You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Vaniver comments on A Challenge: Maps We Take For Granted - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: Sable 29 May 2015 03:50AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (29)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Vaniver 29 May 2015 01:00:53PM 2 points [-]

4) You are only allowed to pull from general, scientifically literate knowledge - high school/bachelor's level only.

The benefit of civilization is that you can do more with less knowledge; everyone is more specialized. If "high school / bachelor's level" means something that any person learns in that time period, then you can do lots of things, but if it's every person, then you're in trouble. Vitamin C being in citrus fruit and an effective treatment for scurvy and legumes fixing nitrogen are both very helpful tips that are fairly easy to transport back in time... but what percentage of moderns with a high school education know that? What percentage of moderns can look at a plant and identify whether it's a legume or not?

It seems to me that any map that we "take for granted" is, by assumption, a map that we could not accurately recreate from memory. I have a generic understanding of how internal combustion engines work, but not nearly enough to be useful in a project to redesign them from scratch. (I actually know more about early steam engines because of my historical interest in the early industrial revolution than I do about the car I drive almost every day!)