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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7713 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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I wonder if there might actually still be, even in our modern world, some major intellectual insights that future generations, once those insights have appeared, will think of as relatively low-hanging fruit and wonder why it took so long for their ancestors to come up with them, and wonder why their ancestors did not come up with them given that they already had every necessary bit of knowledge to come up with them, and maybe only lacked some spark of genius.

Some examples from history:

  • Calculus - You can teach this to any decently intelligent 17 year old kid nowadays, but, while there were some remarkably close predecessors to it in ancient Greece (the method of exhaustion), it was not formalized as a rigorous concept and method until about the 18th-19th centuries.
  • Antibiotics - As far as I know, there is nothing about penicillin as an antibiotic agent that could not have hypothetically been developed and systematized 2000 years ago - this would not have required any modern technology. To be fair, there may have been ancient cultures that had an intricate knowledge of plant-derived drugs and so on that are at least relatively comparable... but to my knowledge, none of them developed something like modern antibiotics, which revolutionized the world and basically immediately did away with the whole literary genre of "lonesome poet dies at 30 from tuberculosis".
  • Free markets - It seems at least plausible these days to many decently intelligent people that free-ish markets (too much freedom in markets has its own problems but...) serve as a good communicator of economic information, and that this can help relatively free market economic systems at least in some cases to outcompete central planning (there are many other factors involved of course, but this is one of them...). I'm not aware of anyone having had this kind of hypothesis until a few hundred years ago. But it's the kind of idea you can explain to a decently intelligent 17 year old kid nowadays, it's not something that requires mountains of highly specific knowledge to grasp.
  • Natural selection - The idea that the combination of survival pressure and reproduction will over time cause better-adapted entities to out-reproduce worse-adapted entities is so logical that one can demonstrate the truth of it through pure mathematics. But as far as I know, it did not become a popular explanation for the evolution of living beings until about 170 years ago, even though people 2000 years ago were both familiar with so-called artificial selection (breeding of livestock and so on) and probably had the intellectual background to understand the concept of natural selection mathematically (people who were advanced enough mathematics thinkers to create something like Euclid's Elements certainly had the raw brain-power to model natural selection mathematically, if a certain spark of genius had struck them).

It makes me wonder what kinds of insights might be lying around these days, which future generations, if we do not discover them, might wonder what took us so long.

Even in the mid-1800s pre-Marxist thought there was extreme market skepticism. As the quote inventing the term "dismal science" explains:

Truly, my philanthropic friends, Exeter Hall philanthropy is wonderful; and the social science -- not a "gay science," but a rueful --which finds the secret of this universe in "supply and demand," and reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone, is also wonderful. Not a "gay science," I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate and, indeed, quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.

Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question, Thomas Carlyle, 1849

His incredulous criticism of free markets is inadvertently a correct statement of their overwhelming strength. He just didn't get it.

Someone not grown up indoctrinated in this ideology thinks it is preposterous. Sure you can train a 17 year old to recite the truths of free markets. Or recite a Soviet ideological statement about socialism. The free market version happens to be correct. But learned thoughtful people have denounced it as false.

I read Orwell's assertions about how actually markets are bad and central planning is better. He's wrong, but not due to ignorance. You in a time machine couldn't convert him to laissez faire market ideology.

The problem with free markets is that they require a modern state.

Modernity provides the scale and technology to enable now commonplace and relatively undistortionary forms of taxation (e.g. income, sales) with ease and precision. Premodern societies struggled to raise taxes in non-distortionary ways, because anything they taxed needed to be highly legible to a tax collector. Hence, the widespread practice of building taxes becoming taxes on windows, gross floor area, and so on - leading to predictable results of fewer windows and slim but tall buildings in those areas. The most effective way of generating long-term revenue was in the form of tariffs levied at trade checkpoints. ~20% of the British State's revenue during the Napoleonic Wars was from customs duties, so you can imagine there was little incentive to reduce trade barriers even then, despite whatever Adam Smith had to say.

Premodern states simply weren't powerful enough to enable free markets. The local baron was powerful enough to enforce his idiosyncrasies within his domain. Certain products were restricted for his use, others might be required to be produced in a certain way, while 'his' peasants were tied to the land. A king attempting to change this would be attempting to upend feudalism, and find himself killed or forced to agree to limit his powers. In fact, the incentives usually ran the other way, with the crown being encouraged to grant certain monopolies or rights in return for support for new taxes or causes. Meanwhile, while Guilds notoriously fixed prices and restricted supply, they were sufficiently embedded in the social fabric that the King would find breaking them up or restricting their behaviour essentially impossible. Their dealings would be almost completely illegible to a premodern state, who anyway lacked a police force loyal to the crown able to punish cases of the guild breaking the legs, say, of a non-compliant journeyman.

Free markets are reliant on trust. For a village, the trust networks are already there, but at scale, what's needed is homogeneity and stability. Coinage was often inconsistent, and subject to frequent debasement. Only the modern state has the reach to provide consistent governance and enforcement for contracts, arbitrate disputes and so on.

Finally, only modern economies are sufficiently productive to allow free markets without frequent bread riots and the demand for price controls.

Yes, you can explain free markets to an intelligent 17-year-old, but only in modern times could it be anything more than a thought experiment.

Agreed, plus the premodern state doesn't necessarily want economic growth, they want boots on the ground and stability.

The roman empire was broadly free market. They had strong property rights and relatively low taxes. They thought trade was pretty good. But they were quite worried about bread prices, so they arranged for food shipments to Italy to keep the plebs happy. And money had to be found somewhere for warfare, they struggled with getting the tax base to pay for all these wars. It's hard to extract money from all these entrenched aristocrats who naturally develop wealth trading.

In an agrarian economy, food is money so why not have as many people making food as possible? You can get pretty good results with legalist policies of strict state control and contempt for trade. If you read the book of shang yang, it's basically just 'the wastelands must be cultivated' and 'don't let people do what they want, fancy silk clothing is not needed for fielding a gigantic army'. There's not much need for a dynamic private sector economy when you only need grain, swords, salt and horses in huge quantities. The state can handle that quite well with economies of scale alone and conscripted labour.

Only when you start needing hugely expensive ships, optics, cannons, advanced metallurgy and innovation does a private sector economy really start to shine.

The problem with free markets is that they require a modern state.

The movie "Becoming Jane" sees a lawyer talking to a judge:

  • Why are you here?
  • To learn the law
  • Which has no other end but what?
  • The preservation of the rights of property.
  • Against?
  • The mob. Therefore order is kept because we have (the army? prudence? I forget how it goes past here and the transcripts cut off)

I have a feeling we'll find some cancer cures that make us go 'doh'. Growing organs in vitro will probably take a breakthrough that seems obvious in retrospect. I'm guessing there's probably a few breakthroughs in nuclear technology, or power transmission, which will be in the same category.

I hope we get wireless power transmission like Tesla always dreamed of. Would also make space exploration easier.

Personally I think we'll find a more dense fuel for space travel at some point as well.

Wireless power transmission is very much already a thing, you do it with powerful microwaves.

The issue is any suitably powerful and efficient means of wirelessly transmitting energy is indistinguishable from a death ray should some unfortunate soul happen to stumble into the emission cone.

WOAH I had no idea! You just blew my mind.

Can we do it efficiently though? Is the only problem the danger?

Its nowhere near as efficient as just using a conductive cable certainly. IIRC its something like 50% efficient in a lab, so probably half that in real applications. You have to have a really, really good reason for not just running a power line for it to be worth it for high power applications.

The FCC actually approved charging via WiFi a few years ago, but its limited to maybe 1 W at most, not too many commercial applications at the moment to my knowledge.

