Scott Badger wrote:
> >> If you dropped back a hundred thousand years, how long would it take you
Thats not necessarily the test. A survivalist, by definition, is trained to
SURVIVE, not to PROGRESS. Anyone's first concern in a crisis situation like
that is obviously "how am I going to make it through the day", then how am
> >> to out-invent hunters who had been using spears all their life? Skill
> >> is a poor substitute for smartness.
>
> >I wonder how well I could build all those waterwheels, metal melting,
> >steam engines and Volta cells. Have you tried to recreate technology?
> >And the interesting thing in this example is that in the end it hinges
> >not on me being a super-genius, but on me knowing things already (and
> >then needing to somehow implement them, which is the hard part!).
>
> >It would be interesting to drop you off on an isolated island together
> >with a randomly selected but stupid survivalist. Would your superior
> >intellect bring you more food?
Combine survivialist training with engineering knowledge, and that person could go extremely far back in time and have a decent 18th century community going within 10-15 years. Teach some primitives written language, the scientific method, some ethics/philosophy, and record as much as you can of what technologies are possible and how to acheive them, and you'd have a 20th century civilization going within a few generations
>
>
> >I would rather say smartness is a poor substitute for skill, which is
> >why we tend to rely on learned skills rather than problem solving for
> >most tasks we do.
>
> Yes. I remember thinking about this after watching "A Connecticut
> Yankee in King Arthur's Court" with the Bing-meister. I would want to
> take along my four volume set of "How Things Work".
I've been looking for a CD-ROM set of that. Does anyone know if it's digitized yet and where to get it?
Mike Lorrey