5 ms·

> The only real scarcity would be of a long attention span. I get the author's drift, and broadly agree. But I don't think it's really a long attention span th

> The only real scarcity would be of a long attention span. I get the author's drift, and broadly agree. But I don't think it's really a long attention span that would get in the way of (e.g.) a Mars colony, or interstellar travel; it's that people's views change from one generation to the next. My kids have been imbued with some of my attitudes, sure; but I've not had much of a hand in the raising of my grandchildren. And kids rebel against their parents' views, even if they're objectively less sensible than the latest kids' fashion. The Death Star, to take the author's example, is the product of a particular hypothetical society that looks a lot like fascist authoritarianism: a Glorious Leader, militarization, and oppression. But how many societies like that have lasted 500 years? The Golden Horde lasted about 250 years; the Roman Empire lasted about 200 years. Chinese imperial rule lasted much longer, maybe 1,500 years? Egyptian pharoahs about the same, if you treat the Early, Middle and Late as distinct empires. But these empires changed their character as the centuries passed, and were not characterized by any particular continuity of social outlook or collective goals. I have only a vague knowledge of what the attitudes of my grandparents and their generation were - too vague for me to either support them or to rebel against them. So I think it's not so much a matter of attention-span, and more a question of plain old memory; history lessons and books are no substitute for talking to the people who were there, and after 200 years there's nobody left who "was there".