But yeah, the lowered efficiency and substantial safety risks are the barriers at the moment. Maybe that will change in the future.

wireless power transmission like Tesla always dreamed of

Tesla's dream of wireless power transmission was mostly just him going senile / developing schizophrenic symptoms. His earlier inventions that he made his fame from relied on the same laws of physics that were well known by then to make such long distance wireless power transmission inherently extremely inefficient (there's a reason any modern "beamed power transmission" concepts use parabolic antennae and microwave wavelengths).

We probably have different views on what schizophrenia is.

Feel free to substitute a better term for "clear detachment from factual reality on some issues where the person was before well aware of the reality". Tesla's idea of wireless power transmission fundamentally cannot work because of the interaction of inverse square law and Maxwell's equations. Tesla, having invented the AC induction motor, was well aware of those equations and his inventions relied on them. Thus to later pivot to "No, that's actually bullshit and I'll just transfer power wirelessly without direct beaming" is a sign of either that or generally losing his wits (ie. senility).

As @TeknOSheEeP mentioned, you can beam power but that's fundamentally the same as just pointing a giant flashlight in one direction, only using microwaves in the hope of better conversion efficiency. A key fact is that it relies on a tightly directional beam, something which requires wavelength much shorter than the dimensions of the transmitter. Otherwise you've just built a plain old radio transmitter which (again because of inverse square law) are extremely inefficient as far as the receiver power goes.

We already have wireless power transmission, you can charge your phone etc wirelessly very easily these days

Yeah but my understanding was that it's extremely inefficient over anything past like a couple inches?

Not over space distances.

Depending on the charger you can actually wireless charge a phone with a 1cm air gap between the charger and your phone.

And if you want to see wireless power transmission over long (many meters) distances then this MIT demo is basically the best out there I know of, even though technically it's to show dipole radiation and not power transfer. Also it's a very good demonstration that you don't need to have a complete circuit for electricity to flow.

Most people, even the scientifically inclined, have absolutely zero idea of how electricity really works. And yet their vote counts just as much as mine... (yes I am salty about this)

I am confident there are many insights out there that remain to be "discovered" that will seem obvious in retrospect. So much of the history of human progress is discovering obvious (in retrospect) insights. Even something as simple as wheels on luggage. People pushed luggage around on wheeled carts for decades before figuring out we should just put wheels on the damn suitcases. Insights from Taleb and Mandelbrot about tail risks and black swans are another good example of something "obvious" that it took smart people a long time to come to terms with. It's really hard to see obvious things until they are pointed out.

Somewhat of an aside, but I have found Taleb supremely frustrating - he sounded like a typical "empirics bro" making wild in-principle-statements as if hes disproven mathematics, which I rounded down to "dont be too confident in your models". It took a completely different branch of thought for me to learn about the problems of infinite variance for decision theory.

People pushed luggage around on wheeled carts for decades before figuring out we should just put wheels on the damn suitcases.

Is this true, though? Wheels are only effective if they're large relative to the bumps on the surface you're using them on. Modern wheeled luggage (2 inch wheels) is only effective on smooth, swept concrete surfaces. And those are a quite modern invention (maybe we can blame the ADA here?), at least in quantity as far as I can tell. Having once lugged a wheeled suitcase a mile on cobbled European roads, a cart would have worked better. I wouldn't even try on an unpaved road.

Yeah, wheels add volume and weight to the luggage that is not required at all times (most of the use time of luggage is spent not being wheeled around). Weight and volume that travelers pay for in one way or another. The wheels themselves, even on many expensive luggages, are of dubious quality, with little way for the customer to know whether this luggage's wheel are durable, or if they will start blocking and dragging everywhere after 3 trips.

Though my experience of wheeled luggages breaking all the time might be personal; coming from a city with a lot of snow and ice, slippery surfaces are dealt with with pebbles, sand, salts/other chemicals, which remain on streets, sidewalk and indoors floors where people come in with their outdoor shoes (airports, shopping malls, hotel lobbies) for a significant portion of the year, even after the snow and ice are gone. These wreak havoc on small wheels.

The wheels themselves, even on many expensive luggages, are of dubious quality

I've heard a theory that this was the problem: if even modern wheels are of dubious quality and capability, how much worse would they have been a hundred years ago? I'm not sure that makes sense, though. The invention of wheeled luggage is at roughly the same time the transition of roller skates from all-metal wheels to hard polymer wheels (which were lighter and smoother-rolling and less expensive), but all-metal wheels aren't that much worse in utility and they were probably better for durability. The most important invention for small wheels is ball bearing support, and that's more like 100-150 years old (at various levels of quality and expense).

The two other common theories are more situational:

Wheeled luggage came about during the expansion of mass air travel, with it's corresponding huge concourses and lack of porters. This was the first time people really had reason to want to carry their own luggage for long distances.

Wheeled luggage came about shortly after the Women's Rights Movement made it more common for women to travel on their own, and whereas a typical man would feel weak if he avoided carrying his own luggage, a typical woman would feel foolish if she didn't.

I'm not sure either of these really works either, though. Wheeled luggage was invented in 1970, but as another comment points out it didn't become popular until the 1990s. Perhaps that's because of the addition of the retractable handle (invented in 1987) finally making them more ergonomic to roll around? And maybe 17 years isn't too painfully long for someone to come up with that idea once it finally had a use case; "The Retractable Handle" isn't exactly the sort of thing you find at the start of the Civ tech tree next to "The Wheel".

I've heard a theory that this was the problem: if even modern wheels are of dubious quality and capability, how much worse would they have been a hundred years ago? I'm not sure that makes sense, though. The invention of wheeled luggage is at roughly the same time the transition of roller skates from all-metal wheels to hard polymer wheels (which were lighter and smoother-rolling and less expensive), but all-metal wheels aren't that much worse in utility and they were probably better for durability. The most important invention for small wheels is ball bearing support, and that's more like 100-150 years old (at various levels of quality and expense).

Ball Bearings have been around for a long time, but they have been improving all of that time in size, quality, reliability, and price. Just taking your example of rollerblades is pretty illustrative. I had a very good pair in high school that were pretty top of the line at the time. I played outdoor hockey all the time, blading was a pretty common date in my small town with few other places to congregate, etc. If I go to Wal Mart and try on a pair, they roll even better than those ones used to. Same with the skateboard bearings, they are cheaper and better now. By a lot.

Considering that luggage wheels have to be small to be practical, the timeline makes sense to me.

Wheeled luggage came about shortly after the Women's Rights Movement made it more common for women to travel on their own, and whereas a typical man would feel weak if he avoided carrying his own luggage, a typical woman would feel foolish if she didn't.

The typical man should still feel this way. Traveling with something like a Cotopaxi backpack is superior for the vast majority of applications to the point where I wonder how so many people got psyopped into using these unwieldy rollers that I watch them fighting to fit into overhead compartments.

I wonder how so many people got psyopped into using these unwieldy rollers that I watch them fighting to fit into overhead compartments.

This is why checked baggage will always reign supreme. I used to always fly Southwest for that very reason. No need to try to get huge bags in the overhead bin, at best I'm putting up a small tote which has a change of clothes and valuables I don't want to let out of my sight. The rest is in my big checked bag. Alas that they too have joined the legion of airlines trying to turn basic parts of the experience into an upcharge.

Even still, all this does is shift the explanation from one product to another. Backpacks have been around for a while, but they were mostly limited to outdoor and military applications. It wasn't until the 1980s that they became popular for carrying books to school, and it probably wasn't until the 2000s that you began to see them used among normal tourists who weren't going on vacations that would require them to carry everything around with them for long distances. The typical tourist or business traveler who stays in a hotel and travels by car wouldn't use one.

