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This kind of topic always reminds me of this quote from Asimov's Foundation: ----- Hardin continued: "It isn't just you. It's the whole Galaxy. Pirenne heard

by bicx 5y ago

This kind of topic always reminds me of this quote from Asimov's Foundation: ----- Hardin continued: "It isn't just you. It's the whole Galaxy. Pirenne heard Lord Dorwin's idea of scientific research. Lord Dorwin thought the way to be a good archaeologist was to read all the books on the subject—written by men who were dead for centuries. He thought that the way to solve archaeological puzzles was to weight the opposing authorities. And Pirenne listened and made no objections. Don't you see that there's something wrong with that?" Again the note of near-pleading in his voice. Again no answer. He went on: "And you men and half of Terminus as well are just as bad.. We sit here, considering the Encyclopedia the all-in-all. We consider the greatest end of science is the classification of past data. It is important, but is there no further work to be done? We're receding and forgetting, don't you see? Here in the Periphery they've lost nuclear power. In Gamma Andromeda, a power plant has undergone meltdown because of poor repairs, and the Chancellor of the Empire complains that nuclear technicians are scarce. And the solution? To train new ones? Never! Instead they're to restrict nuclear power." And for the third time: "Don't you see? It's galaxy-wide. It's a worship of the past. It's a deterioration—a stagnation!” ― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

dougmwne 5y ago
I was recently reading Foundation at the same time that I visited Vienna’s technical museum, an amazing collection of industrial revolution artifacts. At the same time I am digging through a legacy data warehouse with half a million fields trying to figure out how to prevent a meltdown. This passage rang incredibly true to me.
beaned 5y ago
Maybe there's something in here that's going over my head, but recently it's seemed our culture wants more than anything to destroy its past. We do not seem to hold it in very high regard.
- crooked-v 5y ago
  I'd be curious to see more specific examples of what you mean.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- delusional 5y ago
  You don't give any specific examples, but is this really true? Is there anyone out there saying we should ignore the past and just move on? I think you'll find a lot of people saying that we shouldn't glorify and worship it, but none saying not to remember it.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    I think that's more an American thing than a "western civilization" thing. Of course, the article is talking about America... You see this in many ways. You see some statistic reported, or some event happens, and they say "It's the highest (or the first) since 2017", like that makes this really unusual. You see it in sports, where people argue whether LeBron or Michael are the greatest, as if Bill Russell and Oscar Robertson never existed. You see it in web frameworks. You see it in the 24 hour news cycle. "Here's what's happened in the last hour, and we'll repeat a few things that happened a couple of hours before that" - as if anything older than 3 hours is no longer relevant. You see it in video. I once took a half-hour non-news TV show, and for a 12-minute segment, I counted the cuts. It worked out that the average time between cuts was 3 seconds. This was clear back in the 1980s; it may be worse now. So video is tuning us to a world where, if you don't like what you see, it will all be completely different in 3 seconds. So maybe nobody is explicitly stating as a philosophical that we should ignore the past and just move on... oh, wait. Doesn't existentialism teach that this moment is all you've got? But American in particular is a place where the past is not relevant. It's a place where you go when you want to leave the past behind - leave the old country with all its constraining history. And you can do the same in America, too - just move to another state when you want a new life. I've heard that the difference between America and Europe is that in Europe, 100 miles is a long distance, and in America, 100 years is a long time. We don't have the sense of deeper history that Europe has. So, combining philosophy, lack of history, instant-everything society, and media focusing on what's new right now, yes, I'd say that we're effectively ignoring the past - not totally, but more than most cultures have.
