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> "But what already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow."

To me this is a mind-numbing display of ignorance. Once you understand that you're not the first human being to ever have existed and that the people that came before you (even way before) are not dumber than you, you will immediately realize that there's a lot to learn from what has happened before.

This should be very obvious when it comes to political/social endeavors (e.g. how to push for substantial social change without having things degenerate into some form of totalitarianism), but it's equally as important for scientific and technological ones. For a simple and increasingly popular example just look at Sabine Hossenfelder's line of criticism of contemporary theoretical physics. A lot of it draws on the sociological and historical study of the scientific process.

I don't think it's ignorant, it's just another framework of looking at the world. Consider a chessboard that's in the middle of a game. The moves up to that point don't matter. Only the current state of the board matters and you make the best move given the current position.

This is how this person sees technological progress, and I'm inclined to believe he's right... within the context of technology.

Beyond that, I do think history does matter for understanding how humans interact with each other and with our planet.

> Consider a chessboard that's in the middle of a game. The moves up to that point don't matter. Only the current state of the board matters and you make the best move given the current position.

Since when is reality like a game of chess? Setting aside human history for a moment, just think about natural history (Levandowski mentioned dinosaurs and Neanderthals). Evolutionary biology is to a significant extent a historical discipline - it looks at the record and tries to come up with ways in which animals have changed over time under all sorts of pressures. Can that endeavor be done a-historically? How about even something like cosmology - the origins of the universe etc.?

The universe is not a Markov process. Thinking of it as such is incredibly limiting as an intellectual paradigm.

To be honest I'm not even sure I can think of a way you can completely ignore history and still be able to do useful work of any kind.

A better analogy would be Taleb's "green lumber" story.[0] The narratives we assign to things don't necessarily correspond to what really moved the needle forward. The ability to get things done might sometimes be influenced by historical reading, but it is mostly a factor of reading the present, creating new knowledge, and spending most of your energy on the problems at hand as they actually stand. A person like Zuck might draw parallels from their reading of the classics (to name one notorious example) but in practice their success will be contingent on making decisions in real time with few helpful analogies, or general principles for which historical reading is not strictly necessary. The journalists then comparing Zuck to Augustus are then probably misattributing the causal relationship.

There will be a historical post-facto rationalization of what went down for anything happening in the recent past, but the meat we draw from historical analogies is often poorly applicable since the divergence between the map and the territory is so large. The difference between reality and a game of chess is indeed paramount here, but for different reasons. The past is so complex that the lessons we draw from it are likely to just be distorted narratives that are already just a reflection of the present.

>To be honest I'm not even sure I can think of a way you can completely ignore history and still be able to do useful work of any kind.

In Levandowski's own example, he learned what existed in his time and then built useful things from there without worrying too much about the details of past beyond the directly visible iceberg spire in the present. This is broadly applicable to many fields and there are many people who did the same. It's tautologically true that disciplines that need to draw on the past to move on will do so, such as biology, but that doesn't say all that much about engineering for instance.

[0]https://fs.blog/2016/11/green-lumber-fallacy/

In an ideal sense that’s true, but to use your analogy to make the opposite argument: consider someone that has no knowledge of what kinds of moves where made previously in this chess game and other historic chess games, even though theoretically they can figure out a good move given enough time to read the board but that is prohibitively infeasible. On the other hand it is people who have studied games of chess played in the past that end up building an intuition for what a good move is and are much more likely to come close to making a good move in a reasonable amount of time.

I do like this take.

That is only because subgame perfect equilibrium is applicable to chess. An imperfect information game like Poker cannot have that. Technology is not a process with complete information therefore the chess analogy in the context of technology cannot work. And as bananabiscuit points out, Leela Zero can get away with considering orders of magnitude fewer positions than Stockfish because of the extensive experience from past games encoded into its weights.

Another argument against ignoring the past is it's important to identify what things remain invariant in society as technology evolves. Allowing for a fuller contextualization, understanding and perhaps somewhat anticipation of the on-going changes and their effects.

Technology itself is based on leveraging libraries, tacit knowledge, internet threads and mathematical concepts decades to hundreds of years old. That's a kind of history. It's not uncommon for advancements to occur after revisiting old lines of research that were ahead of their time.

> Consider a chessboard that's in the middle of a game. The moves up to that point don't matter. Only the current state of the board matters and you make the best move given the current position.

That is an immensely myopic view. Analyzing the game up to now and understanding the opponent's style of play and tactical preferences are very useful in planning your next move, especially when you have multiple, equally weighted choices.

