5 ms·

To state the thesis of the talk: * Knowledge is ephemeral. Even recording knowledge doesn't imply or guarantee that it will be passed down the generations enti

by Zhyl 6y ago

To state the thesis of the talk: * Knowledge is ephemeral. Even recording knowledge doesn't imply or guarantee that it will be passed down the generations entire. In fact, throughout history there are times when humankind 'forgot' how to do certain things. * This applies to software. Software is getting so much more complex (as is hardware) that the knowledge for how to do the intricate or demanding things isn't held by many people, which makes it brittle. Adding layers of complexity on top of each other has created a tower of abstraction that people usually only know a part of, which makes the entire stack brittle if not enough people know every part of it and something breaks (maybe in a hundred years, but if that truly happens, there will be no way to fix it). Jonathan Blow makes some recommendations about how to avert what he calls 'the collapse of civilisation'. To summarise: * Simplify tools and processes. Reduce complexity, reduce dependencies. * Get a better, more intuitive understanding of your technologies and tools at a lower level. He doesn't explicitly solutionise this, but I would argue that his game 'The Witness' discusses this at varying levels of detail. The gameplay and puzzles demonstrate breaking up knowledge into small composable chunks which can be taught intuitively and wordlessly. The additional materials more explicitly discuss knowledge, learning, understanding and (more generally) truth seeking. If one wanted to avoid the collapse of civilisation, as outlined by the talk, one should play this game and contemplate its message deeply.

UncleMeat 6y ago
> In fact, throughout history there are times when humankind 'forgot' how to do certain things. I wish, just once, that technology people would actually consult historians of science when making these sorts of claims. There is an entire community of people who study this topic for their entire lives and write books about it. Yet myths persist. So many of the examples of "civilization forgot" are actually just false or at the very least the conclusions drawn about society from these stories are highly misleading.
- Zhyl 6y ago
  Would you be able to comment on the examples from the talk?
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    Blow just says "then the roman empire fell and that knowledge was lost" when discussing the Lycurgus Cup. He just states this. No citation or investigation. This is the classic oversimplification of both technological record keeping and the nature of the collapse of rome. There is no clear evidence that the "fall of rome" (which means about a dozen different things that happened over 1000 years) is responsible for the mechanism for creating such glass being unrecorded. He makes the same claim about alchemists fire. Again, ill supported. There are a tremendous number of reasons why ancient technology might not have surviving records to today. Amateur historians love to just assume this is due to "civilizational collapse." He also seemingly inverts things. Is civilizational collapse the cause of loss of technology? Or is it the opposite? Does technological de-sophistication cause civilizational collapse? He seems to argue both in his talk.
    - Zhyl 6y ago
      I think that's a fair statement in isolation, and I do find Blow's grandiose and loose use of language to get in the way of his message, but I believe the point stands. The knowledge was lost and that is the part that is most relevant here. The factors that caused it, be it the the 'collapse of an empire' or just one illiterate glassblower's creation not being documented before his death (or any other of the tremendous number of reasons) are less material than the fact that we have a chaotic system where we're trying to stop entropy. To that end, I don't think he needed to consult a historian in order to make his point any more valid, but he could probably have done with a historian proofreader to tidy up any flowery language that might detract from the overall message.
    - mechEpleb 6y ago
      Knowledge on how to make things is ephemeral, is constantly lost and has to be rediscovered even in the modern world. People whose day job is playing meaningless language games don't have any appreciation of how much idiosyncracy goes into doing even simple technical tasks.
- ziaddotcom 6y ago
  These historians of science that technologists avoid consulting in your estimation, are they going to refute the dark ages? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) "The term employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the era's "darkness" (lack of records) with earlier and later periods of "light" (abundance of records).[3]" Not having records being categorized metaphorically as darkness, and more records as "Enlightenment" is pretty high regard for a word used the same way in the contemporary context as something an accountant or dentist keeps in a filing cabinet. I'd say these "historians of science" you speak of would corroborate that the lost works of Euclid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid and the near permanent loss of Plato's works to the whole of Europe for hundreds if not over a thousand years as, uh, kind of a big deal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato#Textual_sources_and_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato#Textual_sources_and_hist...