That being said, I own more backpacks than Imelda Marcos owns shoes, and I still use traditional wheeled luggage for most of my normal travel. Why? Because they keep clothes folded. I don't fly much so I rarely use the wheels and could probably do without them, but it's much easier to keep everything together when it's in a rigid box. I would add that I'm also the kind of person who makes use of hotel dressers and closets, despite my tendency to avoid overpacking through the realization that unless I'm going out to dinner a lot or am engaging in messy activities I'm probably going to wear more or less the same thing the entire time I'm away.

I've gotten a bit obsessed recently with the idea of one bag for travel. I got a 30L backpack I stuffed it with an absurd amount of (carefully chosen, but still far from "essential") equipment that would be enough to and it all fits very comfortably, leaving room for 3-5 days of clothing (assuming I will wear on myself the heaviest, bulkiest clothing while traveling).

And when I say an absurd amount of equipment, I mean stuff that would make any minimalist shake their head. I have a laptop, a mechanical keyboard, a folding laptop stand, a travel router, and optionally I bring a portable second monitor.

I have a hard time understanding how I ever needed checked baggage, let alone feel constrained by only having an allowance of one.

*EDIT: A sketchbook (and pencil and eraser), tons of electronic security related gizmos, a game controller, chargers and cables for everything, 2 retractable ethernet cables and 1 retractable HDMI cable... An international solution for plugging in and charging everything. I'll grant the bag is probably heavy, or so I've been told by people trying to pick it up, but while I'm not exactly in good physical shape, one thing I've always had for me is being a pack mule, the bag weighs subjectively very little to me.

I have a hard time understanding how I ever needed checked baggage, let alone feel constrained by only having an allowance of one.

Keep in mind that the size of the person makes a huge impact - I have enormous feet, any time I need more than one pair of shoes (lets say I'm traveling for a wedding and need dress shoes and sneakers) then my packing is totally fucked. Same stuff applies to most of my clothing, although to a lesser extent.

In contrast my various partners I've had in my life have been mostly petite women who could fit an entire wardrobe in my suit bag.

absurd amount

IMO the practically available volume is the biggest advantage of using a wheel-less bag. On a standardish 22"x14"x8" (~55x35x20 cm) international carry-on size bag, one with no wheels can easily have 25% more interior volume than an identically box constrained wheeled bag. Especially those four castor bags you are losing a full 3 inches off of the bottom of the bag. People also underestimate the volume used for the collapsing handle and structure to transmit the load to the wheels.

In practice for me, this means that I can fit a "normal" amount of stuff in a max size personal item 18"x14"x8", and never have to worry about being forced to pay for a carry-on or have my bag gate checked.

People have become convinced they need all kinds of stuff to get through a vacation.

The old timey Jersey Shore slur for a lower-class tourist is a Shoebie, which comes from a time when working class people would catch a bus or train to the beach with everything they needed for the day in an old shoebox tied with string. You don't see people traveling light like that anymore.

I've noticed it in myself, I nearly always drive to my vacations, and I overpack because why not? Pretty quickly I'm packing for a weekend trip to my in-laws as though I'm going to shit my pants three times, work out three times, go to church twice, and have absolutely zero opportunity to do any laundry even in an emergency.

If you limit yourself to packing less stuff, and wearing your clothing multiple times without washing, you don't need so much bag space.

Seconding @pigeonburger, I'm not even packing light! I always have a laptop (Macbook Pro, not even a slim one) and iPad. I'll usually have two pairs of shoes in the bag (running shoes and dress shoes). Running clothes, dressier clothes for work, a hat for running, a warm hat for chilly days, and more.

I'm with you on overpacking for driving trips because it just doesn't matter - throwing another bag in the car is pretty much the same thing as doing one fewer. On flying trips though, it's just unreasonably convenient to have the soft-sided bag to avoid ever needing to even gate-check a bag. I wouldn't quite go so far as calling it a virtue to figure out travel economy, but it's something in that direction.

I'd put it under the broader virtue of Adaptability in the same way I think that having an adaptable diet is a virtue.

Be vegan or Paleo or keep keto or bread and water. That discipline is a virtue. But so is being the kind of person that can eat something anywhere without being sick. When your diet causes you to not to be adaptable to being out of your comfort zone it ceases to be a virtue and becomes a vice.

In the same way, being able to pack light is a virtue, even if doing so in every case isn't the best choice. Only being able to travel with multiple checked bags is bad, so is being the kind of person who comes to a formal wedding in cargo pants because you refused to pack anything else.

Idk I'm working on it.

Airports and train stations have always been perfect use cases for wheeled luggage, but nobody started using them until the late 90s/early 00s. I remember as a child in the early 90s every airport had huge racks of carts you could rent for $0.25 because nobody had wheels on their suitcases.

Isn't this largely a case of democratization?

Luggage before wheeled suitcases didn't look like wheeled suitcases without wheels. You had the small suitcase and the sailor's duffle bag, which were have hand mobile and held a change of clothes or two that an ordinary traveler might pack for a trip, and then you had the steamer trunk an upper class traveler would pack which was designed to be moved and stacked primarily by porters and maximized for durability when stacked in a luggage car or the belly of a ship.

The value of an individual traveler moving a large bag by themselves really only comes into play recently, with the democratization of middle class travel and the disappearance of porters. Along with people having the expectation of packing more clothing!

Every airport I've been to recently still has carts you can just pick up and use for free, and they work much better than wheeled luggage.

I'm sure luggage makers love the wheels though, because they break and make people want to buy new luggages much more often.

If you're going to be walking at all with your luggage outside the airport then carts don't help you at all. The lack of wheels only works if you're assuming a car direct from your house door to the airport and vice versa, that's very much not the case in large parts of the world (in London I'd take the Elizabeth line underground tube from Heathrow to Liverpool Street and then take a taxi from there if necessary, I wouldn't take a taxi from Heathrow back home).

Antibiotics - As far as I know, there is nothing about penicillin as an antibiotic agent that could not have hypothetically been developed and systematized 2000 years ago - this would not have required any modern technology. To be fair, there may have been ancient cultures that had an intricate knowledge of plant-derived drugs and so on that are at least relatively comparable... but to my knowledge, none of them developed something like modern antibiotics, which revolutionized the world and basically immediately did away with the whole literary genre of "lonesome poet dies at 30 from tuberculosis".

They did have something like that; using poultices and the idea that "mouldy bread is a cure" was around for a long time:

Moulds (i.e. filamentous fungi) were widely used as curative agents in all of the world’s cultures well before Fleming’s famous discovery of penicillin in 1928. Imhotep, an ancient Egyptian practitioner, for example, used mouldy bread to treat infections of the face (Wainwright et al., 1992). The literature from more recent folk medicine has documented some other examples of the use of moulds on infections. For example, mouldy jam and mouldy bread were widely used in folk-based therapy in Quebec (Canada), Devon (UK), and Kansas (USA) and poultices made from mouldy chewed barley and apple have long been used in Asia to cure surface wounds. In 1640, one of London apothecaries also advised that moulds have a curative effect when applied to infections (Wainwright, 1989).

What they did not have was Science! Or rather, the development of technology, theory and knowledge that gave us modern science. Fleming's discovery was accidental, but he was looking for it. What the ancients did not have were petri dish cultures or the means to isolate and scale up production of useful fungi and bacteria.

It's the same old story: hindsight is great for telling us how easy it is, once you already know how to do it. But even being very smart two thousand years ago will not get over the gap of "we just don't have the devices, or the tech to make the devices, or the engineering standards to make that tech". You can't speedrun growth from "baby to adult, six weeks", it has to be done incrementally.

