4 ms·

I don't know. Scientific knowledge is expensive to rediscover. It requires a lot of false starts and often involves a great deal of luck/randomness. Historicall

I don't know. Scientific knowledge is expensive to rediscover. It requires a lot of false starts and often involves a great deal of luck/randomness. Historically, periods of flourishing are often associated with the rediscovery or importing of large collections of wisdom. For example revivals of ancient works or the introduction of works from afar due to newly developed trade routes. If ideas were easy to rediscover, we shouldn't expect those events to have much impact. There is certainly a cost of storing data, and cost should enter the equation. But we're losing a lot of data for reasons other than cost and we don't have a reasonable way of assigning a value to the lost data.

ivan_gammel 2y ago
My point is, we are engaging in a very unnatural process, trying to preserve something against the second law of thermodynamics. We are going to lose the data and things are going to break no matter what. We cannot change the nature, but we can accept it.
- hiatus 2y ago
  > We are going to lose the data and things are going to break no matter what. We cannot change the nature, but we can accept it. If man was content with the nature of things he would never fly, or go to the moon, or any of the other myriad accomplishments humanity has made. If we can preserve clay tablets from thousands of years ago we can find some way to keep the information we produce today for posterity.
  - ivan_gammel 2y ago
    I’m not arguing with that. We can and we will preserve some information. We must not be obsessed with saving everything. Imagine the humankind in a million years from now; if we pick 10 most important facts about each century, that will be a hundred thousand facts to remember. Maybe we develop abilities to know and use them all, but from a modern human perspective that’s already too much. Now, can you reduce the XXI century to 10 facts? How much of those zettabytes of information would be worth keeping for a million years? For ten thousand years? For a thousand years?

ivan_gammel 2y ago

My point is, we are engaging in a very unnatural process, trying to preserve something against the second law of thermodynamics. We are going to lose the data and things are going to break no matter what. We cannot change the nature, but we can accept it.

hiatus 2y ago
> We are going to lose the data and things are going to break no matter what. We cannot change the nature, but we can accept it. If man was content with the nature of things he would never fly, or go to the moon, or any of the other myriad accomplishments humanity has made. If we can preserve clay tablets from thousands of years ago we can find some way to keep the information we produce today for posterity.
- ivan_gammel 2y ago
  I’m not arguing with that. We can and we will preserve some information. We must not be obsessed with saving everything. Imagine the humankind in a million years from now; if we pick 10 most important facts about each century, that will be a hundred thousand facts to remember. Maybe we develop abilities to know and use them all, but from a modern human perspective that’s already too much. Now, can you reduce the XXI century to 10 facts? How much of those zettabytes of information would be worth keeping for a million years? For ten thousand years? For a thousand years?