Roman Gladiators ate a mostly vegetarian diet and drank a tonic of ashes

Re:Roman Gladiators ate a mostly vegetarian diet and drank a... by Jun8 on Saturday October 25, 2014 @11:17PM (#8510149)

David Deutsch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deutsch) has an interesting take on explaining why intelligent people in history did not converge on the correct theories sooner (not just in medicine, e.g. in physics, so noise created by placebo effect does not explain those), namely that if you have what he terms a bad theory empiricism or intelligence will not let you iterate to the correct solution as most people assume. You can be stuck at a local minimum.

If you have 15mins, watch his TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_a_new_way_to_explain_....

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Re:Roman Gladiators ate a mostly vegetarian diet and drank a... by benbreen on Sunday October 26, 2014 @10:00AM (#8511015)

Thanks, I'll check this out. Historians of early modern science have a favorite example of this, phlogiston.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory

Phlogiston theory is utterly wrong as an explanation for fire, but it "saves the appearances" (conforms to observable physical phenomena) quite well. I think Thomas Kuhn talks about it as an example of a mindset that required a paradigm shift to be thought about differently in Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which seems to be along similar lines as what I gather is Deutsch's Karl Popper-influenced take on scientific knowledge-making.

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