This makes me think AI might very well be in that "it's so obvious what they were looking at in hindsight" department. We're so obviously bumbling around with not enough of a theoretical framework for what we're building in a way that is reminiscent of pre-scientific ways.

There was that famous post that GPT-2 would have been possible with early 2000s and possibly even late 90s supercomputer compute with the right optimizations, so it language models surely count as one of these inventions.

Most insights are far easier to understand in hindsight. Personally I think as enlightenment culture sort of slowly sloughs off we will have all sorts of new discoveries, freed from the blinders of our past.

Free markets - It seems at least plausible these days to many decently intelligent people that free-ish markets (too much freedom in markets has its own problems but...) serve as a good communicator of economic information, and that this can help relatively free market economic systems at least in some cases to outcompete central planning (there are many other factors involved of course, but this is one of them...). I'm not aware of anyone having had this kind of hypothesis until a few hundred years ago. But it's the kind of idea you can explain to a decently intelligent 17 year old kid nowadays, it's not something that requires mountains of highly specific knowledge to grasp.

I disagree on both counts.

You can find vague rumblings about something like free markets for thousands of years, we don't tend to find a fully fleshed out theory mostly because of what texts survive and what and who was politically effective and powerful throughout most of human history. It took centuries for merchants to be powerful enough to write important texts, and for enough writing to be preserved that we could read them, but you find evidence that people understood the idea of market pricing forever.

The flip side is, free markets are radically counterintuitive, and almost no one actually understands and believes in them because of their understanding. A bright 17 year old who "understands" free market superiority is just doing so in the way that a 17 year centuries before us "understood" the trinity: they can't work it out from first principles, but they can recite it.

Almost no one actually believes in free markets in the true sense, witness the recent Republican turn against the free market while still claiming to be free market true believers. Every government thinks price controls will work for them, just this one time. Every government believes that just a few subsidies and tax benefits here and there can build an industry. Surrendering fully to the impersonal evolutionary logic of the market is near impossible for most people. When you talk to people, almost no one can truly grok that it's all by accident, they point to designs, to national or international planners, to individual heroes; they have trouble emotionally comprehending the idea that the market is made up of an infinite number of selfish actors.

Similarly with evolution, the belief in micro-evolution may be obvious, but the idea of macro-evolution from single-cell to elephant, is not at all intuitive, and requires an understanding of time scales that almost no one possesses.

And it seems worth noting that the scientific consensus only pushed for massive timescales around the time macroevolution started catching on, and animals changing from one kind to a slightly different kind has been around forever.

Good point! I didn't think about the introduction of geological time into the mix.

IIRC- I could be wrong- the Usher chronology(what most people in the anglosphere think of when they hear 'young earth creationism'- there are other chronologies based on biblical literalism, this is just the most popular. Eastern christianity has usually thought the earth about a thousand years older, for example) was actually criticized when first introduced for being longer than the earth was usually understood to be.

Every government thinks price controls will work for them, just this one time.

The rationing systems during WWII I think were a success.

Every government believes that just a few subsidies and tax benefits here and there can build an industry.

And they are sometimes right.

Free markets are a tool. They are not ideology. They are not a goal. What governments don't understand is that to have price control you have to manipulate demand and supply one way or another for them to match at the price you want.

The rationing systems during WWII I think were a success.

Yes, but the objectives of the market change between war and peacetime in highly relevant ways.

A market has no objectives aside from matching buyers and sellers.

Free markets

I suspect the reason free markets took so long to catch on is that the most valuable commodity in human history does not respond particularly well to free markets - namely, annual staple crops.

An ideal free market good is fungible and does not spoil, easy to transport, and has flexible supply and demand. Excess goods on the market can be absorbed through lower prices and reduced production, while deficiencies spur increased production through higher prices, resulting in rapid recalibration towards efficient prices for the good.

Staple crops are obviously not like this at all. They spoil fairly rapidly if overproduced (mostly through pests eating them), and excess food is worthless at any price - a person can really only carry so much fat on them. Meanwhile, underproduction is a literal life-and-death affair, and bringing the goods to market a few months late is going to be less profitable, because everyone involved is dead. To reap crops you need to sow them well in advance, and even when you do, you really have very little control over what is produced (good year? Bad year? Who knows?). Even with all that in mind, most people are self-producing anyway, so the “market” would only be skilled labor and up, which is what, under 10% of the population? Finally, they’re really not efficient to transport on anything but a boat, and even then it’s somewhat risky and therefore expensive business.

So the right model for staple crops is a lot less free market and a lot more risk mitigation. Most of that risk mitigation is decentralized, but central authorities were very interested in helping out, like the Roman dole or the Egyptian granaries. Either way, there’s more demand for theory on agriculture, harvests, and models of good and bad kingship than for free markets, and that’s exactly what we get for most of history.

It’s only once advances in European sail coincide with the durable products of flexible industrial manufacturing to create new centers of value that the free market becomes a more relevant abstraction, and just at that point, the theory emerges to explain why merchant powers are dominating the old land-bound interests. C’est la vie. (I’m sure the spice trade factors in too.)

Prediction markets were probably viable as soon as the first stock exchange was established in 1602. But Robin Hanson did not invent them until 1988, and they are still mostly illegal. If humanity ever gets it act together, we are going to be kicking ourselves for a long time.

(Okay, yes, the idea relies on the efficient market hypothesis, which wasn't really popularized until 1970, but people had already noted that the market was unpredictable as early as 1900. The core insight of "market movement is unpredictable because the current price of an asset already incorporates everyone's best guess about its future value" took a surprisingly long time.)

As far as historical examples, we can add the printing press (much better than scribes), the codex (much better than scrolls), Arabic numerals with a dedicated zero symbol (much better than Roman numerals), and the alphabet (much better than logographs; looking at you, China).

They did. They were called insurance markets. See this 1907 article in the New York Times titled The Greatest Gambling House in the World. It outlines how since the company's founding the legitimate marine insurance business has been walled off from the "prediction market" aspect, which was wholly underwritten by individual members.

It's an interesting question of why the Chinese never switched to an alphabet. The Egyptians invented it(that's what demotic script is). The Koreans invented it. The Japanese derived a sort-of alphabet from the same script, even.

As far as I know, writing was invented independently in Egypt, Sumer, China, and the Maya. Egyptian and Sumerian writing became alphabets in regular use, Chinese writing was developed into an alphabet multiple times but not used that way in the heartland, and Mayan writing was replaced by Spanish before the question could come up.

They have lots of languages in China. Most Chinese people historically didn't speak Mandarin and had no use for Mandarin speech transcribed one phoneme at a time. Characters that mean entire words are quite useful as a common written language in a nation that is so pluralistic that most people lack a common spoken language with people outside of their local region.

This is true even in the modern era. Chairman Mao learned Mandarin as an adult and it shows in his strange accent and phrasing. Like almost everyone, he grew up speaking his local language, not a common national language. But any text written by any Chinese person would be understood by him.

Today Chinese schools demand students speak the common language in class. Outside of school many still speak in local languages which are entirely different than Mandarin. I've seen shanghaiese people switch to shanghaiese to prevent people from other regions and foreigners from understanding them. Rudely right in front of everyone obviously talking about us.

But yeah, bit odd they didn't think to also make a phoneme based script so they could write out their local languages. I was going to say they actually have that, but Google tells me that was invented in the 20th century. And even the Koreans had periods in which hangul was banned and all writing was mandatory Chinese only.

But yeah, bit odd they didn't think to also make a phoneme based script so they could write out their local languages. I was going to say they actually have that, but Google tells me that was invented in the 20th century.

