3 ms·

There are certain bodies of human knowledge and practice which aren't usually referred to as "technologies", and I think that leads us to underestimate their co

by Terr_ 12d ago

There are certain bodies of human knowledge and practice which aren't usually referred to as "technologies", and I think that leads us to underestimate their complexity and importance. In particular, I'm thinking of textiles and agriculture. It's no coincidence that both were prime targets of industrial mechanization, occupying a huge proportion of all human labor.

plufz 12d ago
You don’t have to be a scholar in gender studies to wonder why textile has been a bit overlooked when looking back at human development.
- noosphr 12d ago
  By who? The cotton gin and spinning jenny are front and center in any history of the early industrial revolution.
  - schrectacular 12d ago
    The development of dyes was the genesis of the chemical industry, but no one really talks about that.
    - tyho 12d ago
      I googled "history of the chemical industry" and synthetic dyes were mentioned prominently by each of the first five results returned.
    - usrusr 12d ago
      It's just the A in BASF. But yeah, that entire IG Farben episode might have toned down their enthusiasm for identifying with dyes a little. Same for their peers up and down the Rhine.
  - bluGill 12d ago
    That a technology to develop the spinning wheel should have been around a lot sooner, but it seems to have not appeared until relatively late in the history. Now yes, we are talking probably a thousand years before, but the idea is simple enough that you would think that the ancients who knew all the different pieces such as the lathe could have made that work. Spinning Jenny? Yeah, that's complex enough that it couldn't have appeared much sooner. I'm not sure if the cotton gin would have been possible sooner or not.
    - oblio 12d ago
      If you want to dive deeper, this looks at exactly that question: https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/out-of-whole-cloth https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/out-of-whole-cloth
  - plufz 12d ago
    I didn’t mean industrialization but more articles like this one https://www.gu.se/en/news/textile-production-a-driving-force-in-bronze-age-europe https://www.gu.se/en/news/textile-production-a-driving-force...
- gosub100 12d ago
  You don't have to be a materials science Ph.D to know that stone and metal last a bit longer than cloth.
- redwood 11d ago
  The irony of the comment you're making is that you are the one drawing from a gender stereotype that is ambiguous with respect to its immutability across time and culture
adrianN 12d ago
Who is underestimating the importance of food and clothes in history? Certainly not the historians. Agricultural output is literally what made and broke empires.
- bluGill 12d ago
  Modern historians, yeah, but ancient historians, they tended to ignore both. Ancient kings were aware that starvation was a problem and had some interest in agriculture, but the textiles seems to have not appeared much in history.
  - 1718627440 11d ago
    Vending luxury clothing is what ancient tradesmen got rich from, kinda like the Elon Musks of their time.
dotancohen 12d ago
I think that agriculture and textiles are generally among the first recognized technology. I've never seen them overlooked, quite the opposite.
- bluGill 12d ago
  Today by modern historians. Real the ancient historians and you will see these are often overlooked.
  - dotancohen 11d ago
    Didn't the people that we today call ancient historians mostly just write about their own time? The very few who wrote about events that preceded their time were not using archeological methods.
    - bluGill 11d ago
      They did, but they were not writing about clothing production for the most part. This we lack insight into what they did except what we can make educated guesses on.
      - dotancohen 11d ago
        We can date archeological finds accurately enough the the word guess is not appropriate. I know that sewn clothes have existed something like 20,000 or 30,000 years. And I think I read recently about woven fabrics dating back maybe 8 thousand years or so. I tend to think in round numbers so go ahead and call that a guess, but archeologists have this stuff dated pretty accurately. And new finds sometimes push the dates back even further.
- Terr_ 11d ago
  What I mean is that today "technology" connotes activity in certain fields (and not others), and this leads us (normal people, today) to discount large less-in-vogue fields of human endeavor as... just stuff that is done, but not, y'know, like, technology-technology. Suppose someone leads with: "I'm investing in new technological improvements to my farm". Most people are going to think that means robots, GPS tractors, or special pesticides... Rather than a new procedure allows legumes to be planted more-densely and harvested more quickly. So even when the context is literally a farm, somehow "technology" means electronics/genetics/chemistry rather than agronomics. Give the average person a booklet with an algorithm for toxic-vs-edible mushrooms developed over generations of careful study and experiment. "Is it technology?" Probably only once you port it to a minimally interactive phone-app.
greggsy 12d ago
Language. writing and maths are the main ones that come to mind for me.
- hdgvhicv 12d ago
  Writing and maths are certainly technologies to discover in Civilization.
- achenet 12d ago
  Given that there is evidence [0] to support the idea that (spoken) language is hard-coded into the human DNA, I think language might, like dancing, be something 'innately human' and not a learned technology :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar As in, if we had a total disappearance of all humans on Earth, and then put some new humans on the depopulated Earth, they'd quickly develop a common language, if they were genetically similar to modern humans, but would take a while to start writing. Arguably, things like counting and geometry could also be viewed as something innate in humans - our mammalian brains view the world as a 3-dimensional real vector space, and so we will instinctively have the ability to understand the concept of a 'circle', or 'seven', or a square, or even multiplication ('three groups of three people each'), but the act of writing down those thoughts, and the literate culture focusing on those concepts which stretches from Euclid to Wikipeda, Library Genesis, and Terry Tao's blog, is obviously a developed technology.
- throw0101a 12d ago
  > Language. Technology is generally considered to be something that is invented: there's a debate in whether language is invented/created or whether it is innate to humans (you wouldn't say sight or hearing are technologies). Also a debate on whether math is created/invented or discovered (IMHO hard to argue that pi (π) is invented).
  - 1718627440 11d ago
    Electricity also isn't invented, yet an electricity network uses a lot of technologies. This is kinda true for everything. Invention is a discovery, so I fail to see the dichotomy.
andrewgleave 12d ago
I like to think of technology as packaged-up knowledge intended to solve a particular problem.
throw0101a 12d ago
> There are certain bodies of human knowledge and practice which aren't usually referred to as "technologies", and I think that leads us to underestimate their complexity and importance. “Technology is the active human interface with the material world.” — Ursula K. Le Guin, https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about-technology https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about-technology
- throw0101a 12d ago
  Another quotation I ran across semi-recently: > Reputation is a technology. We solve a lot of problems in the economy by turning one-shot games, in which people literally take the money and run, and turn them into repeated games, in which people have an incentive to behave well in this period so that you will trust them next period, and so on, into the future. * Paul Krugman, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_IYGeZLLhI&t=10m30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_IYGeZLLhI&t=10m30s