lloeki 3y ago
So essentially the problem is one of being able to foster a meme+ that outlives the scale of an individual's life. + the original meaning, not the internets one, which is only an extremely short-lived subset.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  > to foster a meme+ So, I guess, pyramid-building; that's a collective project spanning a few centuries. I struggle to think of any collective project that spans centuries, that isn't fundamentally a religious enterprise.
  - NeoTar 3y ago
    > I struggle to think of any collective project that spans centuries, that isn't fundamentally a religious enterprise. Certain parts of mathematics and science may qualify. Yes they have practical outcomes (as do certain religious projects - building a cathedral will employ craftsmen), but isn't the pursuit of 'pure' mathematics a collective project which serves no purpose apart from intellectual satisfaction.
    - lloeki 3y ago
      Maths has a constant "next step" which makes it very iterative though whereas a pyramid or a cathedral is only complete or not-complete, and it's not-complete over these decades/centuries. > religious Probably the most enduring meme.
      - NeoTar 3y ago
        I think I respectfully disagree almost entirely. Maths requires a huge amount of creative effort and there often is no logical next step. There was a reason that it took three hundred years to go from an idea that a^x + b^x = c^x has no integer solutions when x is greater than two, to a proof of that, and it involved some crazy twists and turns of thinking. However, while a pyramid may have a definite endpoint, cathedrals have historically been in a near constant state of flux - a bishop wants to show his influence and rebuilds a tower higher, a burgher of the town want to show his power by adding a side chapel. New windows are installed, a porch is demolished and replaced with something more beautiful. For the cathedrals which took five hundred years to complete, it wasn't that they were abandoned building sites during that time - they just took that long to reach the state that we see as final today. Maybe in-between there was a wooden roof instead of a stone roof, or a tower was capped at thirty meters tall rather than fifty!
  - pm215 3y ago
    It depends a bit, I think, on how much drift you accept without considering the project to have changed so much it's not the same thing. But for instance some of the older universities in Europe are pretty much the same institutions working on the same goal (educating people) in the same buildings for many hundreds of years. The details of what the education provided ought to be, the balance between education and research, and the administrative details have changed quite a bit, but I think you can still make a case for this being the same non-religious collective project.
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
This nails it I think The basic unit of humanity, the human, does not have consistent long term desires or goals. In fact within the span of a lifetime the same individual is expected to have completely divergent goals and conception of reality when they are 20 versus 50 versus 80. In effect this means that a consistent, coherent goal state for human action is not possible to define that would satisfy the self-reported desires of any individual.
- psychoslave 3y ago
  I don’t know, look at how Knuth is still at work on TAOCP. Sure not everyone is Knuth (I am definitely not at least). Having a life long goal require a conjunction of passion for a topic that requires that much attention span and relevant available resources to explore it. I dare to say that having enough resources at hand including not being interrupted too often with other hassles and hazards from life is the biggest source of scarcity.
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    I’d argue that is something different than I’m suggesting, though I certainly agree that having a consistent project across a lifetime is rare but not that rare. The difference is that Knuth is providing something of value to others, while your grandmother’s fully complete American Girl doll collection she started at age 5 is of limited value. Your last point is really the key takeaway: How do we create a global society that gives every single human the freedom, opportunity and resources to produce their version of the computing bible? We have more than enough natural resources to make that happen
    - WillAdams 3y ago
      I would settle for a society which: - afforded every citizen access to whatever education which they might choose/be interested in - the chance to become the best version of themselves which is possible - the leisure time to apply their talents to a project which makes the world a better place It's kind of hard though, when the best school I ever attended, one which separated academics from social classes and allowed students to work at their ability level (up to 4 grade levels ahead through 4th grade, but after, one could work as far ahead and as fast as one's abilities allowed, and faculty members were dual-credentialed as high school teachers and professors at a local college, so students could easily graduate high school _and_ be conferred a 4 year degree, some students received multiple college degrees when graduating at age 18) which excelled at education was deemed an illegal arrangement by the Mississippi Supreme Court because it conferred an unfair advantage to those students who were able to apply themselves and take advantage of it, with no commensurate compensation for those who were unable to do so.
lukas099 3y ago
> the Roman Empire lasted about 200 years I thought it lasted much longer than that in the East?
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  I guess about 500 years, if you include Byzantium? But Byzantium was a very different creature from Rome.
  - NeoTar 3y ago
    According to the popular conciousness, the Roman Empire lasted from 27 BCE to 476 CE in the west (i.e. 503 years), and from 27 BCE to 1453 CE including Byzantium (i.e. 1480 years). But that's a really bad way to think about it. A Roman in 30 BCE and 20 BC probably wouldn't notice much difference. There was still a Senate, still elections, still powerful men exerting massive influence over the lives of ordinary people. Essentially someone had just written 'Augustus' in chalk at the top of all the organization charts. Similarly, in the west a Roman in 470 CE and 480 CE wouldn't have noticed much difference. There was still a Senate, and powerful 'barbarian' generals were still exerting massive influence over the lives of ordinary people. There even was still an Emperor who was nominally in charge - he was in Constantinople, but the Emperors hadn't lived in Rome for decades. The fall of Constantinople was probably a bit different since a whole new political regieme was imposed, but even there I believe the Ottomans actually claimed to be the inheritors of Rome and the rightful emperors (Rome was Pagan, then Christian, why couldn't it now be Muslim?) Realistically, there were a series of political regimes which evolved into each other time: * Aristocratic Republic, * 'Constitutional' Monarchy, * Absolute Monarchy, * Military Dictatorship, * Theocratic Dictatorship.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
