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> The human world has become so big that we have relinquished our knowledge Sure, the average person probably knows/understands less of the sum of 'human knowl

> The human world has become so big that we have relinquished our knowledge Sure, the average person probably knows/understands less of the sum of 'human knowledge' than the medieval man. But the average person has more knowledge, both learned and learnable, than ever before in human history. Most people have never been particularly knowledgable or skilled. The average medieval peasant was no more able to make steel than the average person today. Ideas and theories that were groundbreaking at their time, such as Newton's calculus, Shannons information theory, and Einstein's theory of relativity are now undergraduate (or even high school) courses. As part of my B.Sc in Computer Science, we studied public key cryptography (in particular RSA), which conceptually didn't exist until the 1970's. The average undergraduate probably knows more about cryptography than Alan Turing ever did. In the 1800s, we didn't have biology, chemistry, and physics, we simply had "natural philosophy". The sum of our scientific knowledge was so meagre that there was no need for that distinction. Today, not only is physics distinct from biology, but quantum physics is distinct from geophysics. In medicine, don't just have doctors, we have neurologists, paediatricians, and radiologists. > Trying to articulate the values of knowability, of understandability, of systems that we can be involved with is very very hard The world today is more knowable than ever. When I was in primary school 20-something years ago, if I wanted to find information I had to go to the library and hope they had a book on the subject. These days, if I'm at the pub stuck in an argument about who scored the first try in the 1987 Rugby World Cup (Michael Jones), it takes about 10 seconds pull out my phone and find the answer. I think your concern is the opposite, that there's too much to know. It's so knowable that we spend at least 10 years at school just learning things. Until recently, apart from (and due to) the lack of knowledge, it was incredibly hard to transfer and obtain information. Before ~1455, when Johannes Gutenberg developed printing press, the reproduction of knowledge was incredibly labour intensive. It took more than a year for a monk to create a copy of the bible. Gutenberg's printing press shortened that to a week. Today, I can download a 40 megapixel copy of the Gutenberg bible (2 GB) in less than a minute. [1] In 1820 only 14% of the worlds population was literate, it wasn't until the 1960's that more than 50% of the world could read. Even now, in Australia, 20% of Aboriginal people are illiterate, and up to 65% are functionally illiterate. That said, we shouldn't rest on our laurels. We still need to continue to strive for our right to the freedom and access of information and knowledge. TL;DR I think you have a romantic idea of the history of information and knowledge. [1] For what it's worth, I'm not religious, but it's a good example of the history of information

rektide 5y ago
You talk very eloquently to how much more knowledge the natural philosophers have dug up and how much more a person might be able to know. But I was born into that world. The world that has happened during my lived life has been one where a greater and greater amount of the total knowledge has been withheld, retained, kept proprietary. And worse, a large amount of this knowledge is knowledge that is impossible for anyone else to ever figure out. Almost all manufacturers keep their processes & ingredients secret. Want to know what this Tyvek thing is that you wrap your house with? We'll give you some marketing blurb, but mostly you have to trust us. With cloud computing, with DRM, there is no observable world: where-as with Tyvek we could buy some & put it under microscopes, tear it apart, run mass-spectrometers on it, try to reproduce it, we couldn't even take our chips out, give them an acid bath, & see what they do any more, because vast amount of the functionality is behind a firewall. That knowledge is physically retained, withheld, guarded inside a data center. And that knowledge is vast, is the very core of the business of many of the biggest companies of the world. Powering products that we interact with for hours a day. This domain of unnatural knowledge defines more and more of the world about us. It shapes society more actively in our day to day than our relationship with the natural world, our knowledge of the sciences. In spite of being the most active force shaping the world about us, humans, it has felt to me, have less and less ability to peer into, to see, to understand the world about them. While our total knowledge grows & we have a bigger pool of knowable things- truly a wonder- as you argue, I argue that the past handful of decades have seen far more knowledge created which is un-discoverable, un-findable than at any other point. And it is knowledge of the basic world about us, of how the basic elements of our world work. This to me is an anathema.
- toomanybeersies 5y ago
  I generally agree with you, that proprietary knowledge isn't a good thing, but I don't don't see how things AWS Graviton are different to Tyvek or Nomex. Given the opportunity, DuPont and Amazon would hide their proprietary knowledge just the same. Maybe one chemicals are easier to reverse engineer than cloud platforms, but the intention is the same.

rektide 5y ago

You talk very eloquently to how much more knowledge the natural philosophers have dug up and how much more a person might be able to know. But I was born into that world. The world that has happened during my lived life has been one where a greater and greater amount of the total knowledge has been withheld, retained, kept proprietary. And worse, a large amount of this knowledge is knowledge that is impossible for anyone else to ever figure out. Almost all manufacturers keep their processes & ingredients secret. Want to know what this Tyvek thing is that you wrap your house with? We'll give you some marketing blurb, but mostly you have to trust us. With cloud computing, with DRM, there is no observable world: where-as with Tyvek we could buy some & put it under microscopes, tear it apart, run mass-spectrometers on it, try to reproduce it, we couldn't even take our chips out, give them an acid bath, & see what they do any more, because vast amount of the functionality is behind a firewall. That knowledge is physically retained, withheld, guarded inside a data center. And that knowledge is vast, is the very core of the business of many of the biggest companies of the world. Powering products that we interact with for hours a day. This domain of unnatural knowledge defines more and more of the world about us. It shapes society more actively in our day to day than our relationship with the natural world, our knowledge of the sciences. In spite of being the most active force shaping the world about us, humans, it has felt to me, have less and less ability to peer into, to see, to understand the world about them. While our total knowledge grows & we have a bigger pool of knowable things- truly a wonder- as you argue, I argue that the past handful of decades have seen far more knowledge created which is un-discoverable, un-findable than at any other point. And it is knowledge of the basic world about us, of how the basic elements of our world work. This to me is an anathema.

toomanybeersies 5y ago
I generally agree with you, that proprietary knowledge isn't a good thing, but I don't don't see how things AWS Graviton are different to Tyvek or Nomex. Given the opportunity, DuPont and Amazon would hide their proprietary knowledge just the same. Maybe one chemicals are easier to reverse engineer than cloud platforms, but the intention is the same.