by Terr_ 12d ago

plufz 12d ago

You don’t have to be a scholar in gender studies to wonder why textile has been a bit overlooked when looking back at human development.

noosphr 12d ago
By who? The cotton gin and spinning jenny are front and center in any history of the early industrial revolution.
- schrectacular 12d ago
  The development of dyes was the genesis of the chemical industry, but no one really talks about that.
  - tyho 12d ago
    I googled "history of the chemical industry" and synthetic dyes were mentioned prominently by each of the first five results returned.
  - usrusr 12d ago
    It's just the A in BASF. But yeah, that entire IG Farben episode might have toned down their enthusiasm for identifying with dyes a little. Same for their peers up and down the Rhine.
- bluGill 12d ago
  That a technology to develop the spinning wheel should have been around a lot sooner, but it seems to have not appeared until relatively late in the history. Now yes, we are talking probably a thousand years before, but the idea is simple enough that you would think that the ancients who knew all the different pieces such as the lathe could have made that work. Spinning Jenny? Yeah, that's complex enough that it couldn't have appeared much sooner. I'm not sure if the cotton gin would have been possible sooner or not.
  - oblio 12d ago
    If you want to dive deeper, this looks at exactly that question: https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/out-of-whole-cloth https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/out-of-whole-cloth
- plufz 12d ago
  I didn’t mean industrialization but more articles like this one https://www.gu.se/en/news/textile-production-a-driving-force-in-bronze-age-europe https://www.gu.se/en/news/textile-production-a-driving-force...
gosub100 12d ago
You don't have to be a materials science Ph.D to know that stone and metal last a bit longer than cloth.
redwood 11d ago
The irony of the comment you're making is that you are the one drawing from a gender stereotype that is ambiguous with respect to its immutability across time and culture

adrianN 12d ago

Who is underestimating the importance of food and clothes in history? Certainly not the historians. Agricultural output is literally what made and broke empires.