  - meheleventyone 6y ago
    Loss of records is not loss of skills or knowledge though. And the Dark Ages wiki you link talks about how the term fell out of use amongst historians for being inaccurate. To quote: "Science historian David C. Lindberg criticised the public use of 'dark ages' to describe the entire Middle Ages as "a time of ignorance, barbarism and superstition" for which "blame is most often laid at the feet of the Christian church, which is alleged to have placed religious authority over personal experience and rational activity".[52] Historian of science Edward Grant writes that "If revolutionary rational thoughts were expressed in the Age of Reason, they were made possible because of the long medieval tradition that established the use of reason as one of the most important of human activities".[53] Furthermore, Lindberg says that, contrary to common belief, "the late medieval scholar rarely experienced the coercive power of the church and would have regarded himself as free (particularly in the natural sciences) to follow reason and observation wherever they led".[54] Because of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire due to the Migration Period a lot of classical Greek texts were lost there, but part of these texts survived and they were studied widely in the Byzantine Empire and the Abbasid Caliphate. Around the eleventh and twelfth centuries in the High Middle Ages stronger monarchies emerged; borders were restored after the invasions of Vikings and Magyars; technological developments and agricultural innovations were made which increased the food supply and population. And the rejuvenation of science and scholarship in the West was due in large part to the new availability of Latin translations of Aristotle.[55]" ETA: Also didn't realise you're the same person I replied to below!
- rozab 6y ago
  Which of Blow's many examples do you take issue with?
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    I'd hardly call three examples "many examples" (especially if they all originate from greece and rome). Blow just says "then the roman empire fell and that knowledge was lost" when discussing the Lycurgus Cup. He just states this. No citation or investigation. This is the classic oversimplification of both technological record keeping and the nature of the collapse of rome. There is no clear evidence that the "fall of rome" (which means about a dozen different things that happened over 1000 years) is responsible for the mechanism for creating such glass being unrecorded. He makes the same claim about alchemists fire. Again, ill supported. There are a tremendous number of reasons why ancient technology might not have surviving records to today. Amateur historians love to just assume this is due to "civilizational collapse."
- myWindoonn 6y ago
  I haven't watched the talk. During the Late Bronze Age Collapse, civilizations around the Mediterranean lost the ability to write! Before the Collapse, we see lots of Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian cuneiform. Afterwards, we have a period of quiet for about a century, and then Phoenician emerges and starts splitting into all of the abjads and alphabets that we see today. This is how we know, for example, that many Iron Age writings are talking about Bronze Age myths; they're written in the wrong language for their time period. We still don't know how to read Linear A; it is on the wrong side of the Collapse and we don't have a Rosetta Stone or other transitional artifact yet which includes it. It is not unreasonable that it could take us millennia to recall how to do things which we've forgotten.
- mechEpleb 6y ago
  Historians are typically people with an utter lack of technical skills or any understanding of what actually goes into making anything work. A dry surface level analysis of literary accounts and archaeological finds doesn't mean much if you lack the mental context for it.
pharke 6y ago
> (maybe in a hundred years, but if that truly happens, there will be no way to fix it) He also makes the point that collapse often happens over the course of many generations. ~100 years for the bronze age collapse and ~300 years for the collapse of the Roman Empire. I think this is a key point because it is something we don't intuit easily. He then goes on to say that the loss of knowledge that results in such collapses is often the result of a lack of generational transfer of knowledge (hence the slow collapse). This is a well known problem, the Bus Factor. If we want to prevent the collapse of our civilization we need to vastly increase that number on a societal level.

