5 ms·

We as a society need to become more comfortable with the destruction of information. Not every piece of past data is valuable. The hypothetical future value of

We as a society need to become more comfortable with the destruction of information. Not every piece of past data is valuable. The hypothetical future value of most past data is less than the cost of preserving it.

ghaff 5y ago
It can be hard to know what should be kept and be tossed. And reasonable people can disagree about which applies. But it's certainly a fair point that we probably don't want to preserve every byte of ephemera forever.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  It's mildly amusing to glance at a copy of my high school newspaper from eons ago. But I still can't see any value in it.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    The argument that I hear often is that people in 200/300 years would precisely love that kind of thing. My history book in high school was filled with things like that. Articles from journals, letters from soldiers sent to their families. I think we don't need to keep every single high school newspaper, but I wouldn't know where to start if I had to choose which ones to keep.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      I.e. "scan it all and let god sort it out" :-)
    - ghaff 5y ago
      I love this quote from here: https://www.salon.com/2002/01/08/saving_usenet/ https://www.salon.com/2002/01/08/saving_usenet/ "We started dumping stuff that we thought was obviously of no future use, groups that specialized in a lot of talk and no substance, so to speak. For example, fairly early on there was a newsgroup about abortion which specialized in violent arguments." That's why not only the very earliest Usenet posts, before Spencer started archiving in 1981 (Usenet began in 1979) but even some of the posts in the 1980s are still lost. It's too bad; today, wouldn't more of us rather see what was being said about abortion in 1984 than sift through the arcana of bug fixes in systems that have probably been long since retired? "It was perfectly reasonable from the viewpoint of stuff that we might want to use again, but a little sad from today's viewpoint," Spencer admits. -------- One of the challenges is that, even if storage comes close to free, the management of "everything" isn't. I've been going through this with cleaning up my photo library. It's not that a TB or so of storage matters much one way or the other but getting rid of dupes and near-dupes, adding better metadata, and so forth is a lot of work.
      - Zababa 5y ago
        I agree, it will take a lot of time and energy to sift through this data to find things of value. But on the other hand, it's not even a fraction of what would be necessary if the data was lost.
        ghaff 5y ago
        But whose time and energy? I'm not personally going to spend hundreds of hours scanning and organizing stuff because someone someday might get some value out of it. Maybe a few things I find especially noteworthy or that I myself might want a digital copy of. But not in general.
        Zababa 5y ago
        Researchers mostly. They are the one currently going through stuff from the Roman Empire through the 80's to try to understand history better. You can see a thread on HN that is about what people ate in the Roman Empire https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27310179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27310179. I also remember a youtube channel called "Depression Cooking" where an old lady explained what they ate and how they lived during the great depression. You can argue about the value of knowing what romans or people during the great depression ate, but our society seems to value knowing the past.
        ghaff 5y ago
        My point is that future historians and researchers can spend however much time and energy they want. But I mostly will not go out of my way to assist them. Not out of any active desire not to help them but because I'm mostly not willing to put a lot of time/effort into it.
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      This is perilously close to the mental illness that results in hoarding behavior. A friend of my mom's saved every bank statement, utility bill, and cancelled check (this was when you actually got your cancelled checks back from the bank every month). She thought her kids "might be interested in looking at it" some day. Of course they weren't and when she died they threw it all in a dumpster. Newspapers and books are one thing. Every random photo on your phone and piece of paper that comes through your home is quite another. Nobody is intersted in it. Throw it away.
      - Zababa 5y ago
        I don't understand your comment. We were precisely talking about "newspapers and books" which can have an historical value, and you present an anecdote about a friend of your mom that was a hoarder, while calling data preservation "perilously close to the mental illness that results in hoarding behavior.". Do you not understand the difference between keeping newspaper, books, photos and "every random [...] piece of paper that comes through your house"? > Nobody is intersted in it. Throw it away. How about you focus on how to live your life and I'll handle how to live mine?
  - bpodgursky 5y ago
    A ton of modern historical research comes from trawling through very boring old records. Import/export financial records, church tithe ledgers, birth lists, etc. You might be surprised what a researcher in 2060 will get out of your high school newspaper (especially as the ability to computationally aggregate old digitized primary records continues to advance).
  - ghaff 5y ago
    I've actually been doing some scanning because I picked up a large format scanner for a non-profit I'm on the board of but haven't been able to arrange a handoff. The problem I find is that I have a ton of stuff that's neither "must keep" or "trash can" but, while I don't really begrudge it the space in my house, for now, it's also not stuff I'm going to spend hours and hours scanning against some future want.
Inhibit 5y ago
If there's someone very interested in archiving a given set of information I'm all for it. Where I think we collectively have an issue is when we're super into someone else archiving it. And that they then need to figure out a way to finance it all.
Zababa 5y ago
One advantage of keeping everything is that it's a "neutral" approach. Especially with our history as a species, it's easy to think that we should preserve everything to protect us against certain groups of people or way of thinking that would erase some part of history.
B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
> need to become more comfortable with the destruction of information. I've come to observe that we're much too much dominated by a clerkish worldview - the imperial chinese civil service exams (sold in the West as meritocracy) have mostly taken over the world. And what file clerk does not shudder at the thought of not keeping archives?
- Zababa 5y ago
  I don't really see the link between meritocracy and keeping archives (if that's what you're trying to say), would you mind explaining more?
  - B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
    Check the definition of clerk. Written exams were the method for selecting good clerks, and that's what's come to dominate. Now think how things were done before there were written exams, and before it was practical to keep thorough records of just about everything. Different worldviews. And ours now is shaped by clerks.

ghaff 5y ago

It can be hard to know what should be kept and be tossed. And reasonable people can disagree about which applies. But it's certainly a fair point that we probably don't want to preserve every byte of ephemera forever.

