across.
It did not end well for the island City of Tyre and its inhabitants.
I jumped to read a bit about it, expecting from your comment a swift victory, but it's much more involved than that, the sequence of attack strategies and counterattacks are quite suspenseful.
I've visited a castle in Germany once, where they had special short swords for defending the staircases. The staircases in that castle were too small to wield a regular sword.
That sounds eerily similar to the myth from the linked article. Although there is a chance that some enterprising blacksmith came up with a clever marketing scheme for those to convince the nobility that they really needed such a set of short swords.
'Just in case pillagers come up the stairs, and I'll throw in a Zweihänder for half the price too, in case your attacker steps out of reach of your regular sword!'.
What could be more prepping than building a whole stone castle? It’s the historical equivalent of a bunker for most part of modern (and ancient) history
Building castles to cover captured terrain was pretty common (unless of course there already was one around, in which case you besiege and take it, if you can). Of course, building a stone ond rakes time, so they'd build a temp one first, and then, ic theh manage to keep the territory, update it. So if it's prepping, it's a very common and prudenf version of it.
I wonder how many castles were built like codebases. Start with a little MVP and accumulate stuff over time that eventually gets refactored and eventually seems well thought out
A lot of these historic stories are someone's fancy. In Turkey, they'll make up all these stories about wine flasks in Cappadocia that have this hole in the middle. Supposedly the sun must fall through the hole to bless it or something and I can't find any reference to that anywhere. But I wasn't able to find a historian of Turkey and that region to say it definitely was ahistorical.
It's amusing that the Hacker News reaction so far is to advance alternative hypotheses as to why helical staircases have a predominant chirality, without first establishing, as one should do if one were rigorous, that there is a need for an explanation in the first place, and that this is not, as is suggested in other articles (including one hyperlinked by the headlined one here), just a statistical fluke without significance that doesn't need explanation.
To put things in modern parlance: A meme, invented from whole cloth by Daily Telegraph writer Theodore Andrea Cook 120 years ago because he liked fencing, was still going strong on Twitter in 2022; and people are still falling prey to believing its assumptions.
One has to appreciate the additional irony of the Twitter account actually being named "history in memes".
Agreed! I like that there has to be an explanation. "Just because" or "it's the same either way" aren't acceptable. I suppose the internet loves to solve a puzzle (a sentiment I understand and share!).
What about evidence for a simpler theory, such as they were built in the direction that made most sense from where the doors would wind up?
Like if you go through the bottom/top door, it's more natural to walk straight forwards and then curve, rather than walk in, turn 90°, and then walk upwards.
Obviously this wouldn't matter if the door were located facing precisely the middle of the spiral, but it certainly does if it more naturally opens on one side of the spiral.
Doors can be built to open in four ways: inwards or outwards, hinge on the left or right. (Sorry if the language is wrong, non-native speaker here.) Considering that I am not sure I can follow why the door would make one direction more natural than the other. Maybe because there were more right-handed people than left-handed which made one setup more natural than the other?
Often the room itself gives you reason to prefer one direction or another. If the door is in a corner you want the open door to be against the wall (unless you don't - I can't think of why, but...). If there are other doors on the same wall you need to consider them - sometimes hinges all the same for symmetry; sometimes opposite so the the doors don't bang into each other (when they are right next to each other.
Theodore Andrea Cook did, writing _Spirals in Nature and Art_ in 1903 and _The Curves of Life_ in 1914. Unfortunately, we are here fighting the fallout 120 years later, as xe is the source of this very myth.
My own no-basis 30 second gun theory - what if they are all the same way because one guy who was really good at making them passed the knowledge down that way. Then everyone else followed from that one teaching and never bothered flipping it. It wasn’t better, it just won the coin flip
You can go a step further and (maybe, I acknowledge this is a stretch) apply some evolutionary pressure in that it gave defensive advantages they didn't think about and so the people whose castles this guy/his students built retained their wealth and built more castles from the same building style.
I recall an interview with someone doing a late night talk show, that they tried putting the guest on the right side of the host but that didn't sit to well with audiences because they were used to seeing the guest on the left side. No reason for it other than that is what the first popular late show did, so everything else followed.
I like this, and the comment you replied to. I think most of the things we have are the way they are because of reasons like these, not because someone rationally planned them.
I thought the current thinking was that no battle would ever come down to fighting on the stairway. If someone has already made it through all of your castle's defences to even be on the stairs, then the battle is over.
I'm supporting the idea that a spear is superior in any defensive position by pointing out that the problem with an offensive block of spears is the need to move, which doesn't apply to defense.
That’s why you surrender after you realize the situation is hopeless (which is hopefully long before anyone starts climbing up the stairs).
Even if you’re willing to fight to the death/don’t have a choice which was pretty rare and are just stuck at the top what incentives do the attackers have to risk their lives by rushing up the stairs when they can just start a fire at the bottom and/or wait you out?
Wouldn’t you need the relevant event to not be extremely rare for that to matter?
I mean a sieges were once in a several decades or even once in 100-200 years events on average. Actual direct assaults with combat occurring on the stairs were significantly less frequent than that. The defender being able to turn the tide at that point? Even less.
My own guess - there’s already a bias towards right handedness. I assume that is related. I don’t know how these staircases were built but it may be that it’s slightly easier to build these staircases for right-handed people. And then maybe 30% of builders were left handed or some minority of the time the architect wanted to prioritize symmetry with another tower.
