Ancient wisdom often sounds like common sense now that it is commomly taught. What is some ancient wisdom that we no longer teach because it was wrong?
This question inspired by this post..
How they used to get rid of motor oil back in the day.
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.
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.
"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.
This is why I try to endure the fever side effects of vaccines as much as I can without taking a tylenol, so my immune system gets some proper “training” to recognize and fight the real thing.
Aristotle was obviously a great teacher and philosopher but he ended up being wrong about a lot. Like he thought the “elements” were earth, wind, fire, and water and that all objects want to be in their “natural” place. So, if you drop a rock, it tries to return to the earth. Fire goes up because it’s trying to get to where it “wants” to live.
He thought eels didn’t procreate because no one had ever seen it happening. (They go out to sea to fuck.) He was into bees and correctly noticed that there were workers and drones and that young bees grow out of the honeycomb. But he just assumed the Queen was a King and that worker bees were out collecting tiny baby bees from flowers. (He thought the air just blew pollen around and the honey naturally appeared.)
He had a lot of ideas that were just ideas but he was so influential and his writings were preserved and translated. It took a shocking number of years for people to question if Aristotle was full of shit.
The worst part of it was that for a ton of stuff he had contemporaries that were right about much much more, but were dismissed in favor of his confidently incorrect BS.
For example the Epicureans, who thought matter was made of tiny indivisible parts, that light too was made of indivisible parts moving really fast, that each parent contributed to a "doubled seed" which determined the traits of the child and could bring back features of skipped generations, that the animals which we see today were just the ones that were best able to survive to reproduce, and that all of existence arose only from the random interactions of these indivisible parts of matter and not from any intelligent design.
And because Aristotle's stupid ideas influenced the lineage of modern thought, most people learn about him but very few learn about the other group that effectively preempted modern thought millennia earlier.
But he just assumed the Queen was a King
Actually, he acknowledged "some say" the Queen was female, but then argued it couldn't be because the gods don't give women weapons and it had a stinger. And the identification of the leader of the hive as male was actually used for centuries to justify patriarchal monarchy as being "by God's design" because after all, look at the bee hive (somehow when we realized it was actually a female that logic went up in smoke).
So there were other people that did know what was correct, but Aristotle screwed up the development of thinking around it by rationalizing an opposite answer with an appeal to misogyny.
Wild that he was only two degrees of separation from a teacher famed for praising the knowledge of self-ignorance and not falling into false positives and negatives.
What I'm getting from this is that people were the same back then as they are now. Aristotle was basically a hack who said just the right bigoted things for the ruling class to latch onto to justify the status quo. Like an ancient political commentator, or popular "scientist" who says anything for attention.
It's Plato's fault. Plato was a shithead.
But the Epicureans also denied that virtue is primary in achieving eudaimonia and from a Stoic POV, that's just a cardinal sin. Due to the Stoics is also the idea of animals being self-aware as well as cosmopolitanism and the absolutely unheard of notion that women have the same mental faculties as men and thus should also enjoy education.
But really, all the "Figuring out how to be like Sokrates" schools of philosophy were highly productive.
"Element" is a fairly general word, we just generally use it colloquially to refer specifically to the chemical elements. If you interpret his usage in the same way we use "states of matter", it's not horrendously far off. Earth, water, air, and fire roughly correspond to solid, liquid, gas, and (extremely rudimentary, very low ionization) plasma (or perhaps a more general energetic concept). In any case, an object "wanting" to get to its "natural" place also isn't terribly far off from a statement of consistent physical laws. Solids do "want" to accumulate with other solids by gravity, energetic gases do "want" to rise above less energetic ones through buoyancy.
damn, you already said the thing I said but better
Dude developed testable hypotheses thousands of years ago, not exactly like but very close to what we call the scientific method today. Full of shit? What an ignorant thing to say.
My boy Aristotle thought men had more teeth than women, and whatever testable hypothesis he created to prove that fact didn't include, you know, counting the teeth of men and women.
Don't get me wrong, I love the guy, and will agree that "classical elements" is probably the dumbest thing to accuse him of being wrong about. Hell, I have considered getting a Bekker number tattoo, but he was definitely full of some shit. It's okay to acknowledge he was right about some things and wrong about others. That's the whole point of this thread.
Ok, but the rocks and flames thing is pretty cute. The elements.. they yearn for their homes...
Same, elements. Same.
