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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7655 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.

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.

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