Even if defensibility was not the primary design concern, I am sure it factored in as an obvious consideration to accommodate when possible - eg if you could make it go any which way, you might as well make it go the way that gives you a better chance in the most likely scenario.
I'm not actually convinced, there's been a disconnect between the theory of war and the reality for as long as there's been war. Just because you'd never actually want to fight on a staircase doesn't mean that money and thought didn't go into defending a staircase from its middle. How many militaries today still issue bayonets to foot soldiers and handguns to rear line officers?
70/30 split sounds like there is a reason even if there isn’t primary evidence to backup the exact reason. Logically attack/defence sounds like it works and I was certainly able to imagine that on my first tour of a fort when I was young.
I wonder what the split is nowadays. For example I lived in an apartment that had a counter-clockwise stairway, I’m not sure what the landlord’s handed was was, but I don’t think he designed it around defending against left handed sword-armed attackers.
The scholarly source he links to (which actually agrees with him) notes in passing that for Norman castles, the split wasn't 70/30, it was more like 95/5....
Or maybe medieval people thought that it's easier to climb/carry stuff up if the stairs go clockwise (or some other mundane reasons)? Maybe architects just designed it that way because that's just how everyone builds castle staircases? Seems much more plausible to me (or at least as plausible..)
> I was certainly able to imagine that on my first tour of a fort when I was young.
Most people visiting medieval castles probably significantly overestimate the frequency of hand to hand combat that might had taken place there (almost never as far as we know).
Usually if the siege got to the point where attackers were IN YOUR TOWERs, then the next logical step would have been to either surrender or collapse the tower on the attackers to win a tactical victory.
I am willing to bet $10000, that the number of sieges won or lost due to a staircase fight between knights is 0.
Also I wonder what led to this hypothesis being created in the first place? That's a much more interesting question to me. Was it some eccentric historian just inventing it?
To be clear, this article does not attempt to explain why 70% of stairs were built clockwise, which seems salient. And the strongest arguments against the myth are that fighting on a staircase is bad no matter what (granted), and that certain, specific, famous staircases (like those in the Tower of London) were built counter-clockwise. To me, that's not a slam dunk case against the myth, it could be explained by there not being a centralized Castle Staircase Building Code across all Europe, over the course of 1000 years, which was not a misunderstanding I had anyway. I am unconvinced for now!
I'd imagine they were built in a direction without a ton of thought, and it's not really surprising to me that if you basically flip a coin - 70% of them landed one way.
If the staircase happens to be on one side of the building, it would be better to orient it one way - based on how the windows would work - for example.
If the staircase is against another busy entryway - it might be better to have the stairs go one way or the other, etc
If there are several thousand such towers in Europe, then chance of 70% of them all being clockwise due to use of coin flips seems unimaginably small. More likely the first one happened to built that way and most others copied that until someone wondered if you couldn't go the other way instead. Or maybe it is connected to handedness in some other way (easier to draw the design? To lay the stone work? Traditions around who should pass who and how if somebody going up encounters somebody coming down? Who knows...)
I think it would be more likely that the staircase fit better going one direction than the other. Eg taking the most used path to the staircase and going straight onto the stairs vs having to do a 90 degree turn before you can step on the stairs.
It seems unlikely that random chance would lead to a 70/30 ratio for "best fit" either, so that just seems to be moving the phenomenon that needs explanation to layouts around stairwells, which certainly weren't standardised in the medieval era.
The ratio of staircases in Norman castles was more like 20:1 which is a ratio even more in need of a non-chance explanation; the greater numbers of anticlockwise staircases came later, when coincidentally or otherwise individual towers were less important to the overall defensive scheme
I am not a medieval stonemason but these were lifelong craftsmen and I doubt they did it without a lot of thought. They did it with one specific thought it their mind I suspect, it was the way that they were most familiar with doing it so it was the fastest / easier / cheapest way to do it! The same reason any modern craftsman does quite a lot of things.
I'd like to see that 70% distribution mapped out against corner adjacency. As in, if I have a square room [ ] and I put a stairway on the right wall in the bottom corner there, there is a good chance I'm going to go counter clockwise, but if I put it on the right top, I'll go clockwise. I feel like the general flow of a room needs to be mapped out on this as well to get the full context.
> these were lifelong craftsmen and I doubt they did it without a lot of thought
There are so many things that could bias this result. Maybe it's easier to craft in one direction. Perhaps, north of the equator, castles tended to be constructed in certain orientations, with the windowless stairwells tending towards one side versus another. Altogether, there is no reason to prefer the myth over any of those hypotheses--they each have no evidence.
But just that in some direction maters for some reason (layout of the castle forced a direction and thus this works out to random chance?), and the rest was just what the mason felt like building (default to right handed?). You can come up with your own story about why direction would matter, and why for the rest there would/would not be a bias in direction. Then play with how random each one is to get the 70/30 percentage split.
I don't know about that. They seemed to be definitively saying the staircases were not built to aid defenders, but didn't have strong evidence for that. If they'd said "there is no positive evidence that..." or "we have no reason to believe that..." then I'd agree with you, but what they wrote was:
> Medieval staircases were NOT built going clockwise for the defender’s advantage
and
> it’s not true.
