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Comment by mwattsun | Hacker News Reader

I think it's interesting to think about what we have lost because we couldn't keep everything from a 100 years ago and what society 100 years from now will be grateful we preserved.

Off the top of my head, we lost a lot of common wisdom in dealing with the flu pandemic of 1918 because personal letters and most newspapers were not preserved. I think 100 years from now they might wish we had preserved more from marginal and/or world communities. What folk wisdom is being lost? Perhaps we need to expand our definition of what is worth saving.

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An excellent place to start is talking to your parents and grandparents and recording their history and stories online.

That's a good suggestion I've been following

Hard to know what will be of interest for future historians. Some things in which we place great value can be considered irrelevant, while some of our junk can become historical gold.

> some of our junk can become historical gold

That's what interests me. For example, there's a cool repository of 12 step speaker meeting talks hosted in Iceland [1] and frankly, some of the talks are junk, but there's a lot of wisdom. What I find interesting is how it showcases how ordinary citizens talk to each other. The words they use, the accents, the little gems of folk wisdom contained, along with some uncommon stories.

This will be valuable 100 years from now if, for example, you want to build a virtual world based in the mid to late 20th century and you want to get the accents correct. What phrases did people use? What were some common misconceptions? Maybe 100 years from now addiction will no longer be a problem. If my virtual world is to be accurate I need to know what it was like for ordinary people when it was a problem. Etc...

[1] https://xa-speakers.org/

That's a great example, thanks. Funny enough, I got that insight from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. In the end, the most important thing in the future was some 80s rock song.

The mundane of today is very insightful for tomorrow's historians.

Its fascinating when you start looking into any historical time period (you wouldn't even need to go far back), before a lot of details are educated guesses. Since no one chose to record the mundane in detail or it failed to preserve over time.

> The mundane of today is very insightful for tomorrow's historians.

Too add an example I know well.

I grew up on a small farm.

We have plenty of images of Christmas parties etc, but almost none showing actual work being done which is what I think my kids would appreciate the most.

Luckily YouTube for all its warts exist and I can look up the "motorized tea spoon", the U-9 Motostandard for them when I need to explain it: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=motostandard+u9...

(We had the one with front-mounted wagon and a stick for steering. And yes we had another slightly larger tractor as well, the AEBI Transporter TP50: )

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