Before the 20th century the vast bulk of the Chinese population was illiterate. And those that were literate were plugged into the imperial system of governance, which required the use of hanzi. There were some exceptions where ethnic minorities came up with their own syllabic scripts, but this happened mainly on the Yun-Gui plateau as far as I know, which I personally don't even consider China proper.

It's an interesting question of why the Chinese never switched to an alphabet.

My take is that it allowed mutual intelligibility between various Sinitic languages. You can have a man speaking Mandarin write a text and a man speaking only Cantonese or Wu will be able to read it. It will sound weird, like German translated into English word-for-word (yesterday is a female patient in the clinic come that such fear before tooth doctors had that she during the examination to scream begun has then upstood and out the building run is), but it will be legible. Without it a unified China would've been very unstable.

Now that everyone is taught Mandarin it might be easier to switch to bopomofo, but this would separate the newer generations from China's massive literary legacy.

I'm confused. Prediction markets are a re-codification of a bunch of already-existing markets and are more 'a proposal to try and regear betting exchanges' than they are anything essentially new.

and they are still mostly illegal

In the US. Licensed bookmakers in the UK can take bets on almost anything - betting on election results and royal baby names has been commonplace since well before 1988 - Robin Hanson did not invent prediction markets, and knows this. The commentariat on www.politicalbetting.com was the place to find the best non-partisan discussion of UK politics in the heyday of the OG blogosphere. I do not think that the existence of liquid prediction markets on UK politics (particularly after the foundation of Betfair reduced the large bid-ask spreads implied by dealing with a traditional bookmaker) has delivered the kind of benefits that US boosters of prediction markets expect.

My gut feeling is that the reason why prediction markets are currently the cool thing in non-leftist rationalist culture is:

  • There were two close elections in the US (2016 and 2024) where biased pundits mis-represented the polls (which said the election was too close to call) and implied that the Democrat was well ahead. Prediction markets outperformed the pundits to a much larger degree than they outperformed honest polling aggregators like Nate Silver.
  • Cryptobros looking for a less obviously anti-social use case for crypto than scams, ponzi schemes and ransomware.

Antibiotics - As far as I know, there is nothing about penicillin as an antibiotic agent that could not have hypothetically been developed and systematized 2000 years ago

If this had happened, would we know? What if overuse caused antibiotic resistance and caused it to be abandoned?

I'm not saying I believe this, I just find it interesting to ponder.

Natural selection

I seem to recall that the idea of common descent (which might imply or include natural selection?) was known to the ancient Greeks. I don't recall the details, though!

What if overuse caused antibiotic resistance and caused it to be abandoned

We have already overused two different aphrodisiacs to extinction in ancient times, egypt and ancient grece

What if overuse caused antibiotic resistance and caused it to be abandoned?

AFAICT, antibiotic resistance is likely to be a big problem with STD's in the near future, and is a minor problem with certain skin diseases in the present(think staph, athletes foot, etc), but it probably won't be a problem with other diseases because the actual mechanisms for antibiotic resistance are mostly fitness reducing in a vacuum.

Antibiotic resistance is more of an ongoing process instead of a binary state, one issue we run into is that sometimes we do have agents available but they may be slower (and therefore less helpful in severe disease) or more commonly they are way more dangerous.

We'll run out of drugs that treat you without killing your kidneys well before we run out of drugs period.

Incidentally- penicillin still works great (and is the drug of choice) for syphilis.

Song China was relatively free market over 1000 years ago. And yes, this led to them having much more prosperity for everyone than either the dynasty before or after them.

There are also pretty well founded arguments that periods in the Roman Empire had - especially in Rome proper - relatively free markets for many goods and to some extent land. Market capitalism in various forms has existed for at least a couple of thousand years.

The importance of status and peer judgment for promoting behavior. Outside of the workplace, there are few social contexts that try to guide or optimize behavior by consciously and meticulously allocating status. Especially not in a rigorous way to curb antisocial behavior.

Institutional cycles of growth and decay. To some extent of course people were writing about this in 'Decline of the West' and 'Hard times -> Strong men' but the knowledge hasn't widely circulated. Management of large organizations is still generally awful, there is no science of good management, only vague notions and a few people who have some opaque skill at doing it.

Also state-sponsored eugenics isn't exactly a new idea... but nobody does it. It's not that complicated to gather the smartest, most agentic, most capable men and women and encourage them to marry and raise many children, or collect sperm, let alone direct genetic modification. But not a single state is interested in this, everyone prefers to pour trillions of dollars and billions of child-hours into education where the returns are dubious in many cases.

Institutional cycles of growth and decay. To some extent of course people were writing about this in 'Decline of the West' and 'Hard times -> Strong men' but the knowledge hasn't widely circulated.

Within my church (Latter-day Saint i.e. Mormon) this has been common knowledge among members for almost 200 years. One of the main themes of the Book of Mormon is what we call the "pride cycle." People follow God and are blessed with peace and prosperity, their prosperity causes them to forget God and become prideful in their own accomplishments (instead of giving the credit to God), and this causes them to be brought low by God (whether through external invasion by the Lamanites, internal dissent/civil war, or other things like famine etc.).

These ideas are also present in the Bible (Deuteronomy 11 is one of the better examples) but the nature of the cycle is far more explicit in the Book of Mormon.

Ibn Khaldun and Carol Zimmerman have also derived this from historical studies.

Calculus - You can teach this to any decently intelligent 17 year old kid nowadays, but, while there were some remarkably close predecessors to it in ancient Greece (the method of exhaustion), it was not formalized as a rigorous concept and method until about the 18th-19th centuries.

Calculus doesn't become low-hanging fruit until you have co-ordinate geometry. Descartes publishes La Geometrie in 1637 and Newton publishes Principia in 1687. In between you have a lot of work that develops calculus - most notably Barrow's proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus in 1670. (Barrow is conventionally listed in academic genealogies as Newton's PhD-supervisor equivalent.) The first analysis proof that is considered rigorous by modern standards was Rolle's theorem in 1690 and the first important result in analysis is Taylor's theorem in 1715. That is a much faster development than implied by your post, although I suppose you can argue that something that should have taken years took decades.

But that just pushes the problem back a step. Co-ordinate geometry was low-hanging fruit for the 1800 years between Apollonius and Descartes. I think the explanation here is that mathematics got stuck on a local maximum. Apollonius developed the classical geometry of conic sections to the point where (for the few people able to master it) it was more powerful than co-ordinate geometry without calculus. There is also a weird status thing going on. The mathematical brain finds co-ordinate geometry ugly and hackish. As late as the 1990's, part of an old-school mathematical education was the idea that submitting a correct co-ordinate geometry proof when a classical one was available would get you full marks and the lasting scorn and derision of the examiner. In the 17th century, this was compounded by the problem that calculus arguments (though not co-ordinate geometry without calculus) could not be made as mathematically rigorous as geometric ones because modern analysis hadn't been developed yet. Barrow lectured on co-ordinate geometry (that's how Newton learned it) but he published on classical geometry (he started his career as a classicist and his work that was most prestigious in his own lifetime was new translations of the great Greek geometers). Both Barrow and Newton published work that to modern eyes was clearly done using co-ordinate geometry and pre-calculus, but was re-derived using classical geometry for respectable publication.

Antibiotics - As far as I know, there is nothing about penicillin as an antibiotic agent that could not have hypothetically been developed and systematized 2000 years ago - this would not have required any modern technology. To be fair, there may have been ancient cultures that had an intricate knowledge of plant-derived drugs and so on that are at least relatively comparable... but to my knowledge, none of them developed something like modern antibiotics, which revolutionized the world and basically immediately did away with the whole literary genre of "lonesome poet dies at 30 from tuberculosis".