Which seem like confident statements with no affirmative evidence to support them.
In fairness, their conclusion is more measured:
> So in conclusion: there’s no evidence for this claim and it also doesn’t make a lot of sense.
If there's no evidence about a situation, there's no evidence for any theory about the situation. There's no evidence for the proposition A. There's no evidence for the proposition not A. By your reasoning we have to believe that both these propositions are untrue: A and not A. This seems totally insane.
As Russell's teapot [0] demonstrates, that is not the case. A thing, whether the existence of a teapot floating in space, or an old architecture myth, is by default untrue until sufficient evidence arises showing it is true. This article is simply pointing out that such evidence doesn't exist in the staircase attacker theory.
We do not believe that maybe it is true this teapot exists, maybe not, simply because the initial hypothesis (that it is true in the first place) hasn't yet been falsified. If that were the case, I could make up a thousand improbable myths, and say they're all maybe true, maybe not, and we would have to treat them all as equally plausible until someone wastes their time trying to disprove all thousand, and then I could make up a thousand more.
That is why the burden of proof of truth lies with the person asserting the truth of a teapot/staircase belief
To add to your A vs. not-A problem, you are close to identifying the resolution, too: For an analogue in statistics, A = "this staircase explanation has sufficient evidence to say it is true", not-A = "this staircase explanation does not have sufficient evidence to conclude it is true". Not-A here is example of what is called the null hypothesis in statistics. The null hypothesis is the default.
The point of Russell's argument is that we should not believe in the Christian god/the teapot. Not that we should believe that those things do not exist.
It's an argument against believing without evidence, not for believing without evidence.
the point of Russell's teapot is that even though the teapot (like this myth) is neither proven nor disproven, we should, and do, treat it unproven, because that is the default state until sufficient evidence arises
It's an argument against entertaining theories that have no evidence, against ignorant agnosticism towards any arbitrary theory
Okay, so let me them make the claim: "It is false that staircases were built clockwise to advantage the defender".
Then, since we agree that the claim has no evidence to support it, we assume it is false.
Therefore, we conclude, "it is true that staircases were built clockwise to advantage the defender".
I agree that the burden of proof lies upon the person that makes the claim. But that doesn't mean we assume the opposite of the claim must be true until they do. It means we assume ignorance.
So, a more correct statement would be: "In the absence of evidence of why the staircases were constructed, we do not know why they were constructed".
To say the absence of evidence proves the opposite of the claim is wrong.
the actual (and also initial) claim here is that the myth is true, the author is simply pointing out that there is insufficient evidence to support the myth, and thus we fall back on the null hypothesis, aka the default: that there does not yet exist sufficient evidence to conclude the myth is anything other than false.
> But that doesn't mean we assume the opposite of the claim must be true until they do. It means we assume ignorance.
Regardless of the wording, the gist is the same: we /don't/ assume ignorance, we treat the claim, like Russell's teapot [0], or any other unsupported claim, as false until such evidence arises, since there are an infinite number of unfalsifiable premises, and we neither want to, nor do, in practice, treat them all as maybe true, maybe not, forever.
tl;dr: As Russell's teapot [0] demonstrates, yes, there is a default, and that is that a thing is false unless sufficient evidence exists to believe otherwise. No, we don't treat all unfalsified (and unfalsifiable) hypotheses as unknown and assume ignorance.
It actually does, that's why I cited it so many times! :)
In 1958, Russell elaborated on the analogy:
> "...nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice..."[0]
Replace 'teapot revolving in orbit' with 'truth to the staircase fighting myth' – hopefully you now see why it's ridiculous to entertain all hypotheses as equally likely without evidence.
> There's a difference between thinking something false and thinking the thing insufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice.
That's just it – there isn't. There isn't any effective difference between "assume false" and "no evidence for it, so we assume false". The reason we assume it's false is tangential to the fact that we assume that both the teapot theory and the fighting staircase theory are false.
> Russell's teapot argument is about so-called unfalsifiable theories, not about all things
The point of Russell's teapot, as Russell explained, and I quoted, is that even though the teapot (like this myth) is neither proven nor disproven, we should, and do, treat it as false, because that is the default state until sufficient evidence arises.
It's an argument against entertaining theories that have no evidence, against ignorant agnosticism towards any arbitrary theory.
Either way, I think the fighting staircase theory, like the teapot theory, is not falsifiable, but anyone is free to show it is, by falsifying it.
Well, the next time I find myself in a melee battle within a castle and am deciding whether I should fight my way up the stairs, I'm going to draw a distinction between: "Is absolutely false", and "We don't know whether it was true or false", and I'm going to let someone else go up the stairs first...
This is your position, but it's not a position presented in the Wikipedia article.
> we should, and do, treat it unproven
Do you mean disproved here, rather than unproven? I think that when we know something has been neither proved nor disproved we should treat it as unproven (because it is unproven), but that does not mean we should assume that it is false.
Also, you forgot the rest of that! It was probably an honest mistake on your part, so I'll include the full context here, including the parts you missed, and hopefully you can address the whole thing now:
> That's just it – there isn't. There isn't any effective difference between "assume false" and "no evidence for it, so we assume false". The reason we assume it's false is tangential to the fact that we assume that both the teapot theory and the fighting staircase theory are false.
> There isn't any effective difference between "assume false" and "no evidence for it, so we assume false".
