4 ms·

We have been forgetting things for thousands of years. Last I looked, we still don’t know how to make Damascus steel or Roman concrete. People will reinvent the

by sulam 8y ago

We have been forgetting things for thousands of years. Last I looked, we still don’t know how to make Damascus steel or Roman concrete. People will reinvent the things they need and maybe never even know that it’s a reinvention. I reinvented a couple fundamental graphics techniques because I needed them and didn’t study computer graphics in school. I’m sure this happens all the time. I’m all for making it easier to recover data and generally make it easier to store stuff. And I believe you have a right to your data (yay GDPR). But this isn’t a catastrophe.

arbitrage 8y ago
> we still don’t know how to make Damascus steel or Roman concrete That's an oft-repeated but ultimately meaningless statement. We know how to make things better than Damascus steel or Roman concrete. Our processes have exceeded the ancients. The quality of Damascus steel is likely overrated, since it wasn't quite as absolute shit as what was being regularly traded at the time. Same with concrete. We might not have exquisite written recipes and procedures for these materials, but they have been reverse-engineered, and it turns out, they weren't that great compared to modern chemical and material engineered products. We don't need to 'rediscover' Damascus steel because it is obselete. A romantic idea, and poetic in how it was 'lost' to time, but consider that it was 'lost' to time, similar to Japanese steel-working, because nobody wanted to buy it anymore. It became economically and culturally irrelevant.
- sulam 8y ago
  Exactly. We forgot how to do a thing and invented better. The “lost” knowledge isn’t really worth much to us today. And that will be true of essentially everything we forget in the future as well — the forgetting is the sign that it wasn’t needed.

4 ms·

We have been forgetting things for thousands of years. Last I looked, we still don’t know how to make Damascus steel or Roman concrete. People will reinvent the

by sulam 8y ago

arbitrage 8y ago
> we still don’t know how to make Damascus steel or Roman concrete That's an oft-repeated but ultimately meaningless statement. We know how to make things better than Damascus steel or Roman concrete. Our processes have exceeded the ancients. The quality of Damascus steel is likely overrated, since it wasn't quite as absolute shit as what was being regularly traded at the time. Same with concrete. We might not have exquisite written recipes and procedures for these materials, but they have been reverse-engineered, and it turns out, they weren't that great compared to modern chemical and material engineered products. We don't need to 'rediscover' Damascus steel because it is obselete. A romantic idea, and poetic in how it was 'lost' to time, but consider that it was 'lost' to time, similar to Japanese steel-working, because nobody wanted to buy it anymore. It became economically and culturally irrelevant.
- sulam 8y ago
  Exactly. We forgot how to do a thing and invented better. The “lost” knowledge isn’t really worth much to us today. And that will be true of essentially everything we forget in the future as well — the forgetting is the sign that it wasn’t needed.