The Egyptian pyramids are an elephant in the room. Conventional thinking is they're burial chambers built with copper tools and ramps.
But other historians believe they reflect a lost technological sophistication. The pyramids are incredibly precise: perfectly aligned to true north (within ~0.05°), made with millions of 2-70 ton blocks and precise internal engineering for passageways and chambers. Someone recently advocated that there's substantial subterranean infrastructure under the pyramids. The technology to move 70 ton blocks didn't exist again until the 1800's.
One of modern science's ideological straitjackets is Oliver Heaviside's restatement of Maxwell's 20 equations with 20 unknowns into four vector calculus equations. Heaviside's restatements made the math accessible to regular engineers who wanted to build things. But the restatements are arguably a simplification that neutered electromagnetism: https://x.com/TaxiCabJesus/status/1964345590604845487 (Grok had a nice answer for "what phenomenon are inadequately explained by Heaviside's four equations?").
The stones are fastened together without mortar.
They are set on top of each other using their
weight to keep them together. The craftsmanship
detail is so fine and the stones are connected
with such precision that no light passes through
the joints.
Modern humans are at least 100,000 years old. Most of our earlier civilizations are probably along the coasts of the continents, and were submerged at the end of the last ice age. It's silly to think that technology has not been lost and rediscovered over and over again.
> Someone recently advocated that there's substantial subterranean infrastructure under the pyramids.
Ah yes, those giant subterran pillars beneath the pyramids. That actually interested me, so I decisively delved deeply into it, to do my due dilligence. Only to discover an early case of advanced AI-sloppery with no proven source at all. Completely made up.
> This is a similar failure to COVID where they thought lying to the public would make for better outcomes
I'm curious which lies you're referring to. "Two Weeks to Flatten the Curve" reminded me of the time I had fun with my passenger's ignorance of celestial mechanics. She thought the moon really was done for, but after a few more minutes had passed it started to come back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24881670
> but ended up sowing distrust.
Because most people eventually caught on that they were being lied to?
Yes. For example, in the US, they told people to not wear masks at the beginning of the pandemic, saying it wasn't airborne because they wanted to save masks for medical professionals. They should have just said directly that medical professionals need masks, so conserve them, reuse them, donate them, whatever, but anything but lie to the public. It helped create the conspiracy culture around COVID.
My favorite lie had to do with how there weren't enough ventilators. That one got memory holed relatively early, once the frontline medical workers figured out they'd been tricked into thinking ventilation would be helpful for SARS-CoV-2 patients who were not actually in respiratory distress.
My other favorite lie was that the failed ebola drug remdesivir was helpful for COVID-19. The conspiracists think Remdesivir was used to punish people who declined the mRNA jabs.
> It helped create the conspiracy culture around COVID.
I think conspiracists saw very clearly what was going on. A dissident scientist I respected said, at the very beginning, that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was almost certainly a product of the UNC's gain-of-function research. He knew the UNC's work had been transferred to Wuhan, China.
There was a time when I was consuming a lot of industrial cheese. I developed a rash on my legs... One day I realized the rash was certainly being caused by my cheap cheese habit. I'm certain it was related to the "vegetarian enzymes" used as an industrial substitute for the traditional animal rennet. I stopped buying the cheap cheese, and my rash went away.
> I'm certain it was related to the "vegetarian enzymes"
How can you be so certain? I did not find any credible source correlating microbial rennet to rash. Thus I would not rule out that this was simply a coincidence or at least not applicable for most people.
The story is about how medicine assumes that if a little oxygen is good, more is better. But in the real world too much oxygen destroys lungs, and we’re all deteriorated by even a little too much O2.
I, for one, welcome the reconsideration of oxygen anti-therapy.
This is an important story. A lot of people are over-oxygenated by their health care professionals.
A common way that people induce 'too much oxygen' is by hyperventilating. One effect of hyperventilating is that it shrinks the peripheral arteries - in the brain, fingers, toes.
The simplest treatment for hyperventilation is recycling exhaled carbon dioxide with a paper bag.
What if admitting science-mistakes made the weight loss drugs unnecessary? I'm sure the causes of the obesity epidemic could be acknowledged without framing it as a mistake.