Fleming's original discovery could have been made by anyone, but actually synthesizing penicillin in useful quantities required (in our timeline) modern industrial chemistry. I think it could have been done 50-100 years earlier if alt-Fleming takes his discovery to the brewing industry (the hard part is growing fungus cleanly on a carbohydrate feedstock) rather than pharma, but not before that.

It makes me wonder what kinds of insights might be lying around these days, which future generations, if we do not discover them, might wonder what took us so long.

I think the physical sciences have been picked pretty clean by now - my best guess of where to look next is that there could be simple models of the human brain that will be obvious in hindsight to someone with access to 2050's neuroscience and psychology that isn't neutered by political biases, but that could be discovered today.

It is a small local example, but the discovery of superconductivity in MgB2 in 2001 was an example of unpicked low-hanging fruit in solid-state physics - the stuff had been available in obscure chemical catalogues since the 1950's but nobody had tested it for superconductivity.

Fleming's original discovery could have been made by anyone, but actually synthesizing penicillin in useful quantities required (in our timeline) modern industrial chemistry. I think it could have been done 50-100 years earlier if alt-Fleming takes his discovery to the brewing industry (the hard part is growing fungus cleanly on a carbohydrate feedstock) rather than pharma, but not before that.

The pathway to discovery which we took involved noticing that mold was stopping the growth of cultivated bacteria. To take that pathway, you require the cultivation of individual bacteria colonies. This is not trivial, because in nature everything is full of all kinds of spores, and you basically need a theory of germs. Simply, the discovery "mold kills bacteria in a petri dish" requires "one can grow bacteria in a petri dish". Basically, it took Pasteur (ca 1859) to discover the latter fact, before him people generally thought that bacteria would form spontaneously. Fleming discovered his ruined cultures in 1928, and then it took another 15 years or so to really get the production up. I guess I half-agree with your assessment, in that I think there was probably 50 years worth of slack, but I don't think it was 100 years, and certainly not 2000 years as the OP suggested.

I think the explanation here is that mathematics got stuck on a local maximum. Apollonius developed the classical geometry of conic sections to the point where (for the few people able to master it) it was more powerful than co-ordinate geometry without calculus.

Interestingly enough Spengler (himself a math teacher) had this as one of his illustrations of the difference between classical and faustian mentality. I have found this to be a great unintentional illustration of the idea.

As late as the 1990's, part of an old-school mathematical education was the idea that submitting a correct co-ordinate geometry proof when a classical one was available would get you full marks and the lasting scorn and derision of the examiner.

Funnily enough classical geometry can be made to admit a coordinate system over it so both classical and (basic) coordinate geometry are effectively isomorphic in the sense that C++ and Conway's game of life are isomorphic (both are Turing Complete). Both classical and coordinate geometry have a proof theoretic ordinal of omega and even more there's actually a canonical way to convert statements of coordinate geometry to statements of classical geometry and vice versa so it's not even like using coordinate geometry when there's a classical geometry proof is like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Both theories are equally powerful in what they can do, it's just that the coordinate geometry formalism is easier to build upon which in my view makes it superior.

(Can you tell I hated the geometry problems in olympiads?)

Funnily enough classical geometry can be made to admit a coordinate system over it so both classical and (basic) coordinate geometry are effectively isomorphic in the sense that C++ and Conway's game of life are isomorphic (both are Turing Complete).

The cry of the Intercal programmer. Whether classical geometry corresponds to Intercal and co-ordinate geometry to Python or the other way round is let as an exercise to the interested reader.

(Can you tell I hated the geometry problems in olympiads?)

So did I, but then I don't claim to be a mathematician.

I never did figure out why classical geometry was given such place in our high school curriculum. It seemed that any time I wanted to actually use geometry for anything, it was strictly better to use coordinate geometry and trigonometry. Then again, I still consider proofs to be a waste of time unless you want to study mathematics for its own sake.

Broke: Uses classical geometry to solve problem

Woke: Uses coordinate geometry and a bit of algebra

Bespoke: Converts problem into statement of Number Theory via its Godel numbering, then proceeds to directly prove it.

And it took a good twenty years to figure that out, the first large scale use of antibiotics didn’t start until 1944.

Thanks for this deep analysis, much of which I don't have the scientific background to understand. If I may ask, why would it take modern industrial chemistry to synthesize penicillin in useful quantities? I suppose that I have been wrong in thinking that it could be synthesized by pre-modern techniques?

Edit: I should also note that to me, a dabbler in mathematics, this survey of mathematical thought-trends and their impact on the history of mathematics is fascinating.

I'm not the relevant expert, but my understanding is that it is basically just scaling. You need a clean culture of penicillium mold (in optimal culture conditions other species of molds, most of them toxin-producing, outcompete it), and you need enough of it to produce enough penicillin to extract and use. Florey had a cottage industry set up in his lab with a low-double-figures number of labtechs making the stuff, and was not able to produce enough penicillin to run a clinical trial.

I recently watched a video of a guy making penicillin. Unless I'm really missing something I don't see how you could safely produce it at any sort of reasonable scale without countless advancements in in dozens of fields from glassmaking, chemistry, genetics, germ theory, etc. Even with the knowledge of the 1930s it took them two decades from discovery to use it effectively.

Shoot, maybe I really underestimated how hard it is to do this.

I've had this fantasy of traveling a thousand years into the past and trying to teach monks and engigneors modern technology with just my layman's understanding. I was pretty much going to try experimenting with feeding moldy bread to dudes with the bubonic plague.

Welp... if I ever get a time machine I guess I won't be doing that.

You could write a whole genre of fiction about that.

The destiny's crucible series by Olan Thorensen is like this. The writing is not amazing but if you don't care too much about that it scratches that kind of itch.

Axis of Time which is WW2 focused.

You can introduce the spinning wheel, four field system, new world crops, and printing press and see big QoL improvements though.

I've had this fantasy of traveling a thousand years into the past and trying to teach monks and engigneors modern technology with just my layman's understanding. I was pretty much going to try experimenting with feeding moldy bread to dudes with the bubonic plague.

Just try to get everyone to wash their damn hands and you're golden.

That is not how the plague spread- the plague, typhus, etc are spread by fleas carried by rodents. As it turns out, most people don't like drinking dirty water or eating with dirty hands for 'ew' reasons, even without germ theory.

It's possible that the premodern custom of controlling cat populations by killing them for sport was an exacerbating factor to the plague, but rat and mouse overpopulation also kinda just happens in densely packed slums.

Hard to do when everyone is shitting in the water supply.

Better be careful it's the right sort of mould; not just useful penicillin grows on stale bread, the wrong species of aspergillus will make you very sorry you tried it. And again, without the theoretical knowledge and tech to identify "is this blackish mould the right one or not?", you're taking a big chance.

Some Aspergillus species cause serious disease in humans and animals. The most common pathogenic species are A. fumigatus and A. flavus, which produces aflatoxin which is both a toxin and a carcinogen, and which can contaminate foods such as nuts. The most common species causing allergic disease are A. fumigatus and A. clavatus. Other species are important as agricultural pathogens. Aspergillus spp. cause disease on many grain crops, especially maize, and some variants synthesize mycotoxins, including aflatoxin. Aspergillus can cause neonatal infections.

Yes. There's a whole sub branch of my fantasy that involves me getting chased down as a warlock (male witch) representative of Satan because of failed Galileo things.

Off the top of my head:

Computer algorithms. I consider this basically the new literacy.

Quantum Physics: I firmly believe we’ll have a pretty good idea how it all works, probably by 2050.

