Hacker News Reader

I still don't think it quite adds up. You're mixing two different things together because they look kinda similar on the surface but aren't.

If you want to make the point that "what if we developed steam power sooner", then sure, that works so long you keep talking about steam power in Ancient Greece. Yes, knowledge did get lost there.

But that's not what happened with the Saturn V. The knowledge didn't really go anywhere. We still have the engines and the designs, they're just technologically obsolete. We're not making them not because it's some lost wonder-technology we forgot how to make, but because it costs a lot of $$$ and there's no profit to be made by sending another lander to the Moon and science funding is scarce. That we don't see the asbestos covers much doesn't really mean anything because the actual knowledge is in the fields of heat management and materials science, and not magazine cover photos.

Thanks for engaging with the piece so deeply! Really appreciate it.

Just as legacy tech isn’t automatically better than today’s technology, today’s technology isn’t always better than legacy tech. The agency has gone back to the Apollo well many many times for these “technologically obsolete” designs because they effectively solved problems that we haven’t faced in decades.

Example, the CSM’s umbilical connection was a work of art, it had to be reverse engineered from museum pieces for current gen spacecraft, https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/orion/umbil...

The F-1 engine’s turbopump and gas generators had to be taken apart by hand because we haven’t built anything close to their throughput for decades, https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/f1_sls.html

Apollo’s phenolic resin heat shield led to the Phenolic-Impregnated