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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7725 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.

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.

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