I’ll agree with the idea of dietary guidelines being much better than now, but I don’t think it’s that we have absolutely no idea how it works so much is that nobody actually likes the results. Food manufacturers do not want to hear and the public doesn’t like. Basically the solution is to eat mostly vegetables with meat and starches being about a quarter of the meal each. Eat as minimally processed as you can, and avoid refined carbs. It’s not that we’re stupid, it’s that we don’t like that kind of food, and billions are made catering to what people want even though we know it’s bad.

Computer algorithms. I consider this basically the new literacy.

I took a first-year Computer Science course ten-ish years ago, and at the end the prof said: "If you went back in time 50 years with what you know now, you'd be one of the most knowledgeable Computer Scientists alive."

We were doing simple things like algorithmic complexity, sorting algorithms, linked lists, binary trees, and object-oriented programming (and did conditions, loops, control flow, etc. in the previous class), and...he might not have been exaggerating. A lot of the things we learned were discovered/created in the past 50 years, and they aren't just minor pieces of trivia.

What part of quantum physics do you think isn’t understood? Quantum mechanics is the foundation of modern physics so much so that it seems very mundane by the time you're done with grad school. It's not only the relevant to what's going on in physics-y things like colliders and quantim computers but it's the basis of our understanding of the properties of materials, chemical reactions, MRI, transistors, and geckos' feet.

There are two pieces of quantum mechanics that don't quite mesh with other things we know about reality. The first is quantum gravity, which the physics community thought was just around the corner for decades, and which now I think most people feel we aren’t going to definitively answer until we can probe significantly higher enery scales to be certain which of the possible approaches is correct. Most people don't really expect this to change what we understand about the way quantum mechanics works (which you can derivce from classical physics plus the uncertainty principle). I fully do not believe that quantum gravity will be figured out by 2050, because it hasn't happened in the last 80 years, and we've been stuck at the "maybe string theory?" stage for about 50.

The second "missing piece" is related to decoherence and wave function collapse. It's weird the extent to which certain parts of the community think this is a solved problem by just hand-waving it all as decoherence. But a diagonal density matrix isn't the same as picking one specific outcome, and so you need something like many worlds (which actually has a significant problem in that probabilities don't emerge correctly, which is generally also ignored) to ensure everone only sees one outcome.

I don't expect this to be solved by 2050 either because A) vanishingly few people seem to care B) the answer doesn’t affect much of anything C) most hypothetical sutions are untestable even in principal (some involve non linearities or relationships between mass and collapse rate that are testable in principal, but I think most of those have been ruled out).

This. Our current understanding of quantum physics is ultimately called the standard model of particle physics. This theory basically got its finishing touches mid-1970. Since then, we have found a few missing pieces of the puzzle predicted by the SM, such as the top quark or the Higgs.

Besides the open questions which were apparent ca. 1975 (Can we unify the strong and electroweak interaction? How the fuck should gravity fit into all of that?), we have found a few more puzzles (e.g. so at least some neutrinos have mass, dark matter seems to be implied by astronomical observations).

These open problems have been attracting theoretical physicists -- and I have no reason to believe that the current top theoreticians are simply less smart than Einstein or Dirac. So far, we have not made enough progress that one could confidently predict a timeline. If we do not get an AI-powered singularity, it seems certainly possible that by 2125, the progress we will have made is that our best candidate from string theory will be somewhat less ruled out by the SM.

I think dietary science is an open field for this. 60 years of scientists bumbling around about monosaturaded vs polysatured fats, or whether carbs are good this year. How long to fast, when to eat a big meal, etc.

Reminds me of the per-rigerous calculus days, and one day a bright 17 year old with a simple model would find all our scientists embarrassingly naive

Yeah, the entire field of dietary science always reminds me of the factoid that Aristotle thought men had more teeth than women - and then the entire "scientific" establishment believed that for several centuries without ever just... checking.

Hopefully, it'll turn out that we can just measure this. Take a couple of hundred people on a retreat and count what you feed them.

Aristotle thought men had more teeth than women

I wonder if part of that was from the old idea that "you lose a tooth for every child". Lack of proper nutrition means the developing foetus leeches nutrients from the mother's body, and if you're an ancient empiricist and you go about counting the teeth of women of child-bearing age versus men in the same age range, it's entirely possible you might end up with "men have more teeth than women".

Childbearing has an impact on the health of women, and the impact grows with the number of times a woman has been pregnant for longer than 24 weeks. Pregnancy and breastfeeding put energy demands on a woman and can cause permanent changes to a mother’s health.

What’s less well known is the relationship between parity and oral health. That’s despite a widespread customary belief that having an increasing number of children results in tooth loss. “Gain a child, lose a tooth”, or “for every child, a tooth is lost” are common proverbs in many societies. The biological basis of these beliefs is still questioned.

There are few studies on parity and tooth loss. In addition, the available results are inconsistent. Nevertheless, increasing number of children in women has been associated with tooth loss in some populations, as seen in studies in Uganda and the US.

Yeah, there's several theories like that. It's also possible he counted including wisdom teeth - because women are statistically more likely to never have (some of) their wisdom teeth break through.

The point is, he (and his followers across the centuries) evidently never just counted the teeth (or the tooth gaps) of people.

There is also some variance in wisdom teeth: most people have 4, but other numbers happen from time to time. I know some family members of mine had only 2 or 3. More than 4 is possible too.

We've been doing detailed studies for 80 years!

And we still have this deep confusion about whats going on. Citing an old SSC post:

In 1965, some scientists locked people in a room where they could only eat nutrient sludge dispensed from a machine. Even though the volunteers had no idea how many calories the nutrient sludge was, they ate exactly enough to maintain their normal weight, proving the existence of a “sixth sense” for food caloric content.

Next, they locked morbidly obese people in the same room. They ended up eating only tiny amounts of the nutrient sludge, one or two hundred calories a day, without feeling any hunger. This proved that their bodies “wanted” to lose the excess weight and preferred to simply live off stored fat once removed from the overly-rewarding food environment. After six months on the sludge, a man who weighed 400 lbs at the start of the experiment was down to 200, without consciously trying to reduce his weight.

Yeah, this confusion is kind of my point. The lipostat hypothesis is still a bit controversial after 80+ years. If a "set point" for weight truly exists somewhere in the system, it's still not clear what raises this set point, and why lowering it again seems extremely difficult.

There's plenty of studies that indicate that once the set point has been raised, it can't be easily lowered again. This is, funnily enough, contradictory to your 1965 study (unless the 400 lbs -> 200 lbs guy was short, and 200 lbs was still obese). Or maybe only more modern food additives raise the set point permanently? I don't think we know, and almost nobody (relative to how important those questions are) seems to actually test things on large groups of people.

Some other Scott quotes. From "Book Review: Good Calories, Bad Calories":

The failure of small dietary changes to produce major changes in weight suggests something more complicated is going on.

Nutritionists tend to scoff at the idea that weight is anything beyond a simple calories in - calories out balance, and for understandable reason. The First Law of Thermodynamics, that mass/energy can neither be created nor destroyed, means that food mass/energy has to go somewhere. If you put it in your body, either you burn it for exercise or it stays in your body and becomes fat. This is why smug people sometimes say that they're following "the physics diet" of eating less and exercising more as opposed to thinking diet pills or fad diets can do much good. Fancy biochemistry stuff has nothing to do with it, mere sophistry on the part of people who claim to have "bad metabolisms" in the same way people used to say they were "big boned".

But even my limited amount of medical knowledge is enough to know this isn't true. There are a bunch of diseases - Prader-Willi Syndrome, hypothyroidism, hypothalamic lesions - that cause obesity. There are even drugs you can take that cause obesity - some of the antipsychotics are famous for this. And by playing around with mice genes, you can get anything from disgusting spherical mice to mice that look like they just got out of a concentration camp, even if they're all feeding out of the same bowl of Mouse Chow.