This is very unclear to me, but if what you mean is something like "There is no practical difference between supposing something to be false and supposing the thing to be so unlikely that it shouldn't be taken into account in one's decisions" I might agree with you - both that it is true and that something like it is present in the Wikipedia article - and we could go on from that point.
>The reason we assume it's false is tangential to the fact that we assume that both the teapot theory and the fighting staircase theory are false.
I'm not sure what the "it" is in the "it's" part of this sentence, so I can't respond to this part of your comment.
> > There isn't any effective difference between "assume false" and "no evidence for it, so we assume false"
> This is very unclear to me, but if what you mean is something like "There is no practical difference between supposing something to be false and supposing the thing to be so unlikely that it shouldn't be taken into account in one's decisions" I might agree with you
Not sure what part of that is unclear to you, but feel free to ask clarifying questions. I did indeed phrase what I said correctly. Your phrasing is also correct. To tie the two together, it is as likely, with our currently-zero affirmative evidence, that the teapot exists, as it is, with our currently-zero affirmative evidence, that the fighting staircase theory is true. Thus, if you effectively treat the teapot's existence as false, you should also effectively treat the fighting staircase theory as false.
> > The reason we assume it's false is tangential to the fact that we assume that both the teapot theory and the fighting staircase theory are false.
> I'm not sure what the "it" is in the "it's" part of this sentence, so I can't respond to this part of your comment.
Again, you're always free to ask me questions if you don't understand something! In this case, "it" refers to the teapot theory and the fighting staircase theory, since the two are analogous here.
but instead that by default it is effectively untrue? And by that you mean that we can act in practical matters act as if it is untrue, even though we do not actually know whether that is the case?
I meant what I said, and also what you said is correct, too.
Indeed, effectively untrue means untrue for all intents and purposes (including even seriously discussing), and both the teapot and the fighting staircase theory are equally: untrue, effectively untrue, practically untrue, and any other semantic game you wish to play around the word untrue, for the same reason as each other. They have an equal amount of evidence of their truth, after all.
I think the answer to that is made clear by the following passage, which I'll reformat and expand to include your latest desired semantics:
> Indeed, effectively untrue means untrue for all intents and purposes (including even seriously discussing), and both the teapot and the fighting staircase theory are equally:
> - untrue,
> - effectively untrue,
> - practically untrue,
> - something we assume to be untrue,
> - and any other semantic game you wish to play around the word untrue,
> for the same reason as each other. They have an equal amount of evidence of their truth, after all :)
At this point, you seem to be coming up with new ways of wording that the teapot and fighting staircase theories are untrue, so if you come up with more, simply add them to the above 5 item list!
And just to be clear, I'm not claiming anything myself, merely examining and judging the claims of those who lend any credence to the totally unsupported teapot or fighting staircase theories, and pointing out that the results of that examination and judgement don't look good for 'em.
I think perhaps you misunderstand: because each theory has zero evidence, each has zero truth to it (however you want to word "truth", maybe pick from the above list).
Because they both have zero truth, they are equally untrue, meaning an equal amount of untrue: zero in both cases.
Turns out there's no contradiction, and no truth to either!
> OK, that's what I had thought you meant! But that position isn't found anywhere in the Wikipedia article.
It actually is! I even quoted it a couple times up in this thread :) Maybe you're confused over effectively true vs practically true vs true vs. etc, but that's just semantics, they all mean the same thing!
> Also, what if two contradictory propositions each have zero evidence, are they then both untrue?
It depends, can you give details (what are the specific propositions)? For example, Russell's teapot explains when the "contradiction" is between the teapot existing without evidence vs. not existing
Practically untrue and untrue don't mean the same thing.
You could argue that they could be treated as if they mean the same thing (in some limited scope), but that is different to them meaning the same thing, and, since such an argument is not presented in the Wikipedia page (rather, a contrary position is presented by Russell in the second quotation on that page[0]) you would have to make that argument yourself.
[0] He makes an explicit distinction between what he ought to call himself if being purely logical and what he practically is (an agnostic and an atheist, respectively).
The article doesn't make any arguments, it simply examines the arguments made by others, and points out that those arguments aren't convincing enough to conclude the myth is true (and thus we fall back to the default: that the myth is false)
Much of the article just describes that fighting in a stairwell would be dangerous and inconvenient (what fighting is not?), completely ignoring the question wether one winding might be more or less so.
Even if you can prove it true in some specific castle that doesn't not mean it is true for all. Maybe other castles just copied the one where it was - often type of thing is done in architecture without realizing why, and so one castle built for fighting on stairs was copied in others without the other features that make fighting on stairs possible. (Or maybe the first was built for fighting on stairs, but after it was built practice proved it was still a bad idea - lots of variations on this idea).
> To be clear, this article does not attempt to explain why 70% of stairs were built clockwise
I wonder if it's easier for right handed masons to build a staircase in a particular chirality. What percentage of modern staircases are built in a particular direction?
I think the slam dunk against the myth is simply that there's no evidence for it at all. If you have no primary sources or archaeological evidence, and the only "source" is tour guides, then there's no reason to believe it.
It might be true or it might not, but talking about it as if it's definitely true is simply wrong.
There's no evidence for an alternative either. We simply don't have surviving documents that talk about the logic of why staircases were built that way, which is hardly surprising given that even nowadays when books are dramatically cheaper to produce, architects don't tend to write down the logic they use when designing the details of functional structures.
