The World Continues to go Mad

we were playing the mind game of - you are dropped in the England of Henry the eight's time with all the knowledge you have that they don't. What could you do to make yourself useful / indispensable ?
We couldn't think of a single thing we could do to impress them cos we hadn't got a clue about the basic technologies that underly all the modern miracles.
But then we looked at what areas of life were better then and we also couldn't think of one. Ruled by a brutal dictator with absolute power of life and death, death and disease everywhere, incredibly violent punishments including disemboweling and burning alive, lives controlled and managed by a powerful clerical elite, short and brutal lives for most people, no education, no knowledge of the world, no travel no safety net if you got sick or injured - nothing in fact of what makes our lives pleasurable today.
When you look at it like that we are living in a paradise.

Speak for yourself, I could be the royal doctor

You said "the facts are..." - that is not summarising you thick fuck

could you make anti biotics? what could you cure. and how?

You must have a good doctor if all he does is give you antibiotics!!

Knowledge of chemistry is all you need. As an example, willow bark can be used as a pain killer as it contains aspirin, the sap has salicylic acid in it - good for acne

but they already knew about that in 1500. so its not gonna impress them if you start waving bits of willow about is it?
could you perform surgery? could you make anaesthetic? could you cure plague? or cholera or TB? And it's one thing having a knowledge of chemistry, it's another to source the basics you would need. could you synthesise aspirin from willow bark?

and I don't mean 'is it possible to do it' I mean do you personally have the knowledge to do it with the technology available to you in 1500?

Insecure girls are dying theirs hairs bright red all across the country. Please please please FUCKING GET A GRIP OF REALITY

Well now you are changing the game - you said what could you do to make yourself useful. Im saying I could practice medicine in that time, not necessarily bring modern medicine to the 1500s, although Im sure I could teach them a thing or two

Do you really think we are getting stupider? I certainly don't. We've made unbelievable technological advances in the last 10 years

I think the Pike is being gingerist here

ah no I meant if you arrived back there, just you with no books and no technology from now, what could you do?

I stand by my first answer

can doctors do much without modern drugs?

Holy shit forks, your doctor must just pump you full of pharmaceuticals everytime you go in!

Your god is simon cowell and your temple is a lcd tv!! get on your nees and worship x-factor you drones!!

The world has shurunk too fast for us to handle. I listened to an interesting interview the other day with Bill Dovidow called Overloaded Internet. There were all sorts of subtopics but the most interesting for me was about how the internet has changed the way we interact, and perhaps we are too overconnected to the point that it might have a psychological impact on people. There are neurological changes, from the new pressures and the speed of change. He says our brains are not yet adapted to dealing with these fast changes.

I spent a lot of time looking at how tools affected human evolution. For 2-1/2-million years, we have been evolving in physical space with our tools. And remarkable things happen. If we look at a chimpanzee its digestive system is three times ours, it's five times stronger, roughly, and its brain is about a third of our size. With fire, which made food more digestible, and stone tools, working with our brain which made us more powerful enabled us to happen. Twenty-five years ago we moved into virtual space, and our brains were not designed for that. Now I know we're all in awe of what 10-year-olds can do, and I liken what 10-year-olds can do to going to the gym and building up my muscles. I can change my physique or I can strengthen my physique but I can't change it from an evolutionary point of view. And the real thing that concerns me is that I know what our brains would be designed very differently for a virtual environment, and the example I give which is kind of serendipitous, is that one three separate occasions, fish evolved with two sets of eyes. The ideal human configuration in a virtual world is two sets of ears. One set with the ear buds, and another set so we can hear when we're jogging if we're going to get run over from behind.
Now I mean that is carrying something to an extreme, but we're beginning to understand that we're misusing dopamine reactions that were getting cortisol releases, we know things like post-traumatic stress disorder, where people exposed to stress in the war, caused their hippocampus to shrink. And these are all things that we're using our brains in ways in which they weren't designed to be used. And it's a concern, I don't understand very much about it and there are a lot of people who are trying to figure out what to do about it.