Dwarkesh

Like, why didn't Cultural Revolution or some, like, foresight just be like, hey, like, this we can sort of, like, do without?

Yeah.

There's this great blog post by the author Slime Old Time Old where he's discussing – Wait.

Author what?

You don't know internet culture, you know.

There's a bunch of weirdos out there.

I live in a different world.

Sorry.

What did you call it?

Sly multi.

Anyways, they have a blog post about scurvy and why it took so long to discover.

And he was discussing all these sort of like – it's sort of like an epistemic conundrum because you can like use lime and you realize like, oh, it works.

But then if you use lemons, which have much less vitamin C or maybe it's the other way around, they just don't work much –

Way worse.

And then there's like certain kinds of fruit which have vitamin C, certain kinds which don't.

So it's like it's actually hard to kind of figure out like what is it if you don't have a mechanistic explanation about how you solve this problem.

And I think they had once figured it out and then they lost the knowledge until it was rediscovered again.

But it makes it all the more mysterious that the kinds of things that Henrik discusses

uh, forager societies having figured out, like literally there's like this 10 step process for how to process a certain kind of bean so that you don't get cyanide poisoning.

Um, and if you mess up any one of those 10 steps, you're going to get cyanide poisoning, but like a society just figures out, you know, the bright taboos and traditions to process beans, but like you can figure that out.