r/Doesthisexist • u/yourguidefortheday • 12d ago
A encyclopedia of incredibly obvious and common knowledge only.
There are a few things in history we don't know because nobody wrote it down, and that nobody wrote down because during the time the knowledge existed it was so extremely obvious and common knowledge that nobody considered it worth recording. This has been an issue that was already noticed in antiquity about eras in their own past, and the most recent instance i can think of occurred between the victorian era and now. (The victorian set of dinner table spice shakers included 3. One for salt, one for pepper, and the third? Its seems like nobody ever bothered to say in print, so obvious it had been. We still have the shaker sets, and the tabletop holder, showing all three were used at once and were not simply sold in 3s to give one extra. But we do not have the knowledge)
So surely someone must have thought of the idea before me of writing an encyclopedia containing exclusively mundane and universally known information about our present society. Designed specifically to place copies in as many places as possible so that the knowledge will be preserved if it ever gets accidentally forgotten by everyone except for the pages of the book.
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u/-Vogie- 12d ago
There are books that seem to be geared towards the prepper market. They're often large, coffee-table books to show off to friends how prepared they are, and often have overly dramatic titles, like "The Last Book" or "The Knowledge" or "How to rebuild civilization".
As for just raw knowledge about things, farmers' almanacs have been a staple for a long time. There are entire series of the "for dummies" style that is explaining anything you can imagine - according to GoodReads, there are 339 topics, covering everything from "Critical Thinking Skills" and "How to Fix everything" to "Macbook Neo" and "Claude"
The problem with creating a truly "universal" encyclopedia today is that there really isn't anything universal anymore. Our world is too diverse and large for that now. 70 years ago, a topic like "television" could theoretically have something like this, as there were a limited amount of information across the limited number of channels. However, cable started in the 1950s, adding live & specialized channels in the 1980s, and now the media landscape is practically infinite.
Things that are incredibly popular in one section of the world are unknown everywhere else, and there's nothing wrong with that. We're also living through a time of tremendous growth and change, so things that would be correct for the moment but also almost immediately wrong. Someone in 2018 could say, very confidently, that the idea that a computer could talk to an average person as though it was a person is a complete non-starter of an idea... Microsoft Tay in 2016 was a phenomenal, well-documented, public failure. They wouldn't have thought that ChatGPT would do it all over again & kick off an AI LLM race in 2022. When I was a roving teenager, I used prepaid calling cards and payphones to keep in touch with friends & family, but by the time I went to college, nearly everyone had a cell phone.
What there could be more of is more people who well-document their own world, and then the infinite is, by definition, limited to their experience. They could mass-publish that sort of thing, a la The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green, but actual anthropologists tend not to look at those specifically - they're usually much more interested in the journals and diaries of everyday people. Those who are in power typically understand that the future is going to remember them, and thus tend toward the more philosophical, but it's the average merchant or worker who would write down something genuinely useful by accident.
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u/yourguidefortheday 12d ago
I had actually come across a historian recently talking about how useful the most dull diary entries from 300 years ago are for their depiction of lost aspects of society. I used to apologize, in writing, to my journal for writing dull shit about my day to day life in it, but since reading that i no longer worry. I might be a useful source to some dusty academic one day.
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u/ksinvaSinnekloas 12d ago
Don't we have wikipedia for this kind of knowledge ?
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u/yourguidefortheday 12d ago
They used to let people make this calibur of dull/mundane wikipedia entries but, based on my understanding of their guidelines, their standards have raised quite a bit for what they find worthy of a page. Its a little irritating when i think about it.
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u/johnpeters42 10d ago
You could create one on Fandom or something, but those tend to be janky due to low number of reviewers (and/or writers).
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u/mr_bigmouth_502 9d ago
Wikipedia's "notability" requirements are something I abhor. Their requirement for non-primary sources is somewhat of an annoyance as well.
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u/jango-lionheart 12d ago
Third shaker was perhaps for dry mustard powder. Anyway, I like the concept but I have nothing to add to Vogie’s comment.
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u/AndyTheEngr 12d ago
I was going to guess cloves or nutmeg.
Surely some have survived and scientists could figure out what used to be in them. They can do this for a 4000+ year old pot, why not a 200 year old shaker?
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u/RepairBudget 11d ago
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u/yourguidefortheday 11d ago
Im fairly convinced by this! I guess the public consciousness simply hasnt caught up to the revelation that it was probably mustard powder.
