I’ve been looking into feng shui lately, specifically the concepts about what makes a person feel more safe or at ease in a space, such as relaxing or sleeping facing the entrance / exit.
While reading, I came across the guidance that you should always shut your toilet seat to prevent your good fortune from being flushed. The real reason you should keep it shut is so it can’t mist shit-water all over your toothbrush every time you flush. Also so your pets don’t drink out of it.
What other things did humans throughout history accidentally get right?
Pluto was discovered because the orbit of Neptune didn’t match predictions, so astronomers decided that there must be a ninth planet out there. It was very close to where the math predicted it would be.
It turned out later that Pluto was much, much smaller than at first thought, and couldn’t be the 9th planet. It then turned out that the mass of Neptune was greater than expected, and the orbit actually matched expectations without the need for a 9th planet.
Back in the day, without proper health guidelines, banning the eating of pork was a really good idea.
Same goes for shellfish - unrefridgeated it can go nasty quickly, and if you live in a hot environment that’s gonna be even faster.
While true from a health standpoint, isn’t the idea of religious food prohibitons being based on health somewhat contentious?
I thought that Jews didn’t eat them because they have cloven hooves and they don’t chew their cud.~~
Edit: I read the question, then still went on my own tangent because I find the origin of religious taboos interesting. Apologies
Right, isn’t that the point of the question? What old time things did we do for one reason (cloven hooves) that turned out to be right for completely different reasons (health and safety)
That was how the put them in buckets.
But I think it’s at least as likely as not that whoever wrote that rule chose those buckets to be “unclean” because people got more sick more often. “I got sick once after eating it” is still one of the biggest reasons some people don’t like seafood. Your brain is very good at turning single bad events into “don’t touch this” if there isn’t a body of safe interactions to fall back to.
Oh, they likely weren’t based on health, but that still didn’t make it a bad idea. :)
Midwives did not understand germ theory, but still washed their hands and cleaned the delivery areas for delivery due to tradition.
Fun fact:
A Hungarian doctor tried to combine midwife tradition with his knowledge of modern medicine to get even better results. He required his nurses to clean on a regular basis, and required doctors to wash their hands with a chlorine solution before all medical procedures.
The result was a resounding success, with the complication rate as his facility being better than both the midwives and other doctors. However his methods violated social conventions at the time, so he was shunned from society and considered a disgrace. He died in an insane asylum.
Sort of tangential, but Democritus was right about atoms, but obviously he worked it out in a very different way to how modern scientists did — though we don’t know his exact reasoning.
Even more tangential: Aristotle (and others) were wrong about the four elements making all matter, but they do correspond to the four basic states of matter, which is kind of fun: earth=solid, water=liquid, air=gas, fire=plasma.
Black holes. Predicted in the 1700s using Newtonian gravity. The event horizon diameter even turned it to be right (ie. matches the one predicted by general relativity).