    - delusional 5y ago
      Those are interesting points, and I suppose I agree that there's too little "deep thought" and too much "crisis all the time". I'm not really sure if I agree that nobody cares about the past though. I think what we are seeing in large part is a retooling of the past. America cares deeply about it's past. The only thing you ever hear them talk about is "founding farther this" or "Confederacy that". From my perspective America seems infatuated with its own past. Here in Europe we rarely even talk about that time Germany tried to take over the whole thing, maybe because we all tried to do the same previously.
- MomoXenosaga 5y ago
  Agree. Yes we have all the world's accumulated knowledge of the past 1000 years at our fingertips but does anyone ACTUALLY give a shit? No we prefer Twitter because everything can be boiled down to three sentences from my favourite prop agitator.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    This is a great tragedy. A lot of these gems of human thought and art have been the privilege of a few wealthy people to read. If you weren't a monk or a noble, you couldn't get close to them. Now anyone can, yet almost nobody does.
    - mensetmanusman 5y ago
      This is kind of a meme because there simply wasn’t the technology available to put down information at scale, so a community had to set aside a few individuals (in the case of monks) to spend their lives copying text by hand for decades. If everyone did this, then everyone would die of starvation. Once the books were completed, they were chained to the community center so that everyone had access and no one could take it for themselves.
      - marginalia_nu 5y ago
        Even if you had physical access to the priceless books made out of a hundred calf skins and carefully copied by hand, you needed to be able to not only read, but understand Latin.
      - GekkePrutser 5y ago
        There was definitely limited access to knowledge too. The Bible for example was a forbidden book for centuries in the Catholic church. Only accessible to the ordained, lest the peasants would ask difficult questions. Of course most common folk were illiterate back then anyway.
        mensetmanusman 5y ago
monopoledance 5y ago
Is the book really good, or just worth a read? I've recently seen the TV series and I liked some of its scifi ideas, but wonder if the bad parts are down to the original material or Apple's writing. Is it much influenced by the past's societal norms, or visionary enough to foresee at least the now?
- jhawk28 5y ago
  The show has very little to do with the book.
  - monopoledance 5y ago
    Thanks. I figured that to some extent, but assumed some larger themes originated in the books. Like the emperor's dynasty, which I found to be an interesting take on immortality and power.
    - margalabargala 5y ago
      The clone dynasty of the emperor does not in fact appear in the books, though it may have been inspired by a different part later in the series.
    - WorldMaker 5y ago
      The emperor's dynasty is one of the biggest departures from the book because it's a (very good) hack in order to have some actor continuity across hundreds of years of time, but it's also a very interesting departure because it does reflect/evoke some of the books' other themes. (Relatedly and spoilers: any Robot involvement at all in the Foundation series is a very late in the books "twist". In part because it came from Asimov's late use of Foundation as the "capstone" to tie together/lightly retcon Robots and Empire and few other things into a final united timeline. They were considered all dead in the Empire era. It was another interesting departure to show one in direct service to the Empire in the first season, and a lot of interesting speculation on how that is expected to play out over the series versus events in the books. Again, another departure driven by trying to get more of the actors to make it across some of the bigger time jumps. Though there is precedence for this one in the books as the trilogy of prequels by the "Killer Bs" [three authors whose last name start with B who were not Asimov, but invited to write prequels by his estate] also brings Robots into play much earlier in the Foundation timeline than later.)
pkdpic 5y ago
Liked this quote more than the original post, thank you for sharing!