The combat explanation fits the evidence as well as anything else. Perhaps it's not proven to be true, but it's certainly not proven to be false.
I think all the article is arguing is not to just accept that explanation as fact. There is no conclusive evidence that this is the reason stairs were built this way.
It's almost certainly because staircases were 1) hazardous as hell, 2) going down is way more dangerous than going up, 3) clockwise puts the dominant hand/foot on the side with the biggest width when descending.
There was an article here on HN a while ago talking about how the stupidly designed staircases were responsible for the Victorian trope of "falling down a staircase to your death."--the ones for servants were especially poorly designed.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 283 ms ] threadBasically the entire job of a historian is to determine the credibility of old sources, so they can interpret all the data and come to the most accurate conclusion about what happened.
Unsubstantiated conjecture by Victorian historians shouldn't really be treated as a "source" in the first place by actual historians.
Theodore Andrea Cook wasn't a historian. Xe was a writer for the Daily Telegraph, amongst other things, who wrote about sports such as fencing and rowing; and who was also an art critic.
Theodore Andrea Cook wasn't writing in the Victorian Era. _Spirals in Nature and Art_ was a 20th century work, in the Edwardian Era. _The Curves of Life_ was from the subsequent Georgian Era.
Theodore Andrea Cook is the earliest person found espousing this hypothesis. This is, as far as anyone has determined, Theodore Andrea Cook's own original hypothesis, based upon zero evidence. That is certainly what the text of _Spirals_ implies.
As is the nearly-exactly comment in TFA:
> Frankly, if you find yourself in this position the castle is probably already lost.
It's conjecture all the way down.
Just like the entire staircase argument?
Except that we actually know that:
> Frankly, if you find yourself in this position the castle is probably already lost.
Was true in almost all cases.
A castle staircase takes a lot of time and effort to build. Choosing to build the staircase in one direction or the other has negligible cost. If there is even a slight or possible advantage to one direction then it would make sense to build it that way.
Defense in depth.
If it's true that the battle at this point is lost for the defenders -- and known history indicates this is so -- then why would the builders choose directions based on this extremely unlikely scenario, instead of on just about any other consideration (aesthetic, practical, or even random)?
I'll take a stab at guessing (mind you, this is blind guessing, happy to be corrected!): the USMC still issue bayonets because of both tradition, which is important to the military, and also because they are actually useful in close quarters battle, which still occurs on occasion, such as in urban warfare and house-to-house combat clearing, etc. The likelihood of having to use a bayonet/knife in modern CQB is probably significantly higher than the likelihood of medieval defenders recovering from an enemy army that has stormed their castle.
Having a knife might be useful in various situations even outside combat as far as I know.
Saying that castle sieges didn't tend to involve stairway fights doesn't imply that stairways wouldn't have had defensive measures built in. That is post-hoc rationalization.
You're asking to a disprove a purely(?) speculative claim, though.
So in other words, just because the staircases take a lot of time and effort to build, simply means that having the staircase itself is important, not necessarily that its chirality is important. It has to have a chirality but it may well not matter which one, just like roads.
If there were evidence that driving on the right side or left side of the road slightly reduces car accidents and a country with previously no roads or cars began planning to automotize the country, then, all things considered, it would make sense to have people drive in the lane with a slightly reduced fatality rate.
If there are two choices where one presents a slight advantage but no additional cost then a rational actor will go with that choice.
For perspective, Norman keeps were often built with a large internal cross wall, so even if troops made it through the stair door and swarmed into the room they'd still have to fight their way into the other half of the floor. By the stage these expensive and space consuming walls were defensively relevant, defenders would have already lost outer walls, viable long-term food and water supplies and much of the garrison defending it... and any real chance of holding out. But an invading army would still lose more men storming it; so it functioned as a deterrent.
I've heard this "it's a myth" argument before, but 70% of staircases is quite a large proportion of staircases spiralling in a particular direction which would offer the defender a marginal advantage to be pure coincidence. Particularly when the ratio of clockwise to anticlockwise staircases in Norman castles was about 20:1; it was later generations of castle of builders who added many more anticlockwise stairwells, in an era when individual tower defence was less importance, and builders may have simply forgotten or come to doubt arguments about the defensive advantages of clockwise spirals (the blog's arguments for why spiral staircase defence is rubbish work here of course!). Contemporary cathedrals which were not at all defensible tended to build clockwise and anticlockwise spiral staircases as matching pairs, so it wasn't like there was some other sort of massive aversion to stairs in a particular direction.
Going by that logic, the president's bunker under the pentagon would've been built without a lock. After all, people don't usually have to physically drag a country's leader out of their locked bunker, right? By the time anyone's knocking on that door, usually the war is lost and the country has surrendered.
And yet, if you're designing for defense, why NOT take such a cheap and easy countermeasure as putting a lock on the door or choosing the more defensible way to spiral your staircase? You might want to buy a few more minutes to negotiate in a desperate situation; you might want at least the option of taking that futile last stand; you might be facing not an invading army but a single lunatic with a sword who snuck past the outer guards.
If you are the attacking army, just wait it out. You've won the siege, and any defenders up the stairs will have to either come down or starve to death. Why risk attacking up the stairs?
I'm sure it has been an issue forever but online especially it seems painful how much of that information there is.