Also analyzing your moves that got you to that point. Don't like where things are now? Well, what did you do to get here?

Levandowski may wind up convicted of something else if he doesn't learn from history... his history. So maybe he really ought to look at it a bit.

On the other hand, when you've messed up, and you understand that you've messed up, and you've learned what you can from it, then throwing away the past and moving on is perhaps a psychologically healthy thing.

> I don't think it's ignorant, it's just another framework of looking at the world. Consider a chessboard that's in the middle of a game.

Chess is an abstract turn-based zero-sum discrete 1-on-1 board game with perfect information sharing. In other words, it's completely different from real life in every possible aspect, and thus any drawn parallel is likely to be worthless. Real life is not Chess.

I've updated my post to clarify my argument as it missed some important details. To me the value of history is trivial to state, but it's the relationship people have with it that can become a problem. There's a lot to learn indeed, but it is a mental trap as well that causes people to overestimate their own importance.

This seems naive at best. The goal of studying history is not to be paralyzed and constrained by it, but to learn from it. Human behavior seems to be notoriously consistent across centuries, there is much to gain from understanding past mistakes.

Nor is every goal of our existence is about “building stuff”, it can also be about just living a just and considered life.

These types of boorish egotistical statements from tech talking heads masquerading as cerebral contrarian thought are much of what’s contributed to our current mess.

> Human behavior seems to be notoriously consistent across centuries, there is much to gain from understanding past mistakes.

It strikes me that this an argument for the uselessness of reading history. People are basically the same as they always have been and just as you can’t simply explain to a teenager that they’ll feel differently about the world when they’re thirty, every generation has to figure life out for itself.

> People are basically the same as they always have been

And you came to this conclusion without reading any history? This is too absolutist a statement. Sure, some things need to be relearned through experience, but there are also plenty of cases where you don't want to waste time reinventing the wheel.

The downvoters are thrashing a straw man. Obviously nobody believes you're supposed to recreate society every 20 years ex nihilo. What I'm arguing is that the case for reading history has been overstated. Specifically, I was reacting to the claim that, "Human behavior seems to be notoriously consistent across centuries." I agree. It is. Human beings react to the same emotions and incentives they always have and there's no library big enough to change that.

This is like arguing about whether dieting "works." On the one hand, obviously, yes, it works. There's no credible debate about the efficacy of calorie restriction for losing weight. It simply works. On the other hand, most human beings can't actually follow a diet, so, no, it doesn't actually work, for any reasonable definition of "works."

Reading history is probably a lot like that.

Fine, but by your own argument, reading history gives you some insight into how the humans of today will react to certain situations. You can read history to find out what humans actually are like, not what theory says they're like.

I like this framing quite a bit :)

> Human beings react to the same emotions and incentives they always have

And we know this... how? Studying history!

> and there's no library big enough to change that

Who's trying to change human nature? This is a strawman you are thrashing. Studying history is about understanding human nature, not changing it. Just like studying physics is about understanding projectile motion, not about changing the gravitational constant.

The idea behind studying history is that we use the insights gained from it to try to solve new challenges in reasonable ways, instead of ways we'd know were likely to fail if we'd just cracked open a book.

Literally everything about the world we live in has been shaped directly and indirectly by historical events and ideas. Everything, from what you wear, what you eat, the shape of the surface of the planet, the ideas you think, your conception of human beings in the universe, and the fact that you are reading this comment (and not listening to it or feeling it.)

The idea that we all just “appear” on Earth from some formless void, then subsequently make totally independent decisions, devoid of any previous influence, is both highly naive and far too common.

There is another layer to look at the problem. Studying history often does not do what it says on the tin for a few reasons

1. People are rarely in a position to effect changes or draw from historical lessons in the first place

2. Whatever lessons you can draw are often very contingent on the time and place and even taking into account patterns, we still end up in a situation where the lessons can't really be applied beyond general principles that are already well known without much study involved.

3. Often the understanding we think we have of historical events is hopelessly distorted anyway, and colored by the sources and narratives we have read or composed in our minds.

In the end, the people who do change history tend to barrel away at problems without taking the past all that much into account beyond some general references. Even if we take into account survivorship bias this is still an important phenomenon to consider. Hence the conclusions that there is much to learn from history is either trivial or actually under its own layer of naivete.

I worked with a CEO who shared this sentiment about history. After two months with no paychecks, half truths about our funding, and the dev team quitting, he wanted me to start building up a crew of contractors.

After asking what he would change, he told me he had no time to look at the past and could only look ahead.

