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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7707 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.

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.

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