This question inspired by this post..
witch burning
I read Montaigne’s essays (written in the 1500’s) and while his views are remarkably modern in many ways, one thing that stuck out to me was how unabashedly elitist he is. The translation I had used the phrase “common herd” to refer to the large majority of people who failed to impress him due to their lack of education or strength of character. I hesitate to speak for him since I think he was a wiser man than I am, but I expect that our modern notions about democracy would have seemed ridiculous to him. He might accept that universal suffrage is in practice the least-bad option currently available to us, but he would argue that at least in principle it would be better to exclude people who don’t actually know how to run a country from the process of deciding how the country is to be run.
(He would also be unashamed to say that the life of an exceptional person is worth more than the life of someone ordinary, but we think that in the modern day too. We just consider it rude to be so explicit about it.)
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.
Classic case of survivorship bias
People back in the day had just as much terrible advice as we have today, it’s just that the only one that survived long enough to survive to the present day is the really good advice
But to answer the question, anything related to the ingestion of mercury
How they used to get rid of motor oil back in the day.
I love how nowadays they made it illegal to wash your car out on the street because it pollutes the ground.
Like motherfucker where do you think this dirt goes to when it falls off the car while driving?
They should outlaw cars to fix this.
Aristotle was obviously a great teacher and philosopher but he ended up being wrong about a lot. Like he thought the “elements” were earth, wind, fire, and water and that all objects want to be in their “natural” place. So, if you drop a rock, it tries to return to the earth. Fire goes up because it’s trying to get to where it “wants” to live.
He thought eels didn’t procreate because no one had ever seen it happening. (They go out to sea to fuck.) He was into bees and correctly noticed that there were workers and drones and that young bees grow out of the honeycomb. But he just assumed the Queen was a King and that worker bees were out collecting tiny baby bees from flowers. (He thought the air just blew pollen around and the honey naturally appeared.)
He had a lot of ideas that were just ideas but he was so influential and his writings were preserved and translated. It took a shocking number of years for people to question if Aristotle was full of shit.
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.
