[WhatsTheBigIdea]

What a fabulous analysis! The serendipity is remarkably high!

I suppose penicillin might be a good addition to the list of powerful compounds discovered by happenstance?

Does this mean that innovation is basically a brute force calculation? Humans simply trying permutations until something hits?

[vacuity]

Considering how we all seem to be the product of millions of years of hit-or-miss natural selection, it feels almost natural that our advancements have also had a great deal of luck/improbability.

[hinkley]

Some homebrewers will wax nostalgic about how the human sense of smell/taste can detect almost all of the ways that fermentation can go wrong and make it toxic.

But we also keep pushing back earliest dates for precursors to civilization, I start to wonder if maybe there aren't graveyards of people who couldn't distinguish thymol from ethanol and selected themselves out of human history via acute liver failure.

[sudosysgen]

Animals do eat fermented food, through fallen/rotting fruits, so perhaps the thymol sensitivity predates hominids.

[thfuran]

Yeah, the ability to detect toxins likely to appear in the food supply seems evolutionarily important.

[kfarr]

Yeah exactly this is not just random, it’s “guided search” as commented by a sibling

[tumultco]

To give some more context, Fleming's job was an antibacterial researcher, and also molds were also previously known to have these properties. In some ways, the lucky part was others finding his work and developing it. I found this video on the development of Penicillin a pretty interesting watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhXmkDapHWg

[BriggyDwiggs42]

It’s much smarter than random, more like a guided search.

[hinkley]

How did we ever figure out that aspens and willows have aspirin analogs in their bark? Boredom? Starvation food?

Psychedelic mushrooms make sense. You see it, you eat it. Willow bark tea is a whole process.

[throwaway4aday]

Back in the day people made tea out of anything they could get their hands on that wasn't outright poisonous. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbal_tea#Varieties

Also, if you're in constant pain you'll try all kinds of random stuff to make the pain go away. If necessity is the mother of invention then desperation is its father.

[hinkley]

Tea and beer are pathogen-depleted and so it makes a ton of sense that they were both imbibed 'to excess'.

History of the World in Six Glasses claims that tea and coffee more or less caused the enlightenment. One, it stopped day drinking by the intellectual class. And two, they were foil for socialization.

[doubled112]

Makes you wonder about tobacco.

Hey, all the bugs that are eating that plant are dying. Let's see what happens if we smoke it.

[neuromanser]

More like: This plant has no insect parasites, it must be special somehow, let's try and use it in different, increasingly "close approach" ways. I mean, humans must have figured quite early that on average, inhaling smoke of a poisonous plant has a fraction of the effect of chewing the same. Someone gets really sick after chewing some leaves, their family burns the rest of the "crop" and they get high.

[nerdponx]

It seems likely to me that any form of smoking was discovered incidentally by burning stuff that smelled nice, repelled bugs, repelled evil spirits, etc. and happening to inhale some of the smoke.

[hinkley]

Most likely.

For mushrooms it was probably desperation, but my head cannon for mushrooms is Trial by Mushroom: You can be expelled from our community for stealing, or you can eat this mushroom and if you survive, you get to stay.

[hinkley]

The cool thing about tea leaves is that the caffeine is stored in crystals that are not particularly soluble. There's an organelle that contains an enzyme that breaks the crystals down into a soluble form.

There are a couple varieties of tea that are actually fermented, but for most teas it's a misnomer. You aren't causing fermentation, just autolysis (latin: self digestion), which is more akin to the malting phase of beer production. Black tea is left to process longer, while green tea is interrupted sooner. The switch is turned on by bruising the leaves, and off by desiccating them.

From a caterpillar's perspective, a tea leaf is booby trapped. Waiting for mandibles to mix the ingredients and create the insecticide.

[ninjaK4t]

I mean history suggests that’s the case. Took centuries for Copernicus to exist.

AI has been an idea for decades. It wasn’t until transformers in the last few years we had big gains.

Google and giant institutions focus on fiat revenue stability over the long term, in line with political ideology. Few big ideas come out of that. I think what Adam Smith is said to have written applies; division of labor taken to the extreme will result in humans dumber than the lowest animal.

We iterated on our current political system over the Boomers lives. Next generations are tired of the threat of brute force from the elders who the kids now see as in no position to back up those threats given their age. They’re abandoning norms of the last 30-40 years, which IMO, is enabled by abandonment of thousands of years of obligation to preserve religion.

There are shorter iterative periods too; 15 years ago comic movies went crazy with Iron Man, iPhone blew up; now we’re iterating on AI generated content and spatial headsets. 15 years prior (with some wiggle room for margin of error) “information super highway” was coming.

On the shorter scales there seems to a pattern of 3-5 year warmup and 7-10 year plateau, with a cooldown of 2-3 years as the masses lose interest. This aligns with neuroscience experiments that show our brains devalue old patterns after roughly 15 years.

Generational churn and lack of generalized sense of obligation to the past (via abandonment of religious buy in by westerners) could free the future to live in cycles that align with scientific measurement versus obligation to be parrots that recite past memes.

[aeneasmackenzie]

Copernicus is a bad example. He proposed a heliocentric system based on vibes. Actual progress required decades of cutting-edge precision measurements by Brahe and then analysis by Kepler. Objections to heliocentrism were on scientific grounds which were resolved by the discovery of inertia, Airy disks, and stellar aberration.