4 ms·
Ask HN: How would you use your knowledge in a pre-modern society?
As modern humans we have a whole ton of knowledge that our ancestors didn't, but making use of it seems largely to require the infrastructure of modern life as well. If, via time travel or an apocalyptic scenario, you found yourself in a pre-modern society with no technology but your knowledge intact, how would you put it to use? Of what practical value would common scientific or technological knowledge be? Your goals may be to accelerate human development, make yourself dictator, impress people or anything else.
- schoen 7y agoI feel like this has been a common question on other fora like Reddit, Stack Exchange, and Quora. You can probably find a few of them with https://www.google.com/search?q=if+you+were+transported+back+in+time https://www.google.com/search?q=if+you+were+transported+back... although I'm sure there are more out there!
- jgwil2 7y agoYeah, most of the answers are either related to the butterfly effect or are just silly like "sliced bread" or "the printing press." I was hoping for more serious/well-thought-out responses.
- schoen 7y agoI've seen a couple of more substantive ones although unfortunately I didn't save links to them. I remember a couple of cautionary themes were that (1) you might easily offend or alienate people, or make them suspicious of you, (2) you might find it hard to persuade people that things you knew about had much merit or utility, (3) you might not be able to take much advantage of your modern technical knowledge without infrastructure and supply chains, and (4) you might not be able to support yourself easily in an unfamiliar economy while attempting to teach others or manufacture things with your modern knowledge. Although you might feel that there are lots of cool scientific principles that you could demonstrate to convince people that your knowledge was important, it's also likely that you wouldn't know all the necessary details or have easy access to the necessary apparatus or raw materials. Anyway, those were someone else's ideas from one of those threads—and they were expressed better there and with more specifics.