A 400-year timeline of failed attempts to fix a lethal bug in the human software of inherited concepts

It was in Latin, and has never been translated - but a striking sentence was, in 1769, by William Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England:Our ancient Saxon laws nominally punished theft with death, if above the value of twelvepence... in the ninth year of Henry the First... all persons guilty of larceny above the value of twelvepence were directed to be hanged; which law continues in force to this day... the punishment of grand larceny, or the stealing above the value of twelvepence (which sum was the standard in the time of king Athelstan, eight hundred years ago) is at common law regularly death. Which, considering the great intermediate alteration in the price or denomination of money, is undoubtedly a very rigorous constitution, and made Sir Henry Spelman (above a century since, when money was at twice its present rate) complain that, while every thing else was risen in its nominal value and become dearer, the life of man had continually grown cheaper. In the time of King Athelstan, 12 pence would buy you a sturdy ox. The law from that time being still on the books in 1801, 13-year-old Andrew Benning was hanged for stealing... a spoon. The 12-penny threshold for death was finally repealed in 1827 - having been in force through an era in which the value of money dropped by a factor of about 200.To abstract a concept from this dismaying story, the bug we see in operation here may be termed [effective chrono-lucropia (ECL): the generation of false perceptions through the operation of concepts formed in a condition of naivety about the instability of the value of money]. A perceptual disorder which occurs because inherited concepts - themselves badged as reliable - are imbued with the delusion that money units are the proper