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This is echoed in a fascinating r/AskHistorians comment I read recently [0]. The question was about how the Romans forgot how to make concrete in the late empir
by necubi 6y ago
This is echoed in a fascinating r/AskHistorians comment I read recently [0]. The question was about how the Romans forgot how to make concrete in the late empire. I highly recommend reading the whole thing, but the gist is: as the empire became poorer, demand for huge building projects (typically funded by the state) declined. Eventually, after a couple hundreds years, the tradition was lost entirely.
Losing knowledge like this was much easier in earlier eras when fewer people were literate. Trade knowledge would be passed down via apprenticeships and rarely written down. So it only takes one generation of the apprenticeship system breaking down for the knowledge to be lost entirely.
(Also, for anybody unfamiliar with r/AskHistorians, it's one of the best corners of the internet! Professional historians provide in-depth answers to random questions about history.)
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gntlr8/how_did_the_late_romans_just_forget_how_to_make/frc9cc9/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gntlr8/how_d...
- ssivark 6y ago> Losing knowledge like this was much easier in earlier eras when fewer people were literate. The thing is, there are many aspects to doing things which can’t be written down. So even today, the one generation concept is meaningful. There is a deep “use it or lose it” spirit in biological systems. We might think of ourselves in primarily literate/rational terms, but that’s far from the truth.
- Mirioron 6y agoNowadays we have video which can cover a large part of things that can't be written down. It doesn't cover all of it though, but it can get pretty close.
- nullc 6y agoIf you can manage to preserve access to the video. "Sorry, we lost all knowledge of how to build those during the great content-id wars of 2029."
- Mirioron 6y agoOh, that is entirely possible! Even worse is that in the future there's a chance video encoding will become complex enough that it'll be difficult to reverse engineer. If the algorithms get lost to time then even if you have the video itself it's meaningless.