"People asked me if this tribe was originally from this area or if they migrated here.
I always say: clearly they were from here. The weather is so bad around these parts, who would choose to move here from somewhere else?"
- German historian
"My German is pre-industrial, and mostly religious."
so, maybe they just adopted the rules of the road, and the legends that come from it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widdershins
> probably from Middle Low German weddersinnes, literally "against the way"
https://www.etymonline.com/word/widdershins#etymonline_v_799...
Basically, this is NOT the way.
And speaking of, let's start another myth. Swedes always dance around the christmas tree or maypole sunwise because it's an ancient dance to evoke the sun after months of darkness.
Thou art thyself, though not "clockwise".
What's "clockwise"? It is nor hand, nor pen-
dulum, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a clock. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So "Widdershins" would, were it not "Widdershins" call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Widdershins, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all my turns.
I would expect that depends on the design of the spiral staircase.
In a spiral staircase, you want to go up about 3 meters in a 360° turn because you need a bit over 2m of headroom and some space for the stair itself.
That means that, 1m away from the center of the staircase, the slope will be about 50%. The ideal staircase has more or less “step width + twice the step height = 63cm” [1], so that would give a good step width of 31cm and a step height of 16cm.
However, 2m away from the center, that same stair would have a slope of about 25%, and the ideal step would be 41cm wide and 11cm high or thereabouts.
3m from the center you’d have a 16% slope, and the ideal step would be 45 cm wide, 8cm high, etc.
Now, in ‘standard’ designs [2], step height can’t change with distance to the center, so the designer has to pick one, and thus has control over the distance from the center where it’s easiest to step.
[1] https://www.practicalarchitecture.com/blog/the-geometry-of-a.... Of course, that’s a heuristic, and the ideal will be different for different persons, but what’s important is that simply scaling up a staircase in order to get wider steps is not a good idea.
[2] very wide stairs can and sometimes do have steps that are sloping upwards. I don’t think these are non-standard, but can’t think of a better word now.
They can get wide. Try climbing the lower part of the dome of St. Peter’s basilica in Rome, for example (https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/view-of-a-yo...)
Also, in the context of “it just feels easier to traverse stairs as close to the inside as possible”, I think spiral staircases that are less than a meter wide aren’t relevant. On them, the only option is to walk in the middle of the stairs.
Being right-footed, I can do cross-over turns while ice-skating in one direction MUCH easier than the other.
However, not sure whether that translates to clockwise or counter-clockwise stairs being easier without trying it.
maybe it would be counter-clockwise? Right foot travels further?
The forward distance travelled is also trivial in terms of effort compared to the height displacement upward. Most people can walk for 10 minutes without breaking a sweat, but way fewer would feel fine walking up stairs for 10 minutes.
Not to mention, you can simply have a convention that the downward walker on a spiral staircase favour whichever side is best.
What if they built right-handed defenders AND left-handed defenders towers?
This is getting silly :P
.
.
.
(An earlier version of my comment ended with "... ever laid duck eggs.", evidencing both my deep ignorance of medieval warfare and the biology of egg laying!)
Currently reading Plutarch. Twice already he's mentioned sieges where the attackers waited for the besieged to run out of water. The grueling wait is compressed in history.
That's a wall around a wall around a wall. Like a frickin' onion.
They slowly stopped laughing as they realized the Macedonians were filling in the shore front to make a kilometer long 200m wide causeway to march across.
It did not end well for the island City of Tyre and its inhabitants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Tyre_(332_BC)#The_sie...
That's happening now in Gaza. Israel has cut off water.
'Just in case pillagers come up the stairs, and I'll throw in a Zweihänder for half the price too, in case your attacker steps out of reach of your regular sword!'.
To put things in modern parlance: A meme, invented from whole cloth by Daily Telegraph writer Theodore Andrea Cook 120 years ago because he liked fencing, was still going strong on Twitter in 2022; and people are still falling prey to believing its assumptions.
One has to appreciate the additional irony of the Twitter account actually being named "history in memes".
Like if you go through the bottom/top door, it's more natural to walk straight forwards and then curve, rather than walk in, turn 90°, and then walk upwards.
Obviously this wouldn't matter if the door were located facing precisely the middle of the spiral, but it certainly does if it more naturally opens on one side of the spiral.
Not "left" or "right", which is different on roomside and stairside, but inside or outside of the spiral.
There could be a window there but not in the alternative location.
I can't draw anything here, but imagine the staircase is the width of two doors. So the door could be on either side (closer to either edge).
If the door is on the left, you want the staircase to curve upwards to the right. And vice-versa.
Perhaps a closer look at the numbers would show a very clear default direction plus a strong priority for symmetry where applicable?
I see what you did there.
The problem with a phalanx is that it's hard to turn, not that attacking from short range is somehow better than attacking from long range.
I did. It's right there in my comment.
I'm supporting the idea that a spear is superior in any defensive position by pointing out that the problem with an offensive block of spears is the need to move, which doesn't apply to defense.
Except when you are going to die, even if the extra odds seems pointless, you do it. much like WW2 tankers putting sand bags on their tank.
That’s why you surrender after you realize the situation is hopeless (which is hopefully long before anyone starts climbing up the stairs).