One of the neat features of the HN Poll is that I can add more choices. Respond to this comment with your favorite 'science mistake', and I'll consider adding it to the poll.
It's not any sort of reasonable discussion if you present a very very slanted set of contentious 'options' which presume malice on the part of "science" (as if that were one cabal), and do not for example list any counter examples of self corrections or false accusations such as the autism/MMR issue, or phlogiston or the aether or the bananas claims about covid vaccines and 5G phone reception...
I put a top-level post on this submission requesting more poll options.
> contentious 'options' which presume malice on the part of "science"
My poll attempted to ascribed malice to the powerful people who use the trappings of science to concentrate wealth. I made a similar comment 2 days ago: "[...] the medical system has been gamed to concentrate wealth. Doctoring pays well, but doctors are much lower on medicine's economic dogpile than insurance and pharmaceutical companies." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43053362
> self corrections or false accusations
I went to a seminar around 2004. The speaker mentioned a foundational science mistake from the 1800's. In the past year I've heard this mistake was corrected, but the correction was classified. <shrug>.
There is no official guide to "how to prevent your child from becoming Autistic", so this issue is still open.
Scott Adams' has been posting deranged shit on Twitter for years now. His credibility as a social commentator is exhausted, and if you don't know that then you're going to be sent on some pretty moronic alt-right snipe chases at his behest.
> "Tongue in cheek" is an idiom
Your "joke" is 6 paragraphs long. Go get a hobby or a girlfriend or a job or something, this is not a healthy expression of irony or frustration with the government. Repeat this shit in another thread or comment and you'll be run out of this site on a rail.
I'm just a simple former taxi-driver. I went the extra mile for some of my passengers - bailing them out of jail, etc - and made notes about people's struggles with the machine.
The guy who I bailed out - a few years ago his friend shared on facebook that he'd been arrested again. I went to his hearing - he saw me. The judge was very stern with all the other people, but said to my passenger, "you haven't caused any trouble since you were arrested years ago, but you did miss your court date so I have to do something..." She was going to give him 30 days with work release, but he said he'd just miss the next court date so they might as well keep him. I sent him some money for his books, he sent me a post card saying that it meant a lot to have the support of someone on the outside.
> this is not a healthy expression of irony or frustration with the government.
Sometimes all you can do is make fun of your predicament.
I'm about to head out to hustle for a while, will respond to you later tonight.
>the medical establishment has suffered a severe blow to their credibility because the government used their work in vain.
It doesn't help that the medical system has been gamed to concentrate wealth. Doctoring pays well, but doctors are much lower on medicine's economic dogpile than insurance and pharmaceutical companies.
I think Medicine became an important jobs project in the post-NAFTA era because it's an industry that can't be outsourced. The amount spent on medicine has gone through the roof, but the outcomes are the same as they've ever been.
I expect that the high spending on ineffective care is a wealth effect rather than something more indirect. The money is there, so people use it. Veterinary care is sort of similar (spending has skyrocketed as disposable income has increased).
There's also probably technology/knowledge effects, new things that are worth paying a lot for, people staying relatively healthy but getting fragile in the process, etc.
But other historians believe they reflect a lost technological sophistication. The pyramids are incredibly precise: perfectly aligned to true north (within ~0.05°), made with millions of 2-70 ton blocks and precise internal engineering for passageways and chambers. Someone recently advocated that there's substantial subterranean infrastructure under the pyramids. The technology to move 70 ton blocks didn't exist again until the 1800's.
One of modern science's ideological straitjackets is Oliver Heaviside's restatement of Maxwell's 20 equations with 20 unknowns into four vector calculus equations. Heaviside's restatements made the math accessible to regular engineers who wanted to build things. But the restatements are arguably a simplification that neutered electromagnetism: https://x.com/TaxiCabJesus/status/1964345590604845487 (Grok had a nice answer for "what phenomenon are inadequately explained by Heaviside's four equations?").
The Coral Castle in Florida was a labor of love, built by a single man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_Castle
Modern humans are at least 100,000 years old. Most of our earlier civilizations are probably along the coasts of the continents, and were submerged at the end of the last ice age. It's silly to think that technology has not been lost and rediscovered over and over again.