by bicx 5y ago

dougmwne 5y ago

I was recently reading Foundation at the same time that I visited Vienna’s technical museum, an amazing collection of industrial revolution artifacts. At the same time I am digging through a legacy data warehouse with half a million fields trying to figure out how to prevent a meltdown. This passage rang incredibly true to me.

beaned 5y ago

Maybe there's something in here that's going over my head, but recently it's seemed our culture wants more than anything to destroy its past. We do not seem to hold it in very high regard.

crooked-v 5y ago
I'd be curious to see more specific examples of what you mean.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
delusional 5y ago
You don't give any specific examples, but is this really true? Is there anyone out there saying we should ignore the past and just move on? I think you'll find a lot of people saying that we shouldn't glorify and worship it, but none saying not to remember it.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  I think that's more an American thing than a "western civilization" thing. Of course, the article is talking about America... You see this in many ways. You see some statistic reported, or some event happens, and they say "It's the highest (or the first) since 2017", like that makes this really unusual. You see it in sports, where people argue whether LeBron or Michael are the greatest, as if Bill Russell and Oscar Robertson never existed. You see it in web frameworks. You see it in the 24 hour news cycle. "Here's what's happened in the last hour, and we'll repeat a few things that happened a couple of hours before that" - as if anything older than 3 hours is no longer relevant. You see it in video. I once took a half-hour non-news TV show, and for a 12-minute segment, I counted the cuts. It worked out that the average time between cuts was 3 seconds. This was clear back in the 1980s; it may be worse now. So video is tuning us to a world where, if you don't like what you see, it will all be completely different in 3 seconds. So maybe nobody is explicitly stating as a philosophical that we should ignore the past and just move on... oh, wait. Doesn't existentialism teach that this moment is all you've got? But American in particular is a place where the past is not relevant. It's a place where you go when you want to leave the past behind - leave the old country with all its constraining history. And you can do the same in America, too - just move to another state when you want a new life. I've heard that the difference between America and Europe is that in Europe, 100 miles is a long distance, and in America, 100 years is a long time. We don't have the sense of deeper history that Europe has. So, combining philosophy, lack of history, instant-everything society, and media focusing on what's new right now, yes, I'd say that we're effectively ignoring the past - not totally, but more than most cultures have.
  - delusional 5y ago
    Those are interesting points, and I suppose I agree that there's too little "deep thought" and too much "crisis all the time". I'm not really sure if I agree that nobody cares about the past though. I think what we are seeing in large part is a retooling of the past. America cares deeply about it's past. The only thing you ever hear them talk about is "founding farther this" or "Confederacy that". From my perspective America seems infatuated with its own past. Here in Europe we rarely even talk about that time Germany tried to take over the whole thing, maybe because we all tried to do the same previously.
MomoXenosaga 5y ago
Agree. Yes we have all the world's accumulated knowledge of the past 1000 years at our fingertips but does anyone ACTUALLY give a shit? No we prefer Twitter because everything can be boiled down to three sentences from my favourite prop agitator.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  This is a great tragedy. A lot of these gems of human thought and art have been the privilege of a few wealthy people to read. If you weren't a monk or a noble, you couldn't get close to them. Now anyone can, yet almost nobody does.
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    This is kind of a meme because there simply wasn’t the technology available to put down information at scale, so a community had to set aside a few individuals (in the case of monks) to spend their lives copying text by hand for decades. If everyone did this, then everyone would die of starvation. Once the books were completed, they were chained to the community center so that everyone had access and no one could take it for themselves.
    - marginalia_nu 5y ago
      Even if you had physical access to the priceless books made out of a hundred calf skins and carefully copied by hand, you needed to be able to not only read, but understand Latin.
    - GekkePrutser 5y ago
      There was definitely limited access to knowledge too. The Bible for example was a forbidden book for centuries in the Catholic church. Only accessible to the ordained, lest the peasants would ask difficult questions. Of course most common folk were illiterate back then anyway.
      - mensetmanusman 5y ago

monopoledance 5y ago

Is the book really good, or just worth a read? I've recently seen the TV series and I liked some of its scifi ideas, but wonder if the bad parts are down to the original material or Apple's writing. Is it much influenced by the past's societal norms, or visionary enough to foresee at least the now?

jhawk28 5y ago
The show has very little to do with the book.
- monopoledance 5y ago
  Thanks. I figured that to some extent, but assumed some larger themes originated in the books. Like the emperor's dynasty, which I found to be an interesting take on immortality and power.
  - margalabargala 5y ago
    The clone dynasty of the emperor does not in fact appear in the books, though it may have been inspired by a different part later in the series.
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    The emperor's dynasty is one of the biggest departures from the book because it's a (very good) hack in order to have some actor continuity across hundreds of years of time, but it's also a very interesting departure because it does reflect/evoke some of the books' other themes. (Relatedly and spoilers: any Robot involvement at all in the Foundation series is a very late in the books "twist". In part because it came from Asimov's late use of Foundation as the "capstone" to tie together/lightly retcon Robots and Empire and few other things into a final united timeline. They were considered all dead in the Empire era. It was another interesting departure to show one in direct service to the Empire in the first season, and a lot of interesting speculation on how that is expected to play out over the series versus events in the books. Again, another departure driven by trying to get more of the actors to make it across some of the bigger time jumps. Though there is precedence for this one in the books as the trilogy of prequels by the "Killer Bs" [three authors whose last name start with B who were not Asimov, but invited to write prequels by his estate] also brings Robots into play much earlier in the Foundation timeline than later.)

pkdpic 5y ago

Liked this quote more than the original post, thank you for sharing!