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Auctions, sanitary towels, retirement, banking, disposable razor, sewing machine, canned food, interchangeable parts, antibiotics, solar cells, postage stamp, l
by nindalf 3y ago
Auctions, sanitary towels, retirement, banking, disposable razor, sewing machine, canned food, interchangeable parts, antibiotics, solar cells, postage stamp, light bulb, pencil, air conditioning, insurance, dwarf wheat, spreadsheet, cold chain, double entry book-keeping, S-bend, infant formula, clocks, public key cryptography, passports, batteries, printing press, video games, GPS, contraceptive pill, shipping container, Haeber-Bosch process, concrete, iPhone.
Shoutout to 50 things that made the modern economy, a great podcast/book.
- cezart 3y agoThis reads like a list of technologies from the game civilization :)
- nindalf 3y agoI thought the same when I was listening to the podcast! Interchangeable parts especially! They’re so impactful, but they’re taken for granted outside of this podcast and Civ.
- dclowd9901 3y agoI’ll add some more: Language, standards, the internet, agriculture, glass, sunscreen, resilient rice, sterilization, human flight, spontaneous development of sentient life in the universe… When you think about it all, you start to appreciate how miraculous things actually are.
- tzs 3y agoSanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, fresh water system, and public health.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ETH_start 3y agoSimilar to language, money, which Nick Szabo—the person who first conceptualized a decentralized blockchain—speculates may have increased the carrying capacity of the environment ten fold and allowed humans to outcompete Neanderthals. https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/CDROM/Literature/LOTwinterschool2006/szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/C...
- MrYellowP 3y agoDoes language really count? It emerged as noises and refined over the years. It's not something anyone invented, or even discovered. It simply came to be all by itself, until humanity reached a point where it could be formalized/standardized (idk the proper term, I'm sure you get what I mean). Regardless ... people's ignorance is showing. Too many never think about the fact that people just 200-100 years ago would have considered modern technology magic. Imagine showing off to one of these people: Omfg you're speaking into a flat rectangle! Omfg it speaks back! Omfg it shows pictures! Omfg that box speaks! Omfg that box speaks and shows people! O M F G YOU GUYS FLY EVERY DAY??? WHAT DO YOU MEAN, SYPHILIS ISN'T AN ISSUE ANYMORE??? AND THERE'S A PILL PREVENTING PREGNANCY ??????????? It's absolutely amazing.
- smsm42 3y agoBut other than that, what the Romans have ever done for us?!
- nindalf 3y agoApart from the aqueduct, sanitation, roads, irrigation, medicine, education, wine, public baths and public order - the Romans didn’t really do much at all.
- anovikov 3y agoAs i see it, Romans mainly gave us idea of "rule-based society" on which entire Western world stands. Even as Romans themselves made a joke out of it in their later history. But the idea was so transformative that even subsequent barbarian kings that ravaged Roman Empire after it's downfall, did not seek to formally overthrow it - rather, they pretended (with varying levels of plausibility) to lawfully inherit and rule it, or parts of it.
- totetsu 3y agoOh, shut up!
- pyrale 3y ago> As i see it, Romans mainly gave us idea of "rule-based society" on which entire Western world stands. Rule-based societies predate the Romans by a lot of time ; Romans weren't even that good at it, considering how often violence was used as a political tool during the republic.
- Tainnor 3y agoThe administration and institutions usually survived a lot of political turmoil in Ancient Rome, but yes, compared to more autocratic kingdoms / empires of the time, transfer of power was probably a much more fragile affair (even in the Empire).
- nindalf 3y ago
- NegativeLatency 3y agoBicycle
- nwiswell 3y agoAs I read this list, the rhythm to We Didn't Start the Fire spontaneously started playing in my head. Sorry not sorry if I just subjected you to the same.
- Cosi1125 3y agoAuctions, GPS, Postage stamp, video games, Public key cryptography, Shipping containers. iPhone, pencil, Clocks and contraceptive pill, Passports, batteries, Banking, antibiotics. Double entry book-keeping, Canned food, air conditioning, Razors, solar cells, Sanitary towels. Retirement, printing press And the Haeber-Bosch process Infant formula, Exchangeable parts. Light bulb, concrete, Sewing machine, spreadsheet, S-bend, cold chain, Insurance and dwarf wheat!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Dylan16807 3y agoThat's just a list of good inventions. GPS, disposable razor, many of these are not impactful enough to be "black swan but good". And things like clocks and batteries were slowly refined over many, many years, so they don't fit either.
- nindalf 3y agoRespectfully, you don’t know what you’re talking about if you think GPS “isn’t impactful enough”. Don’t fall into the trap of reacting with “meh” to everything. Maybe you just don’t know? Maybe you don’t realise how much modern life depends on say, the Haeber-Bosch process or the shipping container? “Oh it’s just a metal box”, a person who doesn’t understand it might say.
- Dylan16807 3y ago> Respectfully, you don’t know what you’re talking about if you think GPS “isn’t impactful enough”. How informative of you. GPS does things better but we can do generally the same things without it. Don't think about what would happen if we ripped out all GPS functionality overnight, think about what would happen if we had a decade to implement replacements. The loss of accuracy wouldn't be that important. > the Haeber-Bosch proces That one's pretty great, it's probably worth including. > or the shipping container? “Oh it’s just a metal box”, a person who doesn’t understand it might say. Hmm, focus on cargo ships and you can see a pretty rapid revolution, but in a wider lens maybe it was more of a broad evolution. I'm not sure. But my point was that the list was too long, not that it didn't have any valid examples.