robinzfc 3y ago
> the Roman Empire lasted about 200 years. The Roman Empire lasted about 500 years - from 31 BC to the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476. If we include the period of existence of the Eastern Roman Empire it would be almost 1500 years - until the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
- JackFr 3y ago
  And that ignores the five centuries of the Roman Republic, before the empire.
crabbone 3y ago
One of the unexpected effects of learning Hebrew for me, was something I didn't realize at first. Only almost thirty years since I could confidently use the language I accidentally watched a video where someone was researching the phonetics of the language (it's more or less generally agreed that nobody really knows how ancient Hebrew sounded). So, the researcher asked people from different communities (eg. Yemenite Jews, Samaritans, etc.) to read aloud a passage from Genesis. It was very surprising to me that I could, more or less, understand what they were saying, despite the accent. Then came the realization that I could actually understand something written thousands of years ago by someone whose mind worked in a very different way, and yet I could, sort-of, communicate with that person. --- I had to move a lot in my life. So, I don't have any childhood photos, nor do I keep in touch with my classmates from wherever I studied, I had to switch the language I use in my everyday life at least twice. I always "traveled light", so, I almost don't have any objects that are more than some ten years old. Except for the razor my grandfather brought from Germany in 1945 (now, I realize that it was probably looted, but many years back I was kind-of proud to inherit that). It says on it that it was manufactured in 1939. I've never really met my grandfather -- he died when I was one y.o. I don't know what kind of person he was in his everyday life, in fact, I've ever only seen a single photograph of him. And yet I know that in many ways, subconsciously, I continue things he was doing. We have very different perspectives on life: he was a member of the Communist party, and I'm strongly in the Humanist camp. He liked gardening, and I hate being in the country etc. But, in a more broad sense, I keep a lot of the same culture he was part of: I'm pretty sure we learned the same multiplication table, or that we both had to read War and Peace at school, we both have the same idea about alphabet or using a dinner table for, well, dinner. And in that sense, I'm distinctly farther away from someone who sits down on a mat to eat their dinner, or, like ancient Greeks, who semi-lied down on a bench for their dinner. In fact, it's very easy to trace my and my grandfather's differences to a common ancestor. It's not hard for me to understand why would he think the way he did, even though he's in the opposite camp. It's much harder to understand those who cannot disagree with me because they don't even know what they can possibly disagree about. --- We don't have an obvious structure for projects that take multiple generations to complete. Not like the cathedrals that used to be built for hundred years or more, or even the books that used to be written by generations of scribes. But we still carry out such multi-generational projects by following conventions. We read books written by the previous generation, reinterpret them and embed their discoveries in our own. It would've been nicer if we could organize this inheritance better, but it's not fair to say that it doesn't exist.
KineticLensman 3y ago
> the Roman Empire lasted about 200 years. Chinese imperial rule lasted much longer, maybe 1,500 years? The Roman empire lasted considerably longer than 200 years - perhaps 500 years in its best understood form going from Octavian becoming emperor in ~30BCE to the fall of the Western Roman Empire in approx 470CE. The eastern end of the empire lasted in various forms for another 1000 years (!) until the fall of Constantinople.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  Thanks for the correction. The upshot, however, is that few empires last as long as 500 years, and only a couple lasted as long as 1,500 years. And those empires change a lot over the course of their existence; they weren't effective vehicles for a collective effort at, say, colonising Mars.
  - KineticLensman 3y ago
    > And those empires change a lot over the course of their existence; they weren't effective vehicles for a collective effort at, say, colonising Mars Completely agree!
alanbernstein 3y ago
> people's views change from one generation to the next Or in other words, our society itself currently has a short attention span.
pbw 3y ago
> people's views change from one generation to the next I think that's what Kevin Kelly means by attention in the essay. He writes: > It is much easier to build a rocket that will sail 500 years to the nearest star, then it is to ensure that the future generations of people born on board that 500-year rocket maintain the mission So he doesn't mean we'll flake out and flit our attention to something else on a whim. He's saying if we drop a project due to changing beliefs, opinions, and goals, that's "not having a long attention span". I don't love his use of the word "attention" to mean that, but I think it's pretty clear what he means by the word from the essay.
- yen223 3y ago
  To be fair would you expect people to spend 2 minutes to read all those words? We've got other things to be distracted by!
kjkjadksj 3y ago
Take a peasant in italy in the year 600 bc, 600 ad, and 1600ad. Does life look any different really? Probably not. Multiple different rulers in this time but life had been basically continuous with respect to how the majority of people lived through these ages. I’d wager you could go up to the early 1900s in some Italian villages and still see an overwhelming amount of similarity in how daily life played out.
- lainga 3y ago
  There is an apocryphal story from the Greek War of Independence in 1821 - when it was won, messengers were sent out to the various Aegean islands to tell them that Greece had won its independence from the Ottomans. On one small island, the response of the villagers was "well, that's nice, but why are you telling us? we aren't Greek, we're Romans (Ῥωμαῖοι Rhomaioi)"
NoraCodes 3y ago
> Chinese imperial rule lasted much longer, maybe 1,500 years? This is true only if you consider many dynastic orders with significant periods of instability in between to constitute a single uninterrupted period "Imperial China". No single dynastic order lasted more than 500 years, arguably none more than 300.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pfdietz 3y ago
In my head canon, the authoritarianism of the Star Wars imperium is there because they got a bee in their bonnet about long term megaprojects, and decided the only way to make them succeed was suppress freedom of thought and change in the society as a whole. After the revolution the engineering visionaries responsible are put up against the wall.

