Babylonian astronomy
“Feed a cold, starve a fever.” Rest, hydrate, and eat if you can.
We also learned that a mild fever is productive in fighting the virus and that you should let it get to a certain point before dealing with it.
Classic case of survivorship bias
People back in the day had just as much terrible advice as we have today, it’s just that the only one that survived long enough to survive to the present day is the really good advice
But to answer the question, anything related to the ingestion of mercury
Or anything radioactive. Turns out it was a bad idea to make radium-lined water coolers
Anything related to health care in general, really. Keep in mind that germ theory was only invented in the late 16th century, and it was ridiculed for centuries in favour of Miasma theory. It wasn’t until the mid 19th century that it started gaining legitimacy.
it’s just that the only one that survived long enough to survive to the present day is the really good advice
Okay but… I thought that was basically the point, in that if the advice survived for that long, then it is worth paying attention to at least, to consider if it might apply to a particular situation? e.g. chicken soup really is good for a cold, whether we knew the precise reasons why or not.
I read Montaigne’s essays (written in the 1500’s) and while his views are remarkably modern in many ways, one thing that stuck out to me was how unabashedly elitist he is. The translation I had used the phrase “common herd” to refer to the large majority of people who failed to impress him due to their lack of education or strength of character. I hesitate to speak for him since I think he was a wiser man than I am, but I think our modern notions about democracy would have seemed ridiculous to him. He might accept that universal suffrage is in practice the least-bad option currently available to us, but he would argue that at least in principle it would be better to exclude people who don’t actually know how to run a country from the process of deciding how the country is to be run.
(He would also be unashamed to say that the life of an exceptional person is worth more than the life of someone ordinary, but we think that in the modern day too. We just consider it rude to be so explicit about it.)
Without knowing his works, I’d argue for him that he’s right to some extent towards an uneducated population, BUT the reason we have universal suffrage is that our founding fathers assumed that:
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Everyone would be well-educated and make rational if not reasonable assumptions about politicians (eg, not elect morons who immediately try and sabotage the government, citizenry, and friends)
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Politicians would serve as public servants and would be even better educated and would work hard to brush up on things so that the common man wouldn’t have to learn the ins and outs of complicated decisions in terms of complex trade agreements, city planning and zoning law, and universal medical systems that work across state lines.
Obviously, it didn’t quite go that way. But it’s why I’m such an advocate for good public schools and free education, because it pays itself back in spades when it comes to R&D/innovation and an informed populace who make the country and world a better place to live.
The founding fathers did not believe in universal suffrage; at the time only people who owned land could vote–to say nothing of even less privileged groups than that–and they were fine with that policy, in part because these were considered to be the people with the most skin in the game.
They also put in “checks and balances” to ensure elitist rule anyways which we are seeing the fruits of.
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To be fair, our modern concept of democracy really is quite shitty and the only reason we use it is because it is better than anything else we came up with so far.
But generally the notion that the common person cannot be entrusted with politics holds true even if we find it distasteful. The average person is a fucking idiot and objectively not qualified to decide on political matters.
Case in point, Brexit.
No, it’s not. But it is ingrained.
Most forms of medical advice, some of it stuck around for a long ass time (bloodletting and the idea of spirits and humors lasted several millennia), but I imagine that the vast majority of it is lost to time.
You don’t even have to go all that far back to see this in action.
In the 90’s, the universal medical advice was to avoid fats, sauces and dear lord never eat more than 2-3 eggs in a week or you’ll have a coronary before 40.
You still shouldn’t go overboard with fats and sauce which is made with fat, but the advice that you shouldn’t eat more than 2-3 eggs in a week is entirely defunct now.
You can eat 2-3 eggs a day (which many people do without even knowing as eggs are used in a whole lot of things) without any medical disadvantages.
I remember that…a lot of people just looked at the advice given and said “I don’t trust people trying to tell me margarine is healthier than butter”.
Study design also plays a role in how risk is measured and presented (see transcripts at these links): https://nutritionfacts.org/video/how-the-egg-board-designs-misleading-studies/
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/debunking-egg-industry-myths/
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/eggs-and-arterial-function/
A bucket of salt is probably more healthy for you than listening to anything a site with “facts” in the name says.
And that’s not even looking at who’s behind that site and the wording they use.
Remember, breathing gives you an elevated risk of lungcancer.
HEAD ON APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD!
The best thing to do when grandma dies is to keep her body under your bed!
Medicine and not taking anything as the will of god you should just accept, this and perception of death. That direct war, colonies are necessary - because now soft power, investments, influence, proxies are seen as more effective and better for business. That raw physical fitness means an easy superiority - and not a gun. Slavery and serfdom took other forms, so are associated stereotypes. Talking while seemingly alone is, arguably, not a solid sign of a mental illness now. First paleness became no longer a wanted trait, then we learnt that sun tan can be bad too. Putting fire to a field or a property isn’t a good idea like it was before. Natural resources are free, limitless and harvested with no consequencies. Finding a stash of gold isn’t that tempting too. Mass production, services kind off changed the amount of skills one needs in an average household and added complexity to it. Knowledge of how to get a clean water noticeably changed our ways. And perception of sex and family in different cultures drastically changed over time due to religion, law and science.
Not even ancient- we used to prescribe cigarettes to cure asthma.
We used to blow tobacco smoke up people’s asses, literally.
Lightning never strikes the same place twice. In fact it favors repeated strikes at the same arcing point.
In the middle ages churches would ring the steeple bells during a thunderstorm in an effort to soothe God. (it was assumed the Christian God was directly responsible for lightning.) This resulted in such an epidemic of lightning deaths among parish priests that ringing church bells in thunderstorms remains a criminal act in some regions of Europe.
Modern cathedrals and statues are fitted with replaceable lightning rods, in an admission God is content to let the mechanics of static electricity guide His thunderbolts.
What goes up comes back down.
Apply math and the object flies in a parabolic arc (not accounting for air friction and wind)
Launch it high enough and the arc start lookin eliptical. Gravitational force looks less like a constant rather is tempered by distance². If the acceleration closes the elipse without hitting the (circular at this scale) ground, your object is now a satellite in orbit.
Keep accelerating and eventually (a whole lot of acceleration) and special relativity factors affect the trajectory…and mass…and time dilates between the object and observers.
That there is a god (or gods)
Almost anything disease-related, E.G. humors.
if it as wrong, it wasn’t wisdom, just a belief.
lmao at the brilliant wordsmiths downvoting this literally tautological and necessary truth.
How they used to get rid of motor oil back in the day.
I love how nowadays they made it illegal to wash your car out on the street because it pollutes the ground.
Like motherfucker where do you think this dirt goes to when it falls off the car while driving?
They should outlaw cars to fix this.
It’s the soap
I mean… the wisdom not really incorrect - the oil would soak into the ground. In this era people just piled up garbage in their back yard and burned it. Obviously this isn’t an appropriate way to dispose of things in 2024.