WalterBright 5y ago
It's mildly amusing to glance at a copy of my high school newspaper from eons ago. But I still can't see any value in it.
- Zababa 5y ago
  The argument that I hear often is that people in 200/300 years would precisely love that kind of thing. My history book in high school was filled with things like that. Articles from journals, letters from soldiers sent to their families. I think we don't need to keep every single high school newspaper, but I wouldn't know where to start if I had to choose which ones to keep.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    I.e. "scan it all and let god sort it out" :-)
  - ghaff 5y ago
    I love this quote from here: https://www.salon.com/2002/01/08/saving_usenet/ https://www.salon.com/2002/01/08/saving_usenet/ "We started dumping stuff that we thought was obviously of no future use, groups that specialized in a lot of talk and no substance, so to speak. For example, fairly early on there was a newsgroup about abortion which specialized in violent arguments." That's why not only the very earliest Usenet posts, before Spencer started archiving in 1981 (Usenet began in 1979) but even some of the posts in the 1980s are still lost. It's too bad; today, wouldn't more of us rather see what was being said about abortion in 1984 than sift through the arcana of bug fixes in systems that have probably been long since retired? "It was perfectly reasonable from the viewpoint of stuff that we might want to use again, but a little sad from today's viewpoint," Spencer admits. -------- One of the challenges is that, even if storage comes close to free, the management of "everything" isn't. I've been going through this with cleaning up my photo library. It's not that a TB or so of storage matters much one way or the other but getting rid of dupes and near-dupes, adding better metadata, and so forth is a lot of work.
    - Zababa 5y ago
      I agree, it will take a lot of time and energy to sift through this data to find things of value. But on the other hand, it's not even a fraction of what would be necessary if the data was lost.
      - ghaff 5y ago
        But whose time and energy? I'm not personally going to spend hundreds of hours scanning and organizing stuff because someone someday might get some value out of it. Maybe a few things I find especially noteworthy or that I myself might want a digital copy of. But not in general.
        Zababa 5y ago
        Researchers mostly. They are the one currently going through stuff from the Roman Empire through the 80's to try to understand history better. You can see a thread on HN that is about what people ate in the Roman Empire https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27310179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27310179. I also remember a youtube channel called "Depression Cooking" where an old lady explained what they ate and how they lived during the great depression. You can argue about the value of knowing what romans or people during the great depression ate, but our society seems to value knowing the past.
        ghaff 5y ago
        My point is that future historians and researchers can spend however much time and energy they want. But I mostly will not go out of my way to assist them. Not out of any active desire not to help them but because I'm mostly not willing to put a lot of time/effort into it.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    This is perilously close to the mental illness that results in hoarding behavior. A friend of my mom's saved every bank statement, utility bill, and cancelled check (this was when you actually got your cancelled checks back from the bank every month). She thought her kids "might be interested in looking at it" some day. Of course they weren't and when she died they threw it all in a dumpster. Newspapers and books are one thing. Every random photo on your phone and piece of paper that comes through your home is quite another. Nobody is intersted in it. Throw it away.
    - Zababa 5y ago
      I don't understand your comment. We were precisely talking about "newspapers and books" which can have an historical value, and you present an anecdote about a friend of your mom that was a hoarder, while calling data preservation "perilously close to the mental illness that results in hoarding behavior.". Do you not understand the difference between keeping newspaper, books, photos and "every random [...] piece of paper that comes through your house"? > Nobody is intersted in it. Throw it away. How about you focus on how to live your life and I'll handle how to live mine?
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  A ton of modern historical research comes from trawling through very boring old records. Import/export financial records, church tithe ledgers, birth lists, etc. You might be surprised what a researcher in 2060 will get out of your high school newspaper (especially as the ability to computationally aggregate old digitized primary records continues to advance).
- ghaff 5y ago
  I've actually been doing some scanning because I picked up a large format scanner for a non-profit I'm on the board of but haven't been able to arrange a handoff. The problem I find is that I have a ton of stuff that's neither "must keep" or "trash can" but, while I don't really begrudge it the space in my house, for now, it's also not stuff I'm going to spend hours and hours scanning against some future want.

Inhibit 5y ago

If there's someone very interested in archiving a given set of information I'm all for it. Where I think we collectively have an issue is when we're super into someone else archiving it. And that they then need to figure out a way to finance it all.

Zababa 5y ago

One advantage of keeping everything is that it's a "neutral" approach. Especially with our history as a species, it's easy to think that we should preserve everything to protect us against certain groups of people or way of thinking that would erase some part of history.

B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago

> need to become more comfortable with the destruction of information. I've come to observe that we're much too much dominated by a clerkish worldview - the imperial chinese civil service exams (sold in the West as meritocracy) have mostly taken over the world. And what file clerk does not shudder at the thought of not keeping archives?

Zababa 5y ago
I don't really see the link between meritocracy and keeping archives (if that's what you're trying to say), would you mind explaining more?
- B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
  Check the definition of clerk. Written exams were the method for selecting good clerks, and that's what's come to dominate. Now think how things were done before there were written exams, and before it was practical to keep thorough records of just about everything. Different worldviews. And ours now is shaped by clerks.