I learned if you have enough money and lawyers, the past doesn't matter because you can enforce trust through litigation. But if you have to take people on their word, then their history becomes important. I didn't rebuild the team.

I'm sure there is some deeper lesson here between "smarmy business folks" and more principle driven individuals.

Is there a lot to learn from him? His amorality has left his reputation in tatters. Yes he earned some money but at what cost? Is being a reviled shadowy billionaire really worthy of praise or respect?

Once you have all the money you need what value is a reputation?

Your reputation only matters if you wish to have relationships with other humans.

When you've bought everything there is to buy, the only thing left is human relationships.

It doesn’t matter. You can have a good reputation and zero human relationships simply because you are not extroverted enough to initiate or maintain them.

I don't know what his personal life is like. But a person with the freedom to do the things they want and the energy to embark on ambitious projects will have no trouble having a genuine social circle and having great experiences barring some serious psychological obstacle in doing so like Howard Hughes.

This is far more important than this vague idea of reputation. Just because a person has a good reputation doesn't mean they are respected or loved. It could just be that they do not figure at all in people's minds. You can live up to people's expectations and die having never really lived.

Honestly it's somewhat reflective of the infamous slave morality vs. master morality debate

He's got a point about history, it's just a story we tell ourselves that only resembles what really happened. There's value in that though, because there are many lessons that can be learned from history. Plus it's just fascinating. We like stories, and history is our story.

However, people put way too much emphasis on history - their personal history - and it affects them in all kinds of unhealthy ways. In my opinion it's so much better to leave the past in the past and focus on making a better future. Learn the lessons that can be learned and then move on (easier said than done.) I'm not an expert, but that's my take on it from my life experience and also watching others struggle with their historical baggage.

"The only thing that matters is HEAD+1. I don’t even know why we use version control. It’s entertaining, I guess—the commits and the bug fixes and the rewrites, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to have the past snapshots to make changes to the current code. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow."

If you don't study what people have done in the past, you're going to be severely disadvantaged when you have to deal with them in the future.

Santayana was pithier.

>I am not a fan of corruption but it's undeniable that he played whatever cards he had in life and played them hard.

His parents were a Diplomat and a Businessman and he graduated with 2 engineering degrees from Berkeley. So we should be lauding him for winning a game of poker when he was dealt a Full House? Lol

To stick to with the poker analogy, the measure success is not if you win the hand when you flop a full house, but how big a pot you walk away with. Anybody can walk away with the initial stakes in that situation, the real skill is to use that hand to walk away with all the money at the table.

Lots of people start life with a lot more than he was given and walk away with a lot less.

He was arrested and charged with ~30 felonies and plead guilty to 1 in a plea deal and was due to spend over a year in federal prison. So what exactly did he win?

So what exactly did he win?

Rich friends, a presidential pardon and no doubt a rich and easy life going forwards.

Every single second of your life doesn't need to be dedicated to your work.

In order to understand why things are the way they are, we first need to understand how they came to be.

I believe that the most useful parts of the history are the parts that are not taught in history classes. Especially monetary history and past enterpreneurs, inventors and scientists. Not history written by winners of wars.

Here’s an example:

https://nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling-out/

> winners of wars

What do you think the global acceptance of capitalism is?

While there are temporary monopolies, great products win long term. Without capitalism we would live like monkeys in the forest. That would be an interesting life as well, but far not as interesting than what we have now.

Humans were living like monkeys in the forest prior to 1700?

I’d go further. Most current news is purely entertainment. You really don’t need to know everything that’s going on. Almost none of it is actionable. It’s fine as entertainment, but people are convinced they’re doing something important when they read the news, when as far as I can tell it’s just something they enjoy as a leisure activity.

I wholeheartedly agree. I am currently trying (and failing miserably) to quit news-watching altogether.

My current approach, for whatever it's worth: I subscribe to the Sunday print edition of my city's daily newspaper. For those too young to remember, this is the week's largest edition, which includes summaries of many of the week's stories. I read it over coffee on Sunday morning (away from my laptop). I'm roughly as informed as anybody else about the events of the day.

I don't remember the exact quote, but one thing that struck me that Alan Kay mentioned is that one of the best way to invent new things is to look at the past. And that our modern times are just a tiny view into the last 100 years. Lots got left behind. And there's a lot of genius inventions that lost out due to no real fault of their own.

No argument there.

The story of Levandowski appears to be a story about consequences being something other people experience.

Bitcoin scams are a great illustration of how to monetize knowledge of history. Or I guess you could just use modern day regulations and emulate what they prohibit in new markets?