Even if you’re willing to fight to the death/don’t have a choice which was pretty rare and are just stuck at the top what incentives do the attackers have to risk their lives by rushing up the stairs when they can just start a fire at the bottom and/or wait you out?
Wouldn’t you need the relevant event to not be extremely rare for that to matter?
I mean a sieges were once in a several decades or even once in 100-200 years events on average. Actual direct assaults with combat occurring on the stairs were significantly less frequent than that. The defender being able to turn the tide at that point? Even less.
Officers simply retain their handguns when they get promoted into rear line positions; no special accommodation is required.
> I was certainly able to imagine that on my first tour of a fort when I was young.
Most people visiting medieval castles probably significantly overestimate the frequency of hand to hand combat that might had taken place there (almost never as far as we know).
I am willing to bet $10000, that the number of sieges won or lost due to a staircase fight between knights is 0.
Also I wonder what led to this hypothesis being created in the first place? That's a much more interesting question to me. Was it some eccentric historian just inventing it?
If the staircase happens to be on one side of the building, it would be better to orient it one way - based on how the windows would work - for example.
If the staircase is against another busy entryway - it might be better to have the stairs go one way or the other, etc
The ratio of staircases in Norman castles was more like 20:1 which is a ratio even more in need of a non-chance explanation; the greater numbers of anticlockwise staircases came later, when coincidentally or otherwise individual towers were less important to the overall defensive scheme
There are so many things that could bias this result. Maybe it's easier to craft in one direction. Perhaps, north of the equator, castles tended to be constructed in certain orientations, with the windowless stairwells tending towards one side versus another. Altogether, there is no reason to prefer the myth over any of those hypotheses--they each have no evidence.
There's got to be a reason, even if it was as simple as "it was arbitrarily chosen and then became standard practice."
There is no evidence of the myth being true. There are no sources in history suggesting it.
It might be true. But there is no evidence that it is.
Proving it false is another matter.
> Medieval staircases were NOT built going clockwise for the defender’s advantage
and
> it’s not true.
Which seem like confident statements with no affirmative evidence to support them.
In fairness, their conclusion is more measured:
> So in conclusion: there’s no evidence for this claim and it also doesn’t make a lot of sense.
But that's not the headline they went with.
see also: Russell's teapot
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
We do not believe that maybe it is true this teapot exists, maybe not, simply because the initial hypothesis (that it is true in the first place) hasn't yet been falsified. If that were the case, I could make up a thousand improbable myths, and say they're all maybe true, maybe not, and we would have to treat them all as equally plausible until someone wastes their time trying to disprove all thousand, and then I could make up a thousand more.
That is why the burden of proof of truth lies with the person asserting the truth of a teapot/staircase belief
To add to your A vs. not-A problem, you are close to identifying the resolution, too: For an analogue in statistics, A = "this staircase explanation has sufficient evidence to say it is true", not-A = "this staircase explanation does not have sufficient evidence to conclude it is true". Not-A here is example of what is called the null hypothesis in statistics. The null hypothesis is the default.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
It's an argument against believing without evidence, not for believing without evidence.
It's an argument against entertaining theories that have no evidence, against ignorant agnosticism towards any arbitrary theory
Then, since we agree that the claim has no evidence to support it, we assume it is false.
Therefore, we conclude, "it is true that staircases were built clockwise to advantage the defender".
I agree that the burden of proof lies upon the person that makes the claim. But that doesn't mean we assume the opposite of the claim must be true until they do. It means we assume ignorance.
So, a more correct statement would be: "In the absence of evidence of why the staircases were constructed, we do not know why they were constructed".
To say the absence of evidence proves the opposite of the claim is wrong.
> But that doesn't mean we assume the opposite of the claim must be true until they do. It means we assume ignorance.
Regardless of the wording, the gist is the same: we /don't/ assume ignorance, we treat the claim, like Russell's teapot [0], or any other unsupported claim, as false until such evidence arises, since there are an infinite number of unfalsifiable premises, and we neither want to, nor do, in practice, treat them all as maybe true, maybe not, forever.
tl;dr: As Russell's teapot [0] demonstrates, yes, there is a default, and that is that a thing is false unless sufficient evidence exists to believe otherwise. No, we don't treat all unfalsified (and unfalsifiable) hypotheses as unknown and assume ignorance.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
In 1958, Russell elaborated on the analogy:
> "...nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice..."[0]
Replace 'teapot revolving in orbit' with 'truth to the staircase fighting myth' – hopefully you now see why it's ridiculous to entertain all hypotheses as equally likely without evidence.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
Russell's teapot argument is about so-called unfalsifiable theories, not about all things.
That's just it – there isn't. There isn't any effective difference between "assume false" and "no evidence for it, so we assume false". The reason we assume it's false is tangential to the fact that we assume that both the teapot theory and the fighting staircase theory are false.
> Russell's teapot argument is about so-called unfalsifiable theories, not about all things
The point of Russell's teapot, as Russell explained, and I quoted, is that even though the teapot (like this myth) is neither proven nor disproven, we should, and do, treat it as false, because that is the default state until sufficient evidence arises.
It's an argument against entertaining theories that have no evidence, against ignorant agnosticism towards any arbitrary theory.
Either way, I think the fighting staircase theory, like the teapot theory, is not falsifiable, but anyone is free to show it is, by falsifying it.
