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How long would it take to figure out how to run a steel mill from (more or less) first principles? That is, if you're a country that has zero steel mills and ze
by geofft 6y ago
How long would it take to figure out how to run a steel mill from (more or less) first principles? That is, if you're a country that has zero steel mills and zero people who have worked at one, and for some out-of-game reason (like a global pandemic) you can't travel to one, but you know that they exist, you have access to books, and perhaps you can interview people, how long will it take to build an acceptable-quality mill?
After all, a) humankind developed steel mills in the absence of any steel mills at all, and b) multiple countries have developed much more complicated things in secrecy from each other (like atomic weapons and orbital rockets and radar), so it seems like it should be doable.
It's to your advantage to give up your skills if the cost of regaining them if you need to is smaller than the comparative advantage of having China make steel for you in the meantime.
- Ma8ee 6y agoIt is certainly doable, but it will take time. Any country can probably get some kind of small scale steel mill up in a few months (or a long afternoon if the scale is small enough). But getting producing high quality steel at industrial scale with economy would probably take longer than a decade.
- fragmede 6y agoThe metal (steel, aluminum, etc) used in new cars didn't exist 10 years ago. From first principles, making steel is easy. Making stainless steel, figuring out when to add additives and what those additives should be, is harder. Doing it at scale, in quantity, cheaply, and safely, taking all aspects into consideration is dramatically harder, and if you dump the expertise now, and then have to restart from first principles 10 years from now, then you're multiple decades behind the competition. Geopolitical considerations may mean there's a business advantage to having it made in China as opposed to elsewhere, but as we've seen with the US pandemic response, there are sectors where it's just plain stupid to believe that expertise can be summoned up as needed, and that it's somehow cheaper not to pay for it in the interim. Government isn't a household, and you can't restart having expertise like canceling Netflix for a few months.
- chii 6y ago> dump the expertise now you'd imagine they, upon acquiring said expertise, would write it down so that it is permanently available to others. What happens to the expertise if the person with it dies in an accident or old age?
- mandelbrotwurst 6y agoYou do write it down for exactly that reason, but it doesn't make it permanently available in the way that you describe - much of generational knowledge transfer happens by living and working side by side, not just reading books that the elders wrote.
- greycol 6y agoSome institutional knowledge is just knowing where it was written down. Some of it is trade secrets and so when the company is wound down it's sold as IP to another place. Some expertise is contextual to the actual build of the equipment. Having a manual that said replace this O-ring every week in a blower or you'll suffer failures may not actually be expert knowledge anymore, It could be all that is stopping you from losing a million dollar piece of equipment or it could be what's causing you to lose productivity for an hour every week in a pagan ritual to the sacred maintenance document. Being an expert and being able to chronicle that expertise are not just separate skills they're separate tasks. They might not know what is worth highlighting or they might prefer to read a book than to take on the extra task of writing it down.