Useful Information to have in the Past

[pepperjack]

Nearly everything in that page is random facts which if you know enough to be able to use them, you know enough to not need to be told.

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This position ignores the value of being able to narrow the hypothesis space while questing for scientific and technological advancement.

 

[Master of Squirrel-fu]

I'd bring a copy of all the good new media. Then I'd publish it for myself and act like an ass by mocking fate with innuendo about what I did when interviewed or making statements.

So just know, if I ever finish writing anything you know it's because I perfected time travel.

 

[DCF]

I'd bring a copy of all the good new media. Then I'd publish it for myself and act like an ass by mocking fate with innuendo about what I did when interviewed or making statements.

So just know, if I ever finish writing anything you know it's because I perfected time travel.

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And if you publish something that has characters casually talking about the great influenza outbreak of 2023 in which 7% of the world's population perished I'll be very nervous.

 

[The Unicorn]

This position ignores the value of being able to narrow the hypothesis space while questing for scientific and technological advancement.

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No, it points out that for that to be useful you need to have some knowledge base.

 

[pepperjack]

No, it points out that for that to be useful you need to have some knowledge base.

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Since this post amounts to a blanket denial followed by a restatement of your original position, I think we're done here.

 

[The Unicorn]

Since this post amounts to a blanket denial followed by a restatement of your original position, I think we're done here.

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Okay, how exactly would the information about diabetes help someone who did not know what the symptoms for diabedes are?

 

[pepperjack]

Okay, how exactly would the information about diabetes help someone who did not know what the symptoms for diabedes are?

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The symptoms are also in the image?

 

[Vorpal]

Air foil - Absolutely useless without a LOT more information, the amount of information there isn't even enough to be dangerous

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It actually is dangerous for the opposite reason: it's outright misinformation. The explanation in the image is completely wrong, and is nothing but a popular myth. To see that it's nonsense, it's enough to recognize that acrobatic planes that can fly both upside-up and upside-down exist, and in fact tend to have symmetrically shaped wings. Appropriately enough, the illustration is labeled woo.

Some of the physics on the image is just worthless nonsense, such as the exact value of the speed of light, the meter, and the gram. A large chunk of text concerning units and none of is of any practical utility nor advances physics in any conceivable way. For the one bit of useful information in there regarding pendula, the critical bits of information are missing: that the height-independence is only correct for short swings but not in general. Any info on the historical mechanisms used to compensate for this and similar issues, or even that you need them, would have been at least somewhat useful.

Some bunch of stuff that's similarly worthless, such as E = mc². Years before relativity, Hasenöhrl deduced E = (3/8)mc², Abraham E = (3/4)mc², and Poincaré and de Pretto both concluded E = mc², all years before Einstein. If you don't understand why Hasenöhrl and Abraham were wrong and why Poincaré was basically right while de Pretto was wrong despite both having the same formula, and why Einstein gets the credit over them both anyway, then it wee be just a worthless factoid. If you do get it, then you wouldn't have needed reminding. It's completely possible to select a single sentence out of one of Einstein's 1905 papers and have it directly point the way to revolutionizing nineteenth century physics—but it surely ain't about E = mc².

Similarly, atoms—so what? The hypothesis had been around for literally millennia, yet there were highly respected and influential chemists calling atoms unscientific foolishness as far as 1905; what can you do to convince them otherwise? Do you know what Einstein did to do so? Thomson? Rutherford? Chemically, law of multiple proportions is more useful than this. Physically, even a basic description of a cathode ray tube would be a thousand-fold more useful than simply recounting the structure of the atom (incidentally, CRTs is both how electrons were discovered and directly lead to television technology). Hell, the very idea of a periodic table would actually be both simple and revolutionary at an appropriate time, instead of half of that section.

I'm ragging on physics because I'm personally more familiar with it, but it doesn't paint a good picture for other fields on that image. You can't make penicillin out of mold unless you're already a good chemist. Hell, even basic facts like germs causing disease—sure, but that's both completely common knowledge among anyone living today, and yet highly controversial among doctors for a long time. Spewing a fact and establishing it are completely different things.

