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> find the cure for cancer written down in some 1000-year-old book somewhere. While you're most likely right about the cure for cancer, I did want to note that

by sersi 2y ago

> find the cure for cancer written down in some 1000-year-old book somewhere. While you're most likely right about the cure for cancer, I did want to note that this is kind of how the cure for malaria was found (artemisinin). Tu Youyou who won the nobel prize systematically investigated Traditional Chinese Medecine remedies until she came across one that was effective. That particular remedy was described in a 1600 years old text The Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergency Treatments, written in 340 by Ge Hong. Note: before anyone think that the fact that a remedy described in traditional Chinese texts mean that TCM is reliable and a viable alternative in all text, she screened over 2,000 traditional Chinese recipes and made 380 herbal extracts, from some 200 herbs which were tested on mice. So, yes one of the remedy were successful but the success rate of TCM was not particularly high :)

shiroiushi 2y ago
This is really interesting actually, but I do want to point out that I'm not saying all old knowledge is only of interest to historians: I was arguing against the idea that some old knowledge is "locked away" and not publicly available as part of some kind of conspiracy. Lots of old knowledge is readily available to the public. The complete works of Shakespeare are a good example here, as is Homer's epics The Odyssey and The Iliad. (I don't know if that TCM stuff is or not.) These kinds of things are considered "classics" and are frequently reproduced, now available online in countless places, etc. Obviously, lots of people besides historians think they're important, and so they're copied frequently and made available at large. As the famous rule goes, "99% of everything is crap", so probably all the best stuff from the past is well-preserved, and the rest, not so much. I seriously doubt that something as good as Shakespeare is locked away in someone's private library and virtually unknown to almost anyone. Of course, there's always exceptions and you never know when some overlooked tidbit of info from the distant past might be really useful, as you showed here, so I do think it's important to preserve and enable easy access to as many old works as possible.

by sersi 2y ago

shiroiushi 2y ago

This is really interesting actually, but I do want to point out that I'm not saying all old knowledge is only of interest to historians: I was arguing against the idea that some old knowledge is "locked away" and not publicly available as part of some kind of conspiracy. Lots of old knowledge is readily available to the public. The complete works of Shakespeare are a good example here, as is Homer's epics The Odyssey and The Iliad. (I don't know if that TCM stuff is or not.) These kinds of things are considered "classics" and are frequently reproduced, now available online in countless places, etc. Obviously, lots of people besides historians think they're important, and so they're copied frequently and made available at large. As the famous rule goes, "99% of everything is crap", so probably all the best stuff from the past is well-preserved, and the rest, not so much. I seriously doubt that something as good as Shakespeare is locked away in someone's private library and virtually unknown to almost anyone. Of course, there's always exceptions and you never know when some overlooked tidbit of info from the distant past might be really useful, as you showed here, so I do think it's important to preserve and enable easy access to as many old works as possible.