We also learned that a mild fever is productive in fighting the virus and that you should let it get to a certain point before dealing with it.

The worst part of it was that for a ton of stuff he had contemporaries that were right about much much more, but were dismissed in favor of his confidently incorrect BS.

For example the Epicureans, who thought matter was made of tiny indivisible parts, that light too was made of indivisible parts moving really fast, that each parent contributed to a "doubled seed" which determined the traits of the child and could bring back features of skipped generations, that the animals which we see today were just the ones that were best able to survive to reproduce, and that all of existence arose only from the random interactions of these indivisible parts of matter and not from any intelligent design.

And because Aristotle's stupid ideas influenced the lineage of modern thought, most people learn about him but very few learn about the other group that effectively preempted modern thought millennia earlier.

But he just assumed the Queen was a King

Actually, he acknowledged "some say" the Queen was female, but then argued it couldn't be because the gods don't give women weapons and it had a stinger. And the identification of the leader of the hive as male was actually used for centuries to justify patriarchal monarchy as being "by God's design" because after all, look at the bee hive (somehow when we realized it was actually a female that logic went up in smoke).

So there were other people that did know what was correct, but Aristotle screwed up the development of thinking around it by rationalizing an opposite answer with an appeal to misogyny.

Wild that he was only two degrees of separation from a teacher famed for praising the knowledge of self-ignorance and not falling into false positives and negatives.

"Element" is a fairly general word, we just generally use it colloquially to refer specifically to the chemical elements. If you interpret his usage in the same way we use "states of matter", it's not horrendously far off. Earth, water, air, and fire roughly correspond to solid, liquid, gas, and (extremely rudimentary, very low ionization) plasma (or perhaps a more general energetic concept). In any case, an object "wanting" to get to its "natural" place also isn't terribly far off from a statement of consistent physical laws. Solids do "want" to accumulate with other solids by gravity, energetic gases do "want" to rise above less energetic ones through buoyancy.

It's fascinating just how utterly alien this all sounds to our modern ears, with the benefit of many generations cycling through the creation and deployment of the written word, then the printed word, then electromagnetic communication, then computers, then the internet.

Imagine the strange descriptions and explanations that were passed down via the spoken word and memory alone, for countless generations until arriving at Aristotle. Before the Sumerians and all the way up to the Phoenicians and FINALLY the invention of a workable, practical phonetic alphabet. Imagine the tales they would tell! So many of them lost to time, before they had a chance at being registered in a physical medium.

How did they make sense of what they saw in the night skies at places like Lascaux and Gobekli Tepe? How did they regard and explain the migration of the birds, the rainbow and the lightning?

Accumulating knowledge and communications technology have standardized certain views of the world, one step at a time, first slowly then more rapidly, and accelerating. In the days of Aristotle, this was all just barely beginning, and I believe that what we don't know about those people before that time - the human primate in the process of becoming civilized - could surprise and confound us, that their views might have been more alien and even outlandish to us than we can imagine.

I mean... Aristotle sounds weird enough, right? I believe he's just the tip of a huge and deep iceberg of ideas and time.

Ok, but the rocks and flames thing is pretty cute. The elements.. they yearn for their homes...

I always suspected that the "no mixing wool and linen" verses in the Bible were due to miniature lightning striking (heh) the fear of God into the ancients.

Or anything radioactive. Turns out it was a bad idea to make radium-lined water coolers

Anything related to health care in general, really. Keep in mind that germ theory was only invented in the late 16th century, and it was ridiculed for centuries in favour of Miasma theory. It wasn't until the mid 19th century that it started gaining legitimacy.

it’s just that the only one that survived long enough to survive to the present day is the really good advice

Okay but... I thought that was basically the point, in that if the advice survived for that long, then it is worth paying attention to at least, to consider if it might apply to a particular situation? e.g. chicken soup really is good for a cold, whether we knew the precise reasons why or not.

We used to blow tobacco smoke up people's asses, literally.

Doc, I have a killer migraine.

Ah, I have just the thing...

pulls out cast iron skillet.

Which it did - eventually.

Yep, better to test if they can swim.

To be fair, our modern concept of democracy really is quite shitty and the only reason we use it is because it is better than anything else we came up with so far.

But generally the notion that the common person cannot be entrusted with politics holds true even if we find it distasteful. The average person is a fucking idiot and objectively not qualified to decide on political matters.

Without knowing his works, I'd argue for him that he's right to some extent towards an uneducated population, BUT the reason we have universal suffrage is that our founding fathers assumed that:

1. Everyone would be well-educated and make rational if not reasonable assumptions about politicians (eg, not elect morons who immediately try and sabotage the government, citizenry, and friends)

2. Politicians would serve as public servants and would be even better educated and would work hard to brush up on things so that the common man wouldn't have to learn the ins and outs of complicated decisions in terms of complex trade agreements, city planning and zoning law, and universal medical systems that work across state lines.

Obviously, it didn't quite go that way. But it's why I'm such an advocate for good public schools and free education, because it pays itself back in spades when it comes to R&D/innovation and an informed populace who make the country and world a better place to live.

Fun fact: This is also how Ethernet (wired network connection) got its name. Ether was already dismissed as a theory, but "omnipresent, completely-passive medium for the propagation of electromagnetic waves" was a good description of hardware layer that can transfer data in a way that's abstracting all the signal handling complexity for higher layers.

So in a way I'm actually sending this comment via Ethernet.

pretty interesting wiki page, is their 60 base math the reason we still have 60 base time?

Look into the death of George Washington. His doctor responded to what could have been a mild cold by taking a liter of blood 4 separate times from him. Washington very well could have recovered if he was just left alone.

Oh, and the doctor somewhat realized his mistake and tried to put some of the blood back after(!) Washington expired, with the logic that if blood loss killed him giving it back should revive him.

So yeah. Pumping blood back into a dead man. That was done on the founding president of the United States.

Unless you have excess swelling in specific parts of the body, like a cranial bleed, which does require letting out some blood to relieve pressure that can kill you. And leeches are used medically for relieving some types of swelling as well. Then there is maggots that can be used for infections to eat dead skin. All of those practices came from some specific medical treatments that did work for some specific types of injuries, although a few of them were overused for things that had nothing to do with why they existed in the first place which was counterproductive.

So while not asking for it is good advice, don't turn it down if an actual licensed medical doctor recommends them as a treatment that has been supported by evidence.