Nearly everything in that page is random facts which if you know enough to be able to use them, you know enough to not need to be told.

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Basically, this in a nutshell. The basic conceit of the image is that Joe Schmoe who finds himself back in time will be able to take the credit for all these wondrous things, whereas in reality, the absolute best Joe Schmoe can hope for is to slightly decrease the research time of already competent experts that would already be poised to discover it. And even then that's assuming the information doesn't hurt more than help, e.g., anyone from this era can tell them that airplanes can be a thing (which is certainly useful in itself), but outright physically-wrong non-explanations have outright negative usefulness.

Overall, while not entirely useless, it was clearly written by someone who hasn't had a clue of how either science or technology works, and that makes most of it a waste of time.

 

[pepperjack]

Vorpal: Thank you, that was a much more satisfactory response.

whereas in reality, the absolute best Joe Schmoe can hope for is to slightly decrease the research time of already competent experts that would already be poised to discover it.

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And this is what I meant about the value of narrowing the hypothesis space, though you make a good point about the potential pitfalls regarding misinformation.

 

[Plotvitalnpc]

Hm...
Here's one!

The cause of scurvy, and the treatment therefor!.
The funny thing about scurvy is that sailors were preventing it and treating it before they actually know how they were.
Even in the age of bringing citrus fruits on ships, people didn't actually understand the general cause of scurvy, or what it was about the fruit that fixed it.

Y'know what it led to when it came time to explore Antarctica and such?
People who'd heard of the Inuit not getting scurvy eating nothing but meat assuming that the lack of fresh meat caused it. So..they brought meat, and got scurvy. The reason the Inuit didn't get scurvy is that the organ meat, in particular the liver, contained the vitamin c stores of the animals they were eating.

It'd be very useful to these people if an actual explanation of the foods that would prevent and treat scurvy was given.

 

[Ack]

I'd take a list of where all the big wars (and little ones), plus disease outbreaks, and basically anything else that caused a great deal of loss of life over a short time, so I can be elsewhere.

Day to day? Germ theory of disease. Absolutely revolutionised modern medicine.

 

[The Unicorn]

The symptoms are also in the image?

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How are those symptoms useful? If you don't know the symptoms you're not going to be able to do anything with it, for that matter the symptoms described are not limited to diabedes.
The etymology of diabedes dates back to Aretaeus the Cappadocian, physician of Alexandria, 2c. If you're in a time when physicians won't recognize the term they won't know what a pancreas is either.

whereas in reality, the absolute best Joe Schmoe can hope for is to slightly decrease the research time of already competent experts that would already be poised to discover it.

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I agree with most of what you said but this is wrong. The random useless or misleading factoids in that image would not in anyway be helpful, but if Joe is dropped a few centuries in the past there's a lot he could do besides pointing researchers in the right direction from fresno scrapers, and cradle scythes to crochet, or canning, or semaphore and heliograph, beekeeping, Penecilin, (although not the way it's presented in the image), etc...

Of course what exactly Joe will be able to do will vary according to his hobbies and knowledge base and where he ended up.

Overall, while not entirely useless, it was clearly written by someone who hasn't had a clue of how either science or technology works, and that makes most of it a waste of time.

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Agreed.

And this is what I meant about the value of narrowing the hypothesis space, though you make a good point about the potential pitfalls regarding misinformation.

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The thing is that image is useless in that regards. Anyone who gets sent back in time would be able to help a bit in that regard (more the further back they go) but there's nothing in that image that would help researchers beyond what talking to(interrogating) the time traveler would already give them.

Day to day? Germ theory of disease. Absolutely revolutionised modern medicine.

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Only after several decades of it's proponents being ridiculed. For this to be useful you'd need to have enough "miracles" with you to get people to listen.

For that matter if you go back to before the early modern period it won't revolutionize much - midwifes and other supposedly inferior medical practitioners (inferior because they couldn't write out an article in Latin explaining why they did something) didn't know about germs, but they knew that keeping clean prevented infection and about several ways to keep germs at bay. It was only when you got scientific doctors going from dissecting a cadaver directly to treating patients that the problems that germ theory solved became so widespread.