Editing Blog/2025-02-24/Lost Science (section)

=== Conclusion ===

Many other such "inventions awaiting discovery" exist. A few of them are:

* wheeled luggage: casters existed for centuries before someone considered putting them on luggage and there were no materials innovations before they became popular (though there have been ones since)

* spectacles: lenses of required optical quality seem to have existed for centuries before they were thought to be used for people

And while looking around for the paddle thing I actually found this old thread from Dan Luu on Twitter that has some examples in software:

{{Tweet
| name = Dan Luu
| username = danluu
| text = Is there anyone who's exploring the question "why wasn't X invented earlier?" for various Xs, especially for modern Xs?

I've heard that I should read Graeber's new book, but that it won't really be what I'm looking for since it mostly focuses on older Xs.
| date = Dec 29, 2021
| ID = 1476260569040646144
| ref-name = Tweet_1476260569040646144
| block = true
}}

These days, in LLMs, "very stupid" things have a lot of success including the classic prompt-enhancer "let's think step-by-step" and sometimes they seem to qualify except for the fact that they're discovered quite quickly.

Nonetheless, these examples all have the problem that someone could conceivably make the argument that economic circumstances did not make the ideas worthwhile at the time and only a change in the requirements of the time (canoe racing, more travel) or a difficult unblocking invention (the miniature trigger) made the device valuable. So these could be another example of History From Below.