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Ada Palmer: recommendation

4 Oct 2023 Conversations with Tyler Ada Palmer on Viking Metaphysics, Contingent Moments, and Censorship

“If I want to do the most good — because I’m actually changing history — then I need to go back to preclassical Egypt and teach Imhotep the germ theory of disease and handwashing practices because he is the earliest medical authority who has the correct background to be able to understand the germ theory of disease and the correct degree of authority to be able to teach it to people.”

— Ada Palmer

Source trail

Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Ada Palmer
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
recommendation
Recorded
4 Oct 2023
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

Transcript context

…Right? You’ve read Diderot on nuns, so you’re a nun. Yes, yes. Dominican would be best for many periods. It depends on the goal. If it’s “I want to live and be okay,” I want to be as close to the present as possible. If it’s “I love these people, and I want to meet them and get to know about them,” I either want to go to a dinner party at Diderot’s house, or I want to talk to Machiavelli late in his life about the importance of his work after he’s written The Prince. If I want to do the most good — because I’m actually changing history — then I need to go back to preclassical Egypt and teach Imhotep the germ theory of disease and handwashing practices because he is the earliest medical authority who has the correct background to be able to understand the germ theory of disease and the correct degree of authority to be able to teach it to people. If you want to actually increase the number of people who have lived by billions, you want to teach handwashing to Imhotep. Is history just a kind of clutter? And is clutter underrated?…

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