by Zhyl 6y ago

UncleMeat 6y ago

> In fact, throughout history there are times when humankind 'forgot' how to do certain things. I wish, just once, that technology people would actually consult historians of science when making these sorts of claims. There is an entire community of people who study this topic for their entire lives and write books about it. Yet myths persist. So many of the examples of "civilization forgot" are actually just false or at the very least the conclusions drawn about society from these stories are highly misleading.

Zhyl 6y ago
Would you be able to comment on the examples from the talk?
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  Blow just says "then the roman empire fell and that knowledge was lost" when discussing the Lycurgus Cup. He just states this. No citation or investigation. This is the classic oversimplification of both technological record keeping and the nature of the collapse of rome. There is no clear evidence that the "fall of rome" (which means about a dozen different things that happened over 1000 years) is responsible for the mechanism for creating such glass being unrecorded. He makes the same claim about alchemists fire. Again, ill supported. There are a tremendous number of reasons why ancient technology might not have surviving records to today. Amateur historians love to just assume this is due to "civilizational collapse." He also seemingly inverts things. Is civilizational collapse the cause of loss of technology? Or is it the opposite? Does technological de-sophistication cause civilizational collapse? He seems to argue both in his talk.
  - Zhyl 6y ago
    I think that's a fair statement in isolation, and I do find Blow's grandiose and loose use of language to get in the way of his message, but I believe the point stands. The knowledge was lost and that is the part that is most relevant here. The factors that caused it, be it the the 'collapse of an empire' or just one illiterate glassblower's creation not being documented before his death (or any other of the tremendous number of reasons) are less material than the fact that we have a chaotic system where we're trying to stop entropy. To that end, I don't think he needed to consult a historian in order to make his point any more valid, but he could probably have done with a historian proofreader to tidy up any flowery language that might detract from the overall message.
  - mechEpleb 6y ago
    Knowledge on how to make things is ephemeral, is constantly lost and has to be rediscovered even in the modern world. People whose day job is playing meaningless language games don't have any appreciation of how much idiosyncracy goes into doing even simple technical tasks.
ziaddotcom 6y ago
These historians of science that technologists avoid consulting in your estimation, are they going to refute the dark ages? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) "The term employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the era's "darkness" (lack of records) with earlier and later periods of "light" (abundance of records).[3]" Not having records being categorized metaphorically as darkness, and more records as "Enlightenment" is pretty high regard for a word used the same way in the contemporary context as something an accountant or dentist keeps in a filing cabinet. I'd say these "historians of science" you speak of would corroborate that the lost works of Euclid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid and the near permanent loss of Plato's works to the whole of Europe for hundreds if not over a thousand years as, uh, kind of a big deal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato#Textual_sources_and_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato#Textual_sources_and_hist...
- meheleventyone 6y ago
  Loss of records is not loss of skills or knowledge though. And the Dark Ages wiki you link talks about how the term fell out of use amongst historians for being inaccurate. To quote: "Science historian David C. Lindberg criticised the public use of 'dark ages' to describe the entire Middle Ages as "a time of ignorance, barbarism and superstition" for which "blame is most often laid at the feet of the Christian church, which is alleged to have placed religious authority over personal experience and rational activity".[52] Historian of science Edward Grant writes that "If revolutionary rational thoughts were expressed in the Age of Reason, they were made possible because of the long medieval tradition that established the use of reason as one of the most important of human activities".[53] Furthermore, Lindberg says that, contrary to common belief, "the late medieval scholar rarely experienced the coercive power of the church and would have regarded himself as free (particularly in the natural sciences) to follow reason and observation wherever they led".[54] Because of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire due to the Migration Period a lot of classical Greek texts were lost there, but part of these texts survived and they were studied widely in the Byzantine Empire and the Abbasid Caliphate. Around the eleventh and twelfth centuries in the High Middle Ages stronger monarchies emerged; borders were restored after the invasions of Vikings and Magyars; technological developments and agricultural innovations were made which increased the food supply and population. And the rejuvenation of science and scholarship in the West was due in large part to the new availability of Latin translations of Aristotle.[55]" ETA: Also didn't realise you're the same person I replied to below!
rozab 6y ago
Which of Blow's many examples do you take issue with?
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  I'd hardly call three examples "many examples" (especially if they all originate from greece and rome). Blow just says "then the roman empire fell and that knowledge was lost" when discussing the Lycurgus Cup. He just states this. No citation or investigation. This is the classic oversimplification of both technological record keeping and the nature of the collapse of rome. There is no clear evidence that the "fall of rome" (which means about a dozen different things that happened over 1000 years) is responsible for the mechanism for creating such glass being unrecorded. He makes the same claim about alchemists fire. Again, ill supported. There are a tremendous number of reasons why ancient technology might not have surviving records to today. Amateur historians love to just assume this is due to "civilizational collapse."
myWindoonn 6y ago
I haven't watched the talk. During the Late Bronze Age Collapse, civilizations around the Mediterranean lost the ability to write! Before the Collapse, we see lots of Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian cuneiform. Afterwards, we have a period of quiet for about a century, and then Phoenician emerges and starts splitting into all of the abjads and alphabets that we see today. This is how we know, for example, that many Iron Age writings are talking about Bronze Age myths; they're written in the wrong language for their time period. We still don't know how to read Linear A; it is on the wrong side of the Collapse and we don't have a Rosetta Stone or other transitional artifact yet which includes it. It is not unreasonable that it could take us millennia to recall how to do things which we've forgotten.
mechEpleb 6y ago
Historians are typically people with an utter lack of technical skills or any understanding of what actually goes into making anything work. A dry surface level analysis of literary accounts and archaeological finds doesn't mean much if you lack the mental context for it.

pharke 6y ago

> (maybe in a hundred years, but if that truly happens, there will be no way to fix it) He also makes the point that collapse often happens over the course of many generations. ~100 years for the bronze age collapse and ~300 years for the collapse of the Roman Empire. I think this is a key point because it is something we don't intuit easily. He then goes on to say that the loss of knowledge that results in such collapses is often the result of a lack of generational transfer of knowledge (hence the slow collapse). This is a well known problem, the Bus Factor. If we want to prevent the collapse of our civilization we need to vastly increase that number on a societal level.