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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7835 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.

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.

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