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Comment by ketanmaheshwari | Hacker News Reader

A bit tangential to the article but I just had this thought: Human knowledge has gaps because humans do not live long enough to effectively pass enough knowledge from generation to generation. Each generation generates knowledge and records it in one form or the other AND also passes it with direct verbal and non-verbal communication. However, since the overlap between two generation's cognitive prime age is narrow, not every thought, intuition, idea is passed along well enough. This creates a continuous rot in knowledge among generations and hence the humanity causing perpetual gaps in knowledge.

This is the main reason why humanity at large does not have perfect knowledge of things such as universal forces, exact nature of universe, ability to predict random events and so on.

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the overlap between two generation's cognitive prime age is narrow

That argument fails on the above point - you picture generations as discontinuous (or nearly so), whereas in the normal, non-technical sense - as here - they are simply a useful picture of an aggregation over a continuum of ages in the population as a whole.

Working and academic environments - beyond a certain level of competence - are populated by individuals of varying ages and experience which are more likely to be demarked by managerial levels and career choices than individual knowledge and aptitude.

Not sure I buy the "narrow overlap of generations" as the main reason for imperfect knowledge. Yes humans don't live long enough. But generations and population ages vary smoothly in a cohort. May be centuries ago, when the effective number of people you interact with is small and finite due to slow transport of information, people and goods. But I would argue since the advent of books, organized schools and universities this is less of a problem. Now with the internet this is really a non issue. One has all the lectures that one could possibly want to listen and all the books and papers to spend every waking moment consuming. So I guess fundamentally we are only limited by our finite lifespan, and may be working memory that has a good decay rate.

> Now with the internet this is really a non issue.

A good chunk of valuable information disappears all the time from Internet. Many thoughts expressed in personal blogs usually go away within a few years. See, for example, demise of Geocities and Yahoo Groups. While only a small part of this disappeared information is valuable, some of it incredibly useful and important.

Either the information was important and was probably backed up somewhere or replicated on other websites while geocities was still alive and other platforms where coming up (the overlap of generations) or the information was not noteworthy in which case it probably wouldn't have been found even if geocities existed today.

You're completely ignoring the argument. The purpose of the internet is not recording information for all eternity. It's to transmit information from person to person. If you want to preserve information then write a book and publish it. It will be archived in organizations that specialize in archival. They allow the internet as a communication method but in theory nothing prevents you from just driving to the location and reading the book on site without the internet.

I like this idea. But I think there are some advantages from information transfer being incomplete.

Because new humans have to learn what the prior generation learned from scratch, it gives them a fresh canvas to eliminate flaws and purify knowledge from the prior generation.

It's like taking a wrong turn on a roadtrip. You've driven so far and convinced yourself that you're on the right path. But in reality you need to step back and check all the assumptions and choices you've made to get on this path.

People coming in and out of existence facilitates sanity checks on current acquired knowledge.

I've had similar thoughts lately. Here's a simple mathematical model of the process that I felt inspired to create by your comment:

k[i] = (1 - c1) * k[i - 1] + c2

where i is the generation number, k is the amount of knowledge we have, c1 is the loss factor (amount of knowledge lost from one generation to another, 0 ≤ c1 ≤ 1), and c2 is the (constant) amount of new knowledge created by generation i.

In this model, it's easy to show that after long periods of time the amount of knowledge will plateau. In fact, the plateau is

k[∞] = c2 / c1

The basic point of this is to highlight that both knowledge creation and loss are factors, and the loss means that knowledge may not keep increasing indefinitely. Of course, any number of the approximations and assumptions involved in this derivation may not be valid, but I think the possibility that knowledge loss can cause problems is worth considering.

Treating c1 and c2 as constants seems problematic. Different generations have different populations and access to resources such as education, technology, etc. The unknown knowledge to be discovered varies. The methods of preserving and transmitting knowledge vary.

There were certainly cavemen born with Einstein-level intelligence from time to time, but without a foundation to build on, peers to collaborate with, or written language to preserve their knowledge, they would both create and pass on significantly less knowledge than someone in modern times. One generation might lose a large portion of all the knowledge built up for millenia prior during a civilization's collapse; while another generation may stumble upon a discovery which ushers in a short but extremely productive era of knowledge production. If nothing else, if you have 4 billion people in one generation and 8 billion in another then all else being equal the latter generation has twice as many brains with which to store and create knowledge.

Fair points. I've made a few refinements already on paper, switching to an ODE model rather than a difference equation and changing the knowledge production rate to vary. If there are diminishing returns then we would expect c2 to decrease as k increases at large k. As you're aware, perhaps this is offset by increases in population.

As you've indicated, heterogeneity in various parts of the problem make this sort of modeling questionable. It's a crude model not meant to make precise predictions, just show that knowledge loss can be a major factor at long times.

