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TheDag  Per Aspera ad Astra  1yr ago (text post)   2766 thread views

Calling all Lurkers: Share your Dreams of Effortposting

It’s been pointed out recently that the topics discussed in the Culture War thread have gotten a bit repetitive. While I do think the Motte has a good spread on intellectual discussion, I’m always pushing for a wider range (dare I say diversity?) of viewpoints and topics in the CW thread.

I was a lurker for years, and I know that the barrier between having a thought and writing a top level comment in the CW thread can loom large indeed. Luckily I’m fresh out of inspiration, and would love to hear thoughts from folks about effortposts they want to write but haven’t gotten around to.

This of course applies to regulars who post frequently as well - share any and all topics you wish were discussed in the CW thread!

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The Three-Plate Method requires little more than three rocks, a decent dye, and a lot of patience; it has obvious applications from art to engineering to design, and is the core and fundamental of true standardization in parts... and was invented in the 1800s. Is there some obvious reason it wasn't invented so long ago we couldn't name the inventor (eg, prussian blue is magic)? Was it just reinvented and dropped over and over again? If neither, is it unique in how long it lay fallow or are there other similar spaces that could have been invented much earlier, and would have been useful, but weren't?

I wondered a similar thing when I encountered Primitive Technology's pot bellows. All it requires is a basic pottery vessel plus some sticks & twine and suddenly you have a method to smelt iron. Iron is extremely abundant but its high temperature requirement is why ancient civilizations settled for using bronze for so long, even though it's a pain in the ass to make. Almost all the bronze alloy recipes require combining metals that tend to not be naturally found near each other, so you need to trade or conquer your way across those distances. Bronze was the status quo for at least two thousand years, and the entire field of metallurgy could've started even earlier than that if only someone realized you could blow on fire to make it hotter.

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