The book's solution - which I think is pretty standard now - is to say that yes, fat has to follow the laws of thermodynamics, but thermodynamics doesn't specify what is controlling the equation. It could be that your diet and exercise are controlling the weight gain. Or it could be that some innate tendency to weight gain is controlling the amount you diet and exercise.

And it seems to be some combination of the two. Realistically, I know not everything is determined by some mysterious inner process - sometimes I just see a cupcake, and want it, and eat it, and I know my having eaten it is determined completely by the fact that I happened to come across it at that moment and no one was watching (obviously a mysterious inner process could have prevented me from eating it by making me feel really full, but that's different). On the other hand, I accept that a lot of the time I eat things it's because my body is telling me I'm hungry, and a lot of the time I don't eat things it's because my body is telling me I'm full, and a lot of the time I exercise it's because my body is telling me I'm antsy, and so on.

So the idea is of an obesity set point. If you get fatter than your body's hidden set point, it makes you a little less hungry and more willing to exercise until you get back down. If you get leaner than your body's hidden set point, it makes you a little hungrier and more tired until you get back up. It is subtle, complicated, and more than enough to sabotage the diet plans of nearly everyone.

Taubes' work supporting the concept of an obesity set point is really spectacular. He talked about both terrible-sounding studies where scientists forced people to subsist on starvation diets, and fun-sounding studies where scientists forced people to eat as many sundaes as they could stuff into their faces. In both cases, people went to desperate lengths to return to their previous weight, and felt absolutely miserable when denied the opportunity (these studies disproportionately came from the military - in every other setting, people just gave the scientists the finger and broke the study rules after a few days). And this happened whether or not the subjects were fat or thin - it wasn't like being fat provided a "buffer" where you were okay with a semi-starvation diet while your fat burned, you were just as desperate to return to your (high) set point as your thin friend was to return to her (lower) one.

This was accompanied by fascinating animal experiments where they would try to trick rats. Suppose a rat usually ate a 10 calorie diet. They would try to trick the rat by giving it a food that looked and tasted exactly like its old food, but was ten times as calorically dense; the rat would eat a tenth as much food and maintain its weight. If they gave it a food that was only a tenth as calorically dense, the rat would eat ten times as much - and maintain its weight. If they surgically stuck food into the rat's stomach, the rat would eat exactly as much additional food as was necessary to maintain its accustomed caloric input and its weight.

So people (and rats) are really good at maintaining their obesity set point. How come some people have higher set points than others, and why does this change over time?

And from "Contra Hallquist On Scientific Rationality":

Taubes believes the human body is good at regulating its own weight via the hunger mechanism. For example, most Asian people are normal weight, despite the Asian staple food being rice, which is high-calorie and available in abundance. Asians don’t get fat because they eat a healthy amount of rice, then stop. This doesn’t seem to require amazing willpower on their part; it just happens naturally.

In a similar vein is one of Taubes’ favorite studies, the Vermont Prison Experiment, where healthy thin prisoners were asked to gain lots of weight to see if they could do it. The prisoners had lots of trouble doing so – they had to force themselves to eat even after they were full, and many failed, disgusted by the task. Some were able to eat enough food, only to find that they were filled with an almost irresistible urge to exercise, pace back and forth, tap their legs, or otherwise burn off the extra calories. Those prisoners who were able to successfully gain weight lost it almost instantly after the experiment was over and they were no longer being absolutely forced to maintain it. The conclusion was that healthy people just can’t gain weight even if they want to, a far cry from the standard paradigm of “it takes lots of willpower not to gain weight”.

Other such experiments focused on healthy thin rats. The rats were being fed as much rat food as they wanted, but never overate. The researchers tried to trick the rats by increasing the caloric density of the rat food without changing the taste, but the rats just ate less of it to get the same amount of calories as before. Then the researchers took the extreme step of surgically implanting food in the rats’ stomachs; the rats compensated by eating precisely that amount less of normal rat food and maintaining their weight. The conclusion was that rats, like Asians and prisoners, have an uncanny ability to maintain normal weight even in the presence of unlimited amounts of food they could theoretically be binging on.

Modern Westerners seem to be pretty unusual in the degree to which they lack this uncanny ability, suggesting something has disrupted it. If we can un-disrupt it, “just eat whatever and let your body take care of things” becomes a passable diet plan.

I sometimes explain this to people with the following metaphor: severe weight gain is a common side effect of psychiatric drug Clozaril. The average Clozaril user gains fifteen pounds, and on high doses fifty or a hundred pounds is not unheard of. Clozaril is otherwise very effective, so there have been a lot of efforts to cut down on this weight gain with clever diet programs. The journal articles about these all find that they fail, or “succeed” in the special social science way where if you dig deep enough you can invent a new endpoint that appears to have gotten 1% better if you squint. This Clozaril-related weight gain isn’t magic – it still happens because people eat more calories – but it’s not something you can just wish away either.

Imagine that some weird conspiracy is secretly dumping whole bottles of Clozaril into orange soda. Since most Americans drink orange soda, we find that overnight most Americans gain fifty pounds and become very obese.

Goofus says: “Well, it looks like Americans will just have to diet harder. We know diets rarely work, but I’m sure if you have enough willpower you can make it happen. Count every calorie obsessively. Also, exercise.”

Gallant says: “The whole problem is orange soda. If you stop drinking that, you can eat whatever else you want.”

Taubes’ argument is that refined carbohydrates are playing the role of Clozaril-in-orange-soda. If you don’t eat refined carbohydrates, your satiety mechanism will eventually go back to normal just like in Asians and prisoners and rats, and you can eat whatever else you want and won’t be tempted to have too much of it – or if you do have too much of it, you’ll exercise or metabolize it away. When he says you can “eat as much fat as you want”, he expects that not to be very much, once your broken satiety mechanism is fixed.

Taubes is wrong. The best and most recent studies suggest that avoiding refined carbohydrates doesn’t fix weight gain much more than avoiding any other high-calorie food. However, the Clozaril-in-orange-soda model, which is not original to Taubes but which he helped popularize, has further gained ground and is now arguably the predominant model among dietary researchers. It’s unclear what exactly the orange soda is – the worst-case scenario is that it’s something like calorically-dense heavily-flavored food, in which case learning this won’t be very helpful beyond current diet plans. The best-case scenario is that it’s just a disruption to the microbiome, and we can restore obese people to normal weight with a basic procedure which is very simple and not super-gross at all.

Reading those Scott quotes makes me wonder if the idea of a "set point" has just been tainted by association with low-status people, much like his observation on how Alex Jones latched onto a real environmental effect and turned "they're turning the frogs gay" into a national joke because people think he's lame.

I don't know man I think @MaiqTheTrue gets it right. We know what the best diet is (Mediterranean/Japanese diet). Mostly vegetables, some starches, fish, and a little bit of meat. It's just that no one wants to hear this. It's bad for food manufacturers because it obviates the need for their existence and most of the public wants to eat junk food or is ideologically opposed to certain elements of this diet.

Also it’s tasty but just… not as tasty as modern less healthy food. There’s a reason that as soon as Mediterranean people themselves get wealthy enough, they ditch.

I think hyper palatable foods represent a real hazard to the health of tge general population , and it’s something I think needs to be dealt with on a policy level alongside providing good public nutrition training in schools. It simply cannot be good for a nation to have 75% of the food in a typical grocery store be the highly processed hyper palatable foods that drive obesity, especially if you have them in single serve ready to eat formats that are found in every venue open to the public. America is a nation of snacking, and any place you go there will be snacks available for sale, even when it should not make sense. Do you really need to be able to buy a bag of chips (that’s actually 4 servings) at a hardware or clothing store? It’s weird to think about.

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