But there's also that saying about how science progresses one funeral at a time. I think incremental progress might be more likely to occur with long lived humans, but breakthroughs may come only with new blood.

Though, if a very long lived human were to become an expert in many different fields, that could also be conducive to innovation.

>However, since the overlap between two generation's cognitive prime age is narrow, not every thought, intuition, idea is passed along well enough.

The overlap is perfect and zero at the same time as "generations" are a descriptive simplification rather than a reflection of reality. Every year people are born whose overlap with the people the year before is off by just one year (more or less). A new PhD student learns from his peers a year further along as well as from the post-doc 5 years ahead and the professor 10 years ahead.

You're saying that if we simply lived long enough we'd be able to predict random events?

I have strong objections to this theory/thought.

You'll have to describe to me how this mechanism works in greater detail because even within my personal lifetime, I do not have perfect anything for anything and I have no clue on how living longer helps that particular problem.

I will try to elaborate.

Let's say I throw a rock in a parabolic curve in a plain field. Humans can predict exactly where it will fall. This is because humans know everything about gravity, mass, etc.

However, we cannot predict when and where exactly will a random meteor fall. This is because we do not know exactly everything about the universe and the various forces of universe.

My thought is that a lot of humans might have understood more about those forces in the past but were unable to effectively pass that information for the next generation to build upon. This could be simply because the cognitive prime of the two generation overlaps for a relatively short period of time.

Now had the humans lived long enough to cross some threshold of effective communication and longer overlap of cognitive peak between generations, they could have better able to pass their intuition, experience, thoughts, ideas to the next generation. In other words, there would be less loss of information/knowledge which would be just enough to fill the critical gaps to know everything about the universe.

Knowing everything about the universe would enable them to predict everything precisely just as in the example of a parabolic throw of a rock on earth's surface.

This makes very little sense to me.

> I throw a rock in a parabolic curve in a plain field. Humans can predict exactly where it will fall

No, we can predict this within a margin of error. That margin of error might be small for simple cases but if you add some gusty wind, some rain etc. it can increase quite rapidly.

> However, we cannot predict when and where exactly will a random meteor fall

We can also predict it within a margin of error just like with the rock in the plain field. But you are comparing an event that last a few seconds (from the throw to the landing) to an event that may last years or more depending on what kind of meteor you are talking about. So of course over the span of years, even a very small imprecision turns out to have very big consequences.

If you could throw the rock hard enough so that it orbits earth for some years before coming back, it would be as hard to predict where it would land.

> Knowing everything about the universe

How could you possibly know everything about the universe when some events are purely random?

> In other words, there would be less loss of information/knowledge which would be just enough to fill the critical gaps to know everything about the universe.

So you are saying we happen to live at the exact time, where, had we not this knowledge transfer issue, we would know everything? This is quite self-centered. Which also simply mean that in a relative close we will now everything, which seems quite ludicrous.

Also take into account quantum theory. There IS no precise location and velocity at the same time. There are only probabilities. At least according to the Copenhagen interpretation

> My thought is that a lot of humans might have understood more about those forces in the past but were unable to effectively pass that information for the next generation to build upon.

This sounds incredibly unlikely. When do you imagine that these people lived? What data were they using to derive their scientific theories? What technology were they using to generate that data?

You can't hope to explain the universe without observing it first, and humans are quite bad at observation without the aide of technology.

You seem to not be taking the limits of a human brain into account.

Another thing is that the way we store information in our brains is different than the way we store information on paper or in computers. It's not possible to communicate ideas directly between brains so we're always going to be losing information in that transfer.

There are no "generations". It is a simplification when we talk about "boomers" and "generation-X" and "millennials". Every year about the same number of people get born and die. You could say that every year is a new "generation".

Talking about "generations" is a bit like talking about signs of Zodiac. Are you a millennial? Or are you Capricorn?

Don’t we just end up running into Gödel’s incompleteness theorem?

Human ability to close this “linked chain” of generations will always have a “missing link”?

An asteroid or... great filter due to environmental collapse!

To me it always felt intuitively like being able to have perfect knowledge of all wave function collapses, all the states of every particle ever scale of a problem.

There’s entropy too; no more information to pull from the universe sounds a lot like heat death to me.

Are we chasing a biochemical feedback loop? There’s a lot of “unproven” math, to be casual Sunday night from a legal weed state about it ;)

How much potential is there all of this boils down to our ability to so thoroughly convince ourselves of something’s correctness and it turns out there’s no Gods on top of that mountain?

That applies to other animals, but not humans. It's almost bizarre that you would assert that because the exact opposite is true. Humans are in every way more "advanced" than other animals on the planet precisely because the information they pass down is useful, comprehensive, and widespread. The last few thousand years has seen the information that gets "passed down" become systemic, and prolific. "Overlap" has nothing to do with anything, as anyone at any age can access a large percentage of important human knowledge going back hundreds to thousands of years, and it's really pretty easy to do so.

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