lloeki 3y ago

So essentially the problem is one of being able to foster a meme+ that outlives the scale of an individual's life. + the original meaning, not the internets one, which is only an extremely short-lived subset.

denton-scratch 3y ago
> to foster a meme+ So, I guess, pyramid-building; that's a collective project spanning a few centuries. I struggle to think of any collective project that spans centuries, that isn't fundamentally a religious enterprise.
- NeoTar 3y ago
  > I struggle to think of any collective project that spans centuries, that isn't fundamentally a religious enterprise. Certain parts of mathematics and science may qualify. Yes they have practical outcomes (as do certain religious projects - building a cathedral will employ craftsmen), but isn't the pursuit of 'pure' mathematics a collective project which serves no purpose apart from intellectual satisfaction.
  - lloeki 3y ago
    Maths has a constant "next step" which makes it very iterative though whereas a pyramid or a cathedral is only complete or not-complete, and it's not-complete over these decades/centuries. > religious Probably the most enduring meme.
    - NeoTar 3y ago
      I think I respectfully disagree almost entirely. Maths requires a huge amount of creative effort and there often is no logical next step. There was a reason that it took three hundred years to go from an idea that a^x + b^x = c^x has no integer solutions when x is greater than two, to a proof of that, and it involved some crazy twists and turns of thinking. However, while a pyramid may have a definite endpoint, cathedrals have historically been in a near constant state of flux - a bishop wants to show his influence and rebuilds a tower higher, a burgher of the town want to show his power by adding a side chapel. New windows are installed, a porch is demolished and replaced with something more beautiful. For the cathedrals which took five hundred years to complete, it wasn't that they were abandoned building sites during that time - they just took that long to reach the state that we see as final today. Maybe in-between there was a wooden roof instead of a stone roof, or a tower was capped at thirty meters tall rather than fifty!
- pm215 3y ago
  It depends a bit, I think, on how much drift you accept without considering the project to have changed so much it's not the same thing. But for instance some of the older universities in Europe are pretty much the same institutions working on the same goal (educating people) in the same buildings for many hundreds of years. The details of what the education provided ought to be, the balance between education and research, and the administrative details have changed quite a bit, but I think you can still make a case for this being the same non-religious collective project.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

This nails it I think The basic unit of humanity, the human, does not have consistent long term desires or goals. In fact within the span of a lifetime the same individual is expected to have completely divergent goals and conception of reality when they are 20 versus 50 versus 80. In effect this means that a consistent, coherent goal state for human action is not possible to define that would satisfy the self-reported desires of any individual.

