Ask Lemmy
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The geocentric theory.
Fat free food helps you keep from gaining weight.
It was a pretty straightforward theory, but it was totally wrong. And the sugar which took fat’s place is so much worse for keeping slim than fat is.
I don't know if anyone else has said it, but the belief that human illness and all that were caused by an imbalance of four bodily humors: black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm. It's an old belief where the earliest I found it being practiced was around 400 B.C.
Traveling faster than a horse is harmful.The body waa not made for that speed.
Plus for any saying like "look before you leap" there's a "the early bird gets the worm"
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
Or anything radioactive. Turns out it was a bad idea to make radium-lined water coolers
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.
if it as wrong, it wasn’t wisdom, just a belief.
lmao at the brilliant wordsmiths downvoting this literally tautological and necessary truth.
that night air is bad for you.