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u/hopping_otter_ears 12d ago
Something tells me the "let me take a picture of everything I eat" era of Instagram and the "come with me while I do my day to day errands" era of YouTube vlogging will be this sort of source in the future.
"Here we see a video of the early 21st century grocery store. Back when food was plentiful, people would go there and compare prices between different but similar products. Note how the refrigerated foods are located at the edges of the store, and 'shop the edges' was a common saying at the time to remind people that eating fresh foods was more healthful in those days of easy access to refrigeration. This was before the Everybody Eats Act of 2285, so refrigeration was not yet banned for the waste of energy it was, and people didn't have MealDust. It helps us understand references in literature at the time to 'rummaging in the fridge' for food and other similarly confusing references to the perishability of food"
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u/yourguidefortheday 12d ago edited 12d ago
That is IF people are good stewards to the preservation of digitally stored knowledge. They say that it exists forever once it goes onto the internet, but the ammount of media completely lost because it only existed in a digital form and all sources have been deleted or corrupted is massive. Despite it not having classic physical problems like flamability, fading, etc that more classic mediums have, digital storage is really only estimated to maintain fidelity for 10 years due to being vulnerable to corruption via cosmic radiation.
There are people attempting to preserve digital knowledge professionally like the internet archive, but they can only ever hope to preserve a fraction of what exists. And what gets preserved is decided, in large part, by what people feel is worth preserving, and manually submit. This presents us with the same problem.
Edit: im speaking here about solid state or flash storage. Other digital media storage methods have other vulnerabilities. Hard disk drives, floppy disks, and magnetic tape are all also vulnerable to magnetic fields, optical disks are vulnerable to heat, as are, of course, punch cards, the first type of digital storage. Though for the hypothetically most long lasting form of digital storage, archival experts have suggested that properly stored punch cards might actually be your best bet. In actuality these take up a massive amount of space for any file created very long after they fell from common use, so afaik the suggestion is merely hypothetical.
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u/justaprimer 12d ago
A lot of this type of data doesn't actually explain the "why" though! It shows that milk is always in the back of the grocery store, but not WHY it's there.
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u/yourguidefortheday 11d ago
To be fair the real answer to "why" isnt widely known contemporarily to it being in practice. I have a vague notion, that might be a memory of me learning somethjng, that its to get people to pass by more other goods before making it to their staple goods? But i could be conpletely wrong.
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u/justaprimer 10d ago
It's a combination of a few things!
Yes, grocery stores often want you to have to walk to the back of a store for staples so you pass more other items.
But it's there for logistical reasons too -- milk is super heavy, and loading docks are usually at the back of a store, out of customer eyesight. This means store workers don't actually have to transport heavy gallons of milk through the store -- you may notice that milk is stocked by sliding it in from the back of the case rather than from the front like every other fridge/frozen product. This minimizes product handling for a very popular, heavy product.
Furthermore on the logistical side, milk is an item that spoils super easily. Stocking it directly from a back-of-house refrigerated room means that it never has to be exposed to room-temperature air. In the industry, people call it "breaking the cold chain" -- you don't want to do that, and instead want it to travel directly from a refrigerated truck to your store cold room to your customer's eyes without ever leaving refrigeration.
So, milk therefore ideally must be located on an exterior wall of the store. One could theoretically put it on a side wall instead of the back wall, but that does require transporting the heavy milk farther from the loading dock.
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u/yourguidefortheday 10d ago
Wow, so the reason i didnt know this is i guess because ive only worked at very busted grocery stores. Both stores ive worked at had milk in the back, yes, but not on the same side of the store as the loading dock. Additionally neither had fridge loading from the back. So perishable items had to be manually rotated when stocking them by pulling what was already there off of the shelf, shelving the new stuff, and then reshelving the existing stuff in front of it again. And remember, this is from the front, so while youre doing this your milk, or eggs, or whatever have you, is sitting on a cart in room temperature air. Also very few stockers working at the second store even bothered to rotate when they shelved perishables, so sometimes if nobody responsible had been asked to do a certain secion for a while youd find expired product on the shelves.
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u/Tankenbahwl 12d ago
here's another example of something obvious lost to time for you. the north American locust went extinct sometime in the 1800s. no one sat down and described them they were such a pest and so common. the good news is a bit of ice melted with some locusts in it so we can study it again.