psychoslave 3y ago
I don’t know, look at how Knuth is still at work on TAOCP. Sure not everyone is Knuth (I am definitely not at least). Having a life long goal require a conjunction of passion for a topic that requires that much attention span and relevant available resources to explore it. I dare to say that having enough resources at hand including not being interrupted too often with other hassles and hazards from life is the biggest source of scarcity.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  I’d argue that is something different than I’m suggesting, though I certainly agree that having a consistent project across a lifetime is rare but not that rare. The difference is that Knuth is providing something of value to others, while your grandmother’s fully complete American Girl doll collection she started at age 5 is of limited value. Your last point is really the key takeaway: How do we create a global society that gives every single human the freedom, opportunity and resources to produce their version of the computing bible? We have more than enough natural resources to make that happen
  - WillAdams 3y ago
    I would settle for a society which: - afforded every citizen access to whatever education which they might choose/be interested in - the chance to become the best version of themselves which is possible - the leisure time to apply their talents to a project which makes the world a better place It's kind of hard though, when the best school I ever attended, one which separated academics from social classes and allowed students to work at their ability level (up to 4 grade levels ahead through 4th grade, but after, one could work as far ahead and as fast as one's abilities allowed, and faculty members were dual-credentialed as high school teachers and professors at a local college, so students could easily graduate high school _and_ be conferred a 4 year degree, some students received multiple college degrees when graduating at age 18) which excelled at education was deemed an illegal arrangement by the Mississippi Supreme Court because it conferred an unfair advantage to those students who were able to apply themselves and take advantage of it, with no commensurate compensation for those who were unable to do so.

lukas099 3y ago

> the Roman Empire lasted about 200 years I thought it lasted much longer than that in the East?

denton-scratch 3y ago
I guess about 500 years, if you include Byzantium? But Byzantium was a very different creature from Rome.
- NeoTar 3y ago
  According to the popular conciousness, the Roman Empire lasted from 27 BCE to 476 CE in the west (i.e. 503 years), and from 27 BCE to 1453 CE including Byzantium (i.e. 1480 years). But that's a really bad way to think about it. A Roman in 30 BCE and 20 BC probably wouldn't notice much difference. There was still a Senate, still elections, still powerful men exerting massive influence over the lives of ordinary people. Essentially someone had just written 'Augustus' in chalk at the top of all the organization charts. Similarly, in the west a Roman in 470 CE and 480 CE wouldn't have noticed much difference. There was still a Senate, and powerful 'barbarian' generals were still exerting massive influence over the lives of ordinary people. There even was still an Emperor who was nominally in charge - he was in Constantinople, but the Emperors hadn't lived in Rome for decades. The fall of Constantinople was probably a bit different since a whole new political regieme was imposed, but even there I believe the Ottomans actually claimed to be the inheritors of Rome and the rightful emperors (Rome was Pagan, then Christian, why couldn't it now be Muslim?) Realistically, there were a series of political regimes which evolved into each other time: * Aristocratic Republic, * 'Constitutional' Monarchy, * Absolute Monarchy, * Military Dictatorship, * Theocratic Dictatorship.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

robinzfc 3y ago

> the Roman Empire lasted about 200 years. The Roman Empire lasted about 500 years - from 31 BC to the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476. If we include the period of existence of the Eastern Roman Empire it would be almost 1500 years - until the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

JackFr 3y ago
And that ignores the five centuries of the Roman Republic, before the empire.

crabbone 3y ago

One of the unexpected effects of learning Hebrew for me, was something I didn't realize at first. Only almost thirty years since I could confidently use the language I accidentally watched a video where someone was researching the phonetics of the language (it's more or less generally agreed that nobody really knows how ancient Hebrew sounded). So, the researcher asked people from different communities (eg. Yemenite Jews, Samaritans, etc.) to read aloud a passage from Genesis. It was very surprising to me that I could, more or less, understand what they were saying, despite the accent. Then came the realization that I could actually understand something written thousands of years ago by someone whose mind worked in a very different way, and yet I could, sort-of, communicate with that person. --- I had to move a lot in my life. So, I don't have any childhood photos, nor do I keep in touch with my classmates from wherever I studied, I had to switch the language I use in my everyday life at least twice. I always "traveled light", so, I almost don't have any objects that are more than some ten years old. Except for the razor my grandfather brought from Germany in 1945 (now, I realize that it was probably looted, but many years back I was kind-of proud to inherit that). It says on it that it was manufactured in 1939. I've never really met my grandfather -- he died when I was one y.o. I don't know what kind of person he was in his everyday life, in fact, I've ever only seen a single photograph of him. And yet I know that in many ways, subconsciously, I continue things he was doing. We have very different perspectives on life: he was a member of the Communist party, and I'm strongly in the Humanist camp. He liked gardening, and I hate being in the country etc. But, in a more broad sense, I keep a lot of the same culture he was part of: I'm pretty sure we learned the same multiplication table, or that we both had to read War and Peace at school, we both have the same idea about alphabet or using a dinner table for, well, dinner. And in that sense, I'm distinctly farther away from someone who sits down on a mat to eat their dinner, or, like ancient Greeks, who semi-lied down on a bench for their dinner. In fact, it's very easy to trace my and my grandfather's differences to a common ancestor. It's not hard for me to understand why would he think the way he did, even though he's in the opposite camp. It's much harder to understand those who cannot disagree with me because they don't even know what they can possibly disagree about. --- We don't have an obvious structure for projects that take multiple generations to complete. Not like the cathedrals that used to be built for hundred years or more, or even the books that used to be written by generations of scribes. But we still carry out such multi-generational projects by following conventions. We read books written by the previous generation, reinterpret them and embed their discoveries in our own. It would've been nicer if we could organize this inheritance better, but it's not fair to say that it doesn't exist.