It's fascinating just how utterly alien this all sounds to our modern ears, with the benefit of many generations cycling through the creation and deployment of the written word, then the printed word, then electromagnetic communication, then computers, then the internet.
Imagine the strange descriptions and explanations that were passed down via the spoken word and memory alone, for countless generations until arriving at Aristotle. Before the Sumerians and all the way up to the Phoenicians and FINALLY the invention of a workable, practical phonetic alphabet. Imagine the tales they would tell! So many of them lost to time, before they had a chance at being registered in a physical medium.
How did they make sense of what they saw in the night skies at places like Lascaux and Gobekli Tepe? How did they regard and explain the migration of the birds, the rainbow and the lightning?
Accumulating knowledge and communications technology have standardized certain views of the world, one step at a time, first slowly then more rapidly, and accelerating. In the days of Aristotle, this was all just barely beginning, and I believe that what we don't know about those people before that time - the human primate in the process of becoming civilized - could surprise and confound us, that their views might have been more alien and even outlandish to us than we can imagine.
I mean... Aristotle sounds weird enough, right? I believe he's just the tip of a huge and deep iceberg of ideas and time.
Like he thought the “elements” were earth, wind, fire, and water and that all objects want to be in their “natural” place. So, if you drop a rock, it tries to return to the earth. Fire goes up because it’s trying to get to where it “wants” to live.
That's basically correct, though, as long as you're intepreting "elements" to mean something more in linenwith "states of matter", rather than actual fundamental periodic style elements.
Check out the history of bird migration science. There was everything from birds going to the moon for winter, swallows burrowing in the mud, transmorphing to different species, up to the 19th century
Add to that where people thought bugs and vermin come from. Obviously they spring fully formed for dirt and muck. Even rats come from rotting grain.
Sounds stupid, but not worse than tiny animals in your blood making you sick (germ theory), or basically anything from cosmology from the Big Bang to dark energy
For anyone curious the history really is interesting, when reading previously I learned about Pfeilstorch, storks throughout the years that had flown to Germany with African arrows stuck in them. First seen at a time when people didn't understand bird migration, it helped to explain where all the birds would go.
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.
I always suspected that the "no mixing wool and linen" verses in the Bible were due to miniature lightning striking (heh) the fear of God into the ancients.
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
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.
Not even ancient- we used to prescribe cigarettes to cure asthma.
We used to blow tobacco smoke up people's asses, literally.
I believe that's where the famous saying originates from.
Doc, I have a killer migraine.
Ah, I have just the thing...
pulls out cast iron skillet.
Try a hammer?
Which it did - eventually.
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 expect that 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.)
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.
Compounding the problem, this environment rewards charlatans and sociopaths. There will always be some that will exploit a weak spot in the system, in bad faith, no matter what the system is.
No, it's not. But it is ingrained.
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:
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.
They also put in "checks and balances" to ensure elitist rule anyways which we are seeing the fruits of.
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.
by that metric, we'd better fire all our politicians
No argument here 🤷
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.
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/
After believing Dr. Gregor (the author of that site) for awhile, i don't believe or trust him anymore. He's a vegan and I think he's set on a vegan mission despite him claiming he's not.
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
The thing with cholesterol is still true though. What matters is, once a lot is fine (body can regulate that) but over a long time it is bad, promotes arteriosclerosis. So, no, the "without any medical disadvantages" bit is not true.
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".
Its perfectly safe to burn any and all trash
Especially batteries
It was safe to burn batteries when they were made of zinc.
Modern battery chemistry is the problem there
All sane people know you should eat batteries, damn it!
It was somewhat safe when there were like 2 billion people on the planet. Not so much when there's 8 billion.
Read the theories of René Descartes (17th century) about the nature of air and the atmosphere. Try to get his original texts (translation if needed), not any secondary works.
It is some seriously sick stuff, from today's point of view :-)
At his time he was quite a renowned scientist.
Phlogiston, its where heat comes from!
it's* where
That there is an invisible structure all around us that allows gravity, light and electricity to move through it. Now debunked or replaced.
Trepanning to release evil spirits.
Drill a hole in your head as a cureall for any mental behaviour abnormalities. Still practised as an emergency surgery, only to release life-threatening blood and pressure buildup inside the cranial cavity.
Gut pain? Almost drowned? Time to blow some tobacco smoke up your bum. Discontinued.