bluGill 12d ago
Modern historians, yeah, but ancient historians, they tended to ignore both. Ancient kings were aware that starvation was a problem and had some interest in agriculture, but the textiles seems to have not appeared much in history.
- 1718627440 11d ago
  Vending luxury clothing is what ancient tradesmen got rich from, kinda like the Elon Musks of their time.

dotancohen 12d ago

I think that agriculture and textiles are generally among the first recognized technology. I've never seen them overlooked, quite the opposite.

bluGill 12d ago
Today by modern historians. Real the ancient historians and you will see these are often overlooked.
- dotancohen 11d ago
  Didn't the people that we today call ancient historians mostly just write about their own time? The very few who wrote about events that preceded their time were not using archeological methods.
  - bluGill 11d ago
    They did, but they were not writing about clothing production for the most part. This we lack insight into what they did except what we can make educated guesses on.
    - dotancohen 11d ago
      We can date archeological finds accurately enough the the word guess is not appropriate. I know that sewn clothes have existed something like 20,000 or 30,000 years. And I think I read recently about woven fabrics dating back maybe 8 thousand years or so. I tend to think in round numbers so go ahead and call that a guess, but archeologists have this stuff dated pretty accurately. And new finds sometimes push the dates back even further.
Terr_ 11d ago
What I mean is that today "technology" connotes activity in certain fields (and not others), and this leads us (normal people, today) to discount large less-in-vogue fields of human endeavor as... just stuff that is done, but not, y'know, like, technology-technology. Suppose someone leads with: "I'm investing in new technological improvements to my farm". Most people are going to think that means robots, GPS tractors, or special pesticides... Rather than a new procedure allows legumes to be planted more-densely and harvested more quickly. So even when the context is literally a farm, somehow "technology" means electronics/genetics/chemistry rather than agronomics. Give the average person a booklet with an algorithm for toxic-vs-edible mushrooms developed over generations of careful study and experiment. "Is it technology?" Probably only once you port it to a minimally interactive phone-app.

greggsy 12d ago

Language. writing and maths are the main ones that come to mind for me.

hdgvhicv 12d ago
Writing and maths are certainly technologies to discover in Civilization.
achenet 12d ago
Given that there is evidence [0] to support the idea that (spoken) language is hard-coded into the human DNA, I think language might, like dancing, be something 'innately human' and not a learned technology :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar As in, if we had a total disappearance of all humans on Earth, and then put some new humans on the depopulated Earth, they'd quickly develop a common language, if they were genetically similar to modern humans, but would take a while to start writing. Arguably, things like counting and geometry could also be viewed as something innate in humans - our mammalian brains view the world as a 3-dimensional real vector space, and so we will instinctively have the ability to understand the concept of a 'circle', or 'seven', or a square, or even multiplication ('three groups of three people each'), but the act of writing down those thoughts, and the literate culture focusing on those concepts which stretches from Euclid to Wikipeda, Library Genesis, and Terry Tao's blog, is obviously a developed technology.
throw0101a 12d ago
> Language. Technology is generally considered to be something that is invented: there's a debate in whether language is invented/created or whether it is innate to humans (you wouldn't say sight or hearing are technologies). Also a debate on whether math is created/invented or discovered (IMHO hard to argue that pi (π) is invented).
- 1718627440 11d ago
  Electricity also isn't invented, yet an electricity network uses a lot of technologies. This is kinda true for everything. Invention is a discovery, so I fail to see the dichotomy.

andrewgleave 12d ago

I like to think of technology as packaged-up knowledge intended to solve a particular problem.

throw0101a 12d ago

> There are certain bodies of human knowledge and practice which aren't usually referred to as "technologies", and I think that leads us to underestimate their complexity and importance. “Technology is the active human interface with the material world.” — Ursula K. Le Guin, https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about-technology https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about-technology

throw0101a 12d ago
Another quotation I ran across semi-recently: > Reputation is a technology. We solve a lot of problems in the economy by turning one-shot games, in which people literally take the money and run, and turn them into repeated games, in which people have an incentive to behave well in this period so that you will trust them next period, and so on, into the future. * Paul Krugman, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_IYGeZLLhI&t=10m30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_IYGeZLLhI&t=10m30s