KineticLensman 3y ago

> the Roman Empire lasted about 200 years. Chinese imperial rule lasted much longer, maybe 1,500 years? The Roman empire lasted considerably longer than 200 years - perhaps 500 years in its best understood form going from Octavian becoming emperor in ~30BCE to the fall of the Western Roman Empire in approx 470CE. The eastern end of the empire lasted in various forms for another 1000 years (!) until the fall of Constantinople.

denton-scratch 3y ago
Thanks for the correction. The upshot, however, is that few empires last as long as 500 years, and only a couple lasted as long as 1,500 years. And those empires change a lot over the course of their existence; they weren't effective vehicles for a collective effort at, say, colonising Mars.
- KineticLensman 3y ago
  > And those empires change a lot over the course of their existence; they weren't effective vehicles for a collective effort at, say, colonising Mars Completely agree!

alanbernstein 3y ago

> people's views change from one generation to the next Or in other words, our society itself currently has a short attention span.

pbw 3y ago

> people's views change from one generation to the next I think that's what Kevin Kelly means by attention in the essay. He writes: > It is much easier to build a rocket that will sail 500 years to the nearest star, then it is to ensure that the future generations of people born on board that 500-year rocket maintain the mission So he doesn't mean we'll flake out and flit our attention to something else on a whim. He's saying if we drop a project due to changing beliefs, opinions, and goals, that's "not having a long attention span". I don't love his use of the word "attention" to mean that, but I think it's pretty clear what he means by the word from the essay.

yen223 3y ago
To be fair would you expect people to spend 2 minutes to read all those words? We've got other things to be distracted by!

kjkjadksj 3y ago

Take a peasant in italy in the year 600 bc, 600 ad, and 1600ad. Does life look any different really? Probably not. Multiple different rulers in this time but life had been basically continuous with respect to how the majority of people lived through these ages. I’d wager you could go up to the early 1900s in some Italian villages and still see an overwhelming amount of similarity in how daily life played out.

lainga 3y ago
There is an apocryphal story from the Greek War of Independence in 1821 - when it was won, messengers were sent out to the various Aegean islands to tell them that Greece had won its independence from the Ottomans. On one small island, the response of the villagers was "well, that's nice, but why are you telling us? we aren't Greek, we're Romans (Ῥωμαῖοι Rhomaioi)"

NoraCodes 3y ago

> Chinese imperial rule lasted much longer, maybe 1,500 years? This is true only if you consider many dynastic orders with significant periods of instability in between to constitute a single uninterrupted period "Imperial China". No single dynastic order lasted more than 500 years, arguably none more than 300.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

pfdietz 3y ago

In my head canon, the authoritarianism of the Star Wars imperium is there because they got a bee in their bonnet about long term megaprojects, and decided the only way to make them succeed was suppress freedom of thought and change in the society as a whole. After the revolution the engineering visionaries responsible are put up against the wall.