As for rebuilding from what is around, knowing helps but I don't think that the recovery process always works much faster than the initial discovery.
Scenario A:
People have never been exposed to metals so they have no clue that they exist or what use they are. They have absolutely no idea what an advantage such a material would give them. They have clumsy stone tools to work with.
Scenario B:
Scruffy Ted who survived the apocalypse is surrounded with things like 21st century goods, tools and materials. They are everywhere. He can take things from garbage dumps and abandoned stores and use them as opposed to digging with his fingers. He quickly learns that these materials exist and realizes how valuable they are through his use of them. When he is ready to try to figure out where they came from or how to make them, he will be starting his search with tools and materials made by a superior generation. This is a significant advantage. Also, if one day, someone figures out how to decipher English ( or whatever language was used locally ) and there are still books around, they will have access to a tremendous amount of knowledge that might have otherwise taken a few thousand years to amass.
Look at the Dark Ages. Some of the pre-dark ages structures still stand right now and the some of the information was intact the whole time in places around but outside of Europe. A cursory look into how long it took Romans to develop concrete seems to point to some centuries. Now fast forward a couple millenia, we are just now starting to reverse engineer the concretes that they made and we have scientists, historians, engineers, archaeologists, and modern infrastructure to put on the task.
I think we are far past this. With the materials and building technologies we have now, roman concrete and pyramid building specifics are not really needed. Yes, its a lost recipie just like great granda martha's fart producing fruit cake... oh well.
I'm not saying that people could just look at something and instantly know how to make one, but they would be starting out with an idea of what is possible and some tangible hints to go on. Looking at a busted open radio, you might see copper coils and start experimenting with them. You might see magnets and other curious things in there. With a coil and a magnet, you can create electricity. That's not to say that you will suddenly make a transmitter and receiver, but you would be well on your way.
But see, this is what I mean about Ted. So Ted saw some copper? Unless Ted has some knowledge intact, that it's not shiny string holding parts together, and he doesn't do something crazy with the copper wire experiment that makes him a candidate for that year's Darwin Award, it's just a guy with some really thin copper. There is nothing to say that Ted will inherently understand what makes that wire unique. See what you are describing is no different a process from starting a discovery from scratch. Having more materials only helps if you have more understanding as well; otherwise, you trial and error from square one or close to it just like someone discovering for the first time. The materials being more refined probably just means Ted will also have to spend time trying to figure out the refining process as well, but refining takes infrastructure that will bog down the time it takes to learn due to each part needing it's own intellectual exploration.
For instance, I can hand you a lump of pure sodium, you can see it and what not... but looking at it does not inherently tell you that the thing is going to blow up if it comes in contact with water. Nor does looking at it necessarily tell you that pure sodium is going to blow up like that but not many other silver colored metals you may find. It doesn't even tell you that Salt has sodium in it if you look at either. If some ancient person found a way to make pure sodium, they would go through the exact same process as someone that was handed the pure sodium outright. They might even be ahead since learning a refining process would likely teach them more than being handed a lump to work with. The only way to skip a few steps in the discovery process is to already know, but if you've lost the knowledge, you are back at the starting gates with the ones who haven't run the track at all yet.
I also stick out that many people have speculated and we have made advances based on their speculations, but often the people speculating had no examples whatsoever. When all is said and done, you can't really inherently peg recovery of knowledge or discovery of knowledge as being inherently faster. I just think that it is more likely that recovery will take longer as people haven't exactly been paying close attention to why and how things work. In a recovery situation, many, dare I say most, would be looking just as cluelessly at the inner workings of modern things as say an ancient person.
And as for losing recipes, it doesn't matter whether we need that particular discovery or not, although roman concrete that cured better underwater was still relevant. The overarching recovery process will be largely the same no matter what the technology is. There is method and the methods do not guarantee any faster learning because the are largely the same as the methods for discovery.
However there does seem to be a little more solid evidence for pharmaceutical companies neglecting to develop or ignoring potential cures. Not sure, I am not looking to get into a night long research session here.
Pharmaceutical companies invest *tons* of cash and take financial risk in hopes of developing a profitable product. If there is no financial incentive in a particular medication or cure, then no, they are not going to bother. I think its one thing to turn down an unprofitable project but another to actually hold back the cure or deliberately release inferior derivatives of the cure.. xD
Well, unprofitable is why some cures are not pursued since there not enough people with the issue to turn a decent profit. That's well known. But, I have mixed feelings about that. To the person who has the disease, profit margin is not as important as struggling to live. For the person that dies, no amount of money can bring them back even though a Pharamacuetical company can find other ways to get money to repair their profit margin.
But the suspected problem is not inferior derivatives, but rather keeping people on treatment as a steady source of income and sadly it does happen on smaller scales. I even caught a doctor doing it to me just recently and I was not happy. Once you cure a disease, you may get a big influx of money as medicine can often be marked up quite a bit, but once the person is cured, they don't need to make that expenditure twice. However, if people are under constant treatment, as soon as they stop taking the medicine they are right back where they started. They still need it so they will eventually have to find away to start paying for the medicine again. Now imagine you can pay a few hundred bucks upfront for a vaccine or cure once, or you can pay 20 bucks a month on treatment injections for years on end. That is what makes for profit medicine a bit worrisome at times.
Love that pic, but I don't want to get involved in this little lover's quarrel <3
I think the advances that we are seeing lately ( last hundred years ) has far more to do with the compounding of knowledge than it does with humans beings being neurologically superior if that is where you were going, Illysia.
She always posts a shaking her head and leaving gif and then hangs around to argue on something else, so I figure there isn't a big enough grain of salt to take it with.
I think it's a certain amount of chance that has lead to the major advances of recently, a well timed accident here or there allowing for breakthroughs that people could run with. Now that's not to say that people aren't making genuine discoveries, and there is probably some compounding as fields started to overlap, but I think it could have easily just passed us by for another century or so too. For instance, as soon as someone figures out a better battery technology will apparently have another spurt, but even with people working around the clock on it, we are making slow progress. But one needed accident later and we could have the new battery tech and then we just start making tons of advancements down that path. But no battery boon and we just keep plodding on not really making the dramatic progress.
