[mightyham]

By "modern liberal attitudes", I mean exactly that. Liberal beliefs held by the general public that came about in the modern era (post enlightenment), which is simply a more rigorous description for what you seem to be referring to when you say that the world took a break from conservatism "during the 19th and 20th centuries". All that to say, it's extremely relevant to the discussion.

If, as you claim, conservatism was the main reason for low life expectancy, then at any point in time people could have just stopped being conversative (I don't even really know what you mean by this, but according to you it happened in the 19th century), and their standard of living would have gone up as a result. I'll say it again, this is ridiculous on its face. The industrial revolution, which lead to today's human prosperity was driven almost entirely by SPECIFIC environmental, economic, and cultural conditions. It was not driven by some shift in public attitude about being generally more accepting of change.

[kragen]

i wasn't talking about conservatism in general. i was talking specifically about stouset's form of conservatism: 'extreme caution when considering the scale and widespread impact ... let's be conservative when considering compounds that live permanently in the environment, are damn near impossible to remove, and are spreading widely to every part of the ecosystem'

such extreme caution is entirely compatible with liberal post-enlightenment beliefs, but not with technological progress, which was indeed largely driven by shifts in public attitudes about technical innovations, including but not limited to novel materials. when newton was inventing modern physics he had to keep his chemistry experiments secret because chemistry was illegal, and the catholic church specifically prosecuted people (via the inquisition) for practicing chemistry: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30134775/

this problem continues to the present day, where it continues to retard technical progress in many places; and, of course, hatred and even legal prosecution of chemists in particular has returned in places like the usa. but the problem is much broader than this; for example, william kamkwamba relates in his autobiography how his neighbors believed the windmill he had built in malawi was causing a drought through witchcraft, after having ridiculed him as a lunatic for years when he was hanging out in the junkyard to salvage the parts to build it