My cousin suggests this is false because, while things can be discovered many times, it has to really take off and get wide adoption for us to find it historically.
This seems plausible for fire; it took ages before wide adoption of fire in humans, but I read a recent article that some present day bonobos discovered fire. If it can happen in my life time, this suggests it would happen many times in history, it just didn’t take off.
I think the same goes for present day inventions. The fact that Yudkowsky invented a way to cure his wife’s SAD by putting up enough lamps doesn’t mean that the invention immeditately spreads to everybody.
In The legend of healthcare, Michael Vassar makes the case that even through medical books talk about the invention of using mirrors for treating pantom limb pain, the treatment usually isn’t used and doctors rather give painkillers.
It would be quite easy for our civilisations to forget the invention.
It’s widely believed that humans basically lived in <200 person tribes that didn’t interact with each other too much before agriculture, so one might wonder how anything got any amount of adoption.
My cousin suggests this is false because, while things can be discovered many times, it has to really take off and get wide adoption for us to find it historically.
This seems plausible for fire; it took ages before wide adoption of fire in humans, but I read a recent article that some present day bonobos discovered fire. If it can happen in my life time, this suggests it would happen many times in history, it just didn’t take off.
I think the same goes for present day inventions. The fact that Yudkowsky invented a way to cure his wife’s SAD by putting up enough lamps doesn’t mean that the invention immeditately spreads to everybody.
In The legend of healthcare, Michael Vassar makes the case that even through medical books talk about the invention of using mirrors for treating pantom limb pain, the treatment usually isn’t used and doctors rather give painkillers.
It would be quite easy for our civilisations to forget the invention.
It’s widely believed that humans basically lived in <200 person tribes that didn’t interact with each other too much before agriculture, so one might wonder how anything got any amount of adoption.
And only about 100 years ago, humanity essentially forgot the cure for scurvy: http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm