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Health seems like the big one. It makes a personal difference to your quality of life and lifespan whether you believe that lead paint is safe, whether you believe that vaccines are good for you, etc. I expect that the biggest thing our descendants are likely to shake their heads at is some benign part of everyday life in the developed world which will have been exposed as having dire long-term consequences on the human body. The "microscopic lithium contamination is causing obesity" people are probably wrong, but something like that.
Our descendants in 100 years seem unlikely to be more longevity maxing or scientifically minded than we are.
I'm not saying they'll be systematically better at taking care of their health, just that something big and loud akin to "yo, lead point is bad for you" might emerge and filter out into popular consciousness to the point they'd be horrified at the 2025 lifestyle for that alone.
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Personal health advice matters up to a point.
I understand this is relevant vis à vis cigarettes or leaded gasoline and the like, but these are matters of public health and public policy. It's only in a democracy that every man must have an opinion on such matters, and we've done fine in the past with more primitive types of holy men declaring things they notice have problems to be unclean and pass down general wisdom like this.
In any case, having a truth seeking apparatus that really works is absolutely necessary, but I would couch that as academic affairs, actually.
In fact, the current state of affairs where no institution is trustworthy and everyone has to build their own opinion of basically anything is a catastrophic failure and a waste of everyone's time. Not some utopian epistemological anarchy.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating we all stop thinking and defer to the closest available authority. But we have to live in a world where most people are going to do that, by necessity. So even if it's unwise, it ought to work.
Surely not? In any era, save some totalitarian hell-scape, I can still use my own judgement to determine if I, personally, am going to take up smoking/let a quack saw up my leg/give the wise-woman's herbal remedy a try. Renaissance, medieval, even ancient literature is full of jokes about doctors prescribing unpleasant/harmful treatments which clearly don't work just to look like they know what they're talking about, and characters rightly giving them a hard pass after the application of a bit of common sense.
You can, but you don't have to for most things.
Consider in the periods you bring up the role of the Church vis à vis morality (protestantism and all), because I think it's a lot more relevant to what I'm trying to illustrate than medicine which has indeed always been suspect of quackery.
There are places that still work like this today. I've lived in some. In some nations, the ruler just says whether something is acceptable or not (which usually really come from his advisors) and people fall in, because that's what you do.
People don't turn off their brain altogether so you can't make insane demands out of them, but they will generally be unconcerned with matters that are beyond their command, and really most dissident talk is about character rather than policy specifics.
This also happens in representative democracies mind you, but this tendency to stick to "is this a good man" rather than "are those good policies" is usually panned as populism because it's rightly recognized as subversive to the ideal of a democratic system.
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