conchis comments on The Great Brain is Located Externally - Less Wrong
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IAWYC but,
I suspect you're caricaturing the (lack of) knowledge of a random historical peasant somewhat. It's easy to come up with a list of things that we know that they wouldn't, because we usually know what we know. There are probably many things that an historical peasant knows that we don't, but it's harder to come up with examples, because often we don't know what we don't know. All things considered, I'd still say we know more, but not necessarily by as much as might be suggested by a naive reading of your comment.
FWIW, a random historical peasant is about 50% likely to be female.
Then again, do we? We live in a sea of things we know, there's so many layers we can't even see them.
The simple activity of vacuuming a carpet is actually as complex as tilling a field, even if the consequences of doing it wrong are far less severe. You get the vacuum out of the cupboard, you swivel the little prong that keeps the cord wound up, you find an outlet that you can reach a lot of the room from, you plug the cord into the outlet, type A plugs fit in type B outlets but not vice versa, if there's a large prong it has to be put in a certain way up, some outlets only supply electricity when the associated switch is turned on, the switch may not be located near the outlet, etc. etc.
For your convenience, here's a gender neutral copy of my post:
Fair enough. I think the comparative point stands though: knowledge of what we know > knowledge of what we don't know.
;)
I don't know how reliable this source is but it suggests that the sex ratio in medieval Europe, at least, was skewed toward men, and offers some compelling reasons for it.