Fun fact: This is also how Ethernet (wired network connection) got its name. Ether was already dismissed as a theory, but "omnipresent, completely-passive medium for the propagation of electromagnetic waves" was a good description of hardware layer that can transfer data in a way that's abstracting all the signal handling complexity for higher layers.
So in a way I'm actually sending this comment via Ethernet.
Interestingly, we've kind of looped all the way around. We describe the particles of the universe with omnipresent fields, which isn't really the same idea as aether but has some neat similarities.
Babylonian astronomy
HEAD ON APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD!
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.
Whatever you do, don't ask for bloodletting if you get sick
Look into the death of George Washington. His doctor responded to what could have been a mild cold by taking a liter of blood 4 separate times from him. Washington very well could have recovered if he was just left alone.
Oh, and the doctor somewhat realized his mistake and tried to put some of the blood back after(!) Washington expired, with the logic that if blood loss killed him giving it back should revive him.
So yeah. Pumping blood back into a dead man. That was done on the founding president of the United States.
Unless you have excess swelling in specific parts of the body, like a cranial bleed, which does require letting out some blood to relieve pressure that can kill you. And leeches are used medically for relieving some types of swelling as well. Then there is maggots that can be used for infections to eat dead skin. All of those practices came from some specific medical treatments that did work for some specific types of injuries, although a few of them were overused for things that had nothing to do with why they existed in the first place which was counterproductive.
So while not asking for it is good advice, don't turn it down if an actual licensed medical doctor recommends them as a treatment that has been supported by evidence.
Adding to the ACKSHSCHUALLYies...
If you have hemochromatosis, and you get sick from it, you probably should be asking about bloodletting. Regular bloodletting is one of the most effective and cost-efficient treatment options available to reduce or prevent the myriad of complications caused by this health condition.
Don't shower because you'll get water on your brain and go dumb
Dang. Is this brought to us from the same people who believe washing your asscrack makes you gay?
Given the increasing popularity of showers over baths over the last several decades this could actually explain a lot.
Anyone reading this thread and genuinely interested in it should go listen to the dollop podcast. It's American history, mostly between the 1500's and now. But the different episodes they do are stuffed full of this kind of faulty logic from the past.
I don't know how common it is but my grandmas always said that you shouldn't eat pork after being released from the hospital or while sick. Then I finally remembered to ask a doctor about it and he said there's no such thing.
I understand that the notion behind it is to eat easy to digest foods, instead of red meat, in order not to burden your body trying to metabolise them while it is also fighting a disease.
I can sort of get behind this, but I also say you still need your protein. Over here a chicken stew is quite commonly given to sick people, maybe for this reasoning.
Cheap Pork is the best medicine. Eat it three times a day. It's full of antibiotics. /s
The bible.
That there is a god (or gods)
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 looking elliptical. Gravitational force looks less like a constant rather is tempered by distance². If the acceleration closes the ellipse 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.
Wasn't that rather a reference to the normal / gaussian distribution, that describes many phenomena so well?
I always thought the phrase was Aristotlean but it seems the internet asserts recent or unknown origins.
opposites attract
The best thing to do when grandma dies is to keep her body under your bed!
In Tonga it's still a common practice to bury relatives in front of your home.
That a vomitorium is a room where Romans would go to vomit up their food and drink so they could gorge themselves some more.
Not saying that this act never occurred, mind you.
A vomitorium is a architectural feature that allows large numbers of people to disperse from a tunnel under the seats of a stadium.
This isn't ancient wisdom. In fact, your debunking uses wisdom that's more ancient. It is true though.
Almost anything disease-related, E.G. humors.
Plus for any saying like "look before you leap" there's a "the early bird gets the worm"
I don't know if anyone else has said it, but the belief that human illness and all that were caused by an imbalance of four bodily humors: black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm. It's an old belief where the earliest I found it being practiced was around 400 B.C.
Fat free food helps you keep from gaining weight.
It was a pretty straightforward theory, but it was totally wrong. And the sugar which took fat’s place is so much worse for keeping slim than fat is.
The geocentric theory.
Traveling faster than a horse is harmful.The body waa not made for that speed.
if it as wrong, it wasn’t wisdom, just a belief.
lmao at the brilliant wordsmiths downvoting this literally tautological and necessary truth.
that night air is bad for you.
'A clock is right twice a day' and 'two stones one bird'
But a BROKEN clock is right twice a day?
Do you mean 'hit two birds with one stone'? That's not advice, it's a useful expression for describing getting good value.