- kasey_junk 3y agoCannot recommend The Box by Marc Levinson enough. It goes in depth on the introduction of the shipping container and how revolutionary it was. There was also a fair bit of legal wrangling to make it possible as well.
- arketyp 3y agoIs it a black swan though? I can imagine something like GPS was envisioned well before the first satellites were even launched into orbit. Note, I'm not disputing you. This got me thinking about the nature of invention and discovery.
- anovikov 3y agoPassports are not a good invention. They are a dystopian evil we grew to take for granted and even see as something that exists for our own benefit. Before WWI there were no passports and no need for them. Those were Good Old Days that are not coming back. It's weird to see some people seeing some kind of benefit in them.
- pineaux 3y agoThe Gestapo popularized passports. Think about that for a while.
- nindalf 3y agoHitler was a vegetarian. Think about that for a while.
- dataflow 3y agoIt's not like we would have free roaming in the modern age if passports weren't a thing. People would still face travel restrictions, they'd just be more nonstandard and unpredictable. Consider how the days before passports also lacked air travel available to the masses. Even cars has only just started to become commonplace. I don't see how you could possibly have travel that is so cheap, quick, and accessible to such a large population without some way to control who is coming and leaving your country? Especially with how we're quickly making different parts of the planet inhospitable, and given how rapidly populations have risen compared to a century ago.
- andrepd 3y agoIf only there was a pre-WWI technology that enabled people to travel quickly and comfortably over long distances... Perhaps some sort of wagon on rails :)
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoThe passport is but one piece of the greater system that we have nowadays of international worldwide travel. I can get on a plane and travel pretty much anywhere in the world now, whereas before travel like that was reserved for explorers, missionaries or high ranking dignitaries. I don't think the passport is an invention itself, so to speak.
- huksley 3y agoAlso, air conditioner. It made huge difference to allow for intellectual work at the places which are otherwise too hot.
- SargeDebian 3y agoIt's already in there.
- mellosouls 3y agoA minor observation - pretty much all of those describe a type where applicable, except for iPhone. "Smartphone" would have been consistent and more accurate. I don't know if that's a bias or proofreading issue. It's an interesting and thought-provoking list though.
- regularfry 3y agoSmartphones existed before the iPhone, but Apple blew the market open.
- mellosouls 3y agoYes, I fully understand that but the segment would have existed without them though may have taken a little longer to mature the user experience and ubiquity.
- LargeTomato 3y agoYou wouldn't say "model T" you'd say car. You wouldn't say "Boeing 737" you'd say flight. They're saying iPhone because it's attention grabbing. No other reason.
- voldacar 3y agoPassports were originally a temporary wartime measure. Not exactly something to celebrate
- xkcd1963 3y agoI don't understand why passports would be a good swan invention. Are we happy about having less freedom? I can't just cross USA to Mexico, I need to be identifiable. Governments could screw me up if they wanted to and the passport is only helping them.
- Tainnor 3y agoLooking at that list, I feel like we would first have to establish which things actually do make life better and which only make it more comfortable. This is going to be highly subjective. For some reason, I'm not entirely willing to believe that my parents (who are still alive) had a less happy life than I have even though they didn't grow up with an iPhone. And it's not like modern conveniences have no downsides (e.g. increase in stress). That's not to say I would give up on these things readily, I'm just way too used to them. I think probably most people could agree that treatments for diseases that regularly also affect young / middle-aged peolle are a good thing. It's hard to argue that someone in the prime of their life should die of some silly infection.
- regularfry 3y agoBear in mind that the list is focused on economic impact, which overlaps but is not coterminous with happiness impact.
- OJFord 3y agoDisposable razor? What's that doing there? Unless it's too comment on 'throwaway mentality', modern consumerism, etc., the book meaning 'made the modern economy' more literally/broadly than you're referencing it for here?
- jlnho 3y agoMakes operations way more sanitary. Many people used to die post operation due to infections.
- regularfry 3y agoSo the assumption would be that it's not the razor, but the immediately adjacent ability to make disposable scalpel blades that mattered?
- OJFord 3y agoOh so we're talking disposable razor blades, not disposable vs (reusable) safety/'cut-throat' razors for shaving?
- drewmate 3y agoAs referenced by GP - it's a list of inventions from the podcast '50 Things That Made the Modern Economy.' [0] The first series is my favorite podcast of all time. They're short (~8 minutes, iirc) but pack a lot of interesting info in each episode. In particular, they explore some of the second-order effects of each invention. The disposable razor might not be a true 'black swan' like the transistor or LK-99, but some of the background and influence around the invention might surprise you! I recommend checking it out. [1] [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Things_That_Made_the_Modern_Economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Things_That_Made_the_Modern... [1] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p04t8k2l https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p04t8k2l
- LargeTomato 3y agoThe list is sensationalized for attention. Why is disposable razor on the list but not electricity, computing, refrigeration, metallurgy, microscopy, or eye glasses?
- ajani 3y agoComputing/computers?! Ironic that no mention here. Nor in additional comments.
- AtlasBarfed 3y agoIn the grand tradition of podcasts being a single wikipedia page stretched out to an hour long podcast (which is freaking 90% of "tech" podcasts), this one is apparently an hour long podcast from reading the tech tree of Sid Meier's Civilization.