Well, the next time I find myself in a melee battle within a castle and am deciding whether I should fight my way up the stairs, I'm going to draw a distinction between: "Is absolutely false", and "We don't know whether it was true or false", and I'm going to let someone else go up the stairs first...
This is your position, but it's not a position presented in the Wikipedia article.
> we should, and do, treat it unproven
Do you mean disproved here, rather than unproven? I think that when we know something has been neither proved nor disproved we should treat it as unproven (because it is unproven), but that does not mean we should assume that it is false.
It actually is, it's Russell's position! :) You claimed that before, and I corrected you then, so here, again for you, is the relevant part:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37831693
Also, you forgot the rest of that! It was probably an honest mistake on your part, so I'll include the full context here, including the parts you missed, and hopefully you can address the whole thing now:
> That's just it – there isn't. There isn't any effective difference between "assume false" and "no evidence for it, so we assume false". The reason we assume it's false is tangential to the fact that we assume that both the teapot theory and the fighting staircase theory are false.
This is very unclear to me, but if what you mean is something like "There is no practical difference between supposing something to be false and supposing the thing to be so unlikely that it shouldn't be taken into account in one's decisions" I might agree with you - both that it is true and that something like it is present in the Wikipedia article - and we could go on from that point.
>The reason we assume it's false is tangential to the fact that we assume that both the teapot theory and the fighting staircase theory are false.
I'm not sure what the "it" is in the "it's" part of this sentence, so I can't respond to this part of your comment.
> This is very unclear to me, but if what you mean is something like "There is no practical difference between supposing something to be false and supposing the thing to be so unlikely that it shouldn't be taken into account in one's decisions" I might agree with you
Not sure what part of that is unclear to you, but feel free to ask clarifying questions. I did indeed phrase what I said correctly. Your phrasing is also correct. To tie the two together, it is as likely, with our currently-zero affirmative evidence, that the teapot exists, as it is, with our currently-zero affirmative evidence, that the fighting staircase theory is true. Thus, if you effectively treat the teapot's existence as false, you should also effectively treat the fighting staircase theory as false.
> > The reason we assume it's false is tangential to the fact that we assume that both the teapot theory and the fighting staircase theory are false.
> I'm not sure what the "it" is in the "it's" part of this sentence, so I can't respond to this part of your comment.
Again, you're always free to ask me questions if you don't understand something! In this case, "it" refers to the teapot theory and the fighting staircase theory, since the two are analogous here.
> by default, it is untrue
but instead that by default it is effectively untrue? And by that you mean that we can act in practical matters act as if it is untrue, even though we do not actually know whether that is the case?
Indeed, effectively untrue means untrue for all intents and purposes (including even seriously discussing), and both the teapot and the fighting staircase theory are equally: untrue, effectively untrue, practically untrue, and any other semantic game you wish to play around the word untrue, for the same reason as each other. They have an equal amount of evidence of their truth, after all.
That we should assume these things to be false, or merely effectively false?
> Indeed, effectively untrue means untrue for all intents and purposes (including even seriously discussing), and both the teapot and the fighting staircase theory are equally:
> - untrue,
> - effectively untrue,
> - practically untrue,
> - something we assume to be untrue,
> - and any other semantic game you wish to play around the word untrue,
> for the same reason as each other. They have an equal amount of evidence of their truth, after all :)
At this point, you seem to be coming up with new ways of wording that the teapot and fighting staircase theories are untrue, so if you come up with more, simply add them to the above 5 item list!
And just to be clear, I'm not claiming anything myself, merely examining and judging the claims of those who lend any credence to the totally unsupported teapot or fighting staircase theories, and pointing out that the results of that examination and judgement don't look good for 'em.
You could hold these two positions simultaneously without there being any contradiction:
* they are both equally untrue.
* they are both true
Because they both have zero truth, they are equally untrue, meaning an equal amount of untrue: zero in both cases.
Turns out there's no contradiction, and no truth to either!
Also, what if two contradictory propositions each have zero evidence, are they then both untrue?
It actually is! I even quoted it a couple times up in this thread :) Maybe you're confused over effectively true vs practically true vs true vs. etc, but that's just semantics, they all mean the same thing!
> Also, what if two contradictory propositions each have zero evidence, are they then both untrue?
It depends, can you give details (what are the specific propositions)? For example, Russell's teapot explains when the "contradiction" is between the teapot existing without evidence vs. not existing
You could argue that they could be treated as if they mean the same thing (in some limited scope), but that is different to them meaning the same thing, and, since such an argument is not presented in the Wikipedia page (rather, a contrary position is presented by Russell in the second quotation on that page[0]) you would have to make that argument yourself.
[0] He makes an explicit distinction between what he ought to call himself if being purely logical and what he practically is (an agnostic and an atheist, respectively).
I wonder if it's easier for right handed masons to build a staircase in a particular chirality. What percentage of modern staircases are built in a particular direction?
It might be true or it might not, but talking about it as if it's definitely true is simply wrong.
The combat explanation fits the evidence as well as anything else. Perhaps it's not proven to be true, but it's certainly not proven to be false.
> It might be true or it might not, but talking about it as if it's definitely true is simply wrong.
But you didn't.
> Your second is a non-sequitur.
How?
There was an article here on HN a while ago talking about how the stupidly designed staircases were responsible for the Victorian trope of "falling down a staircase to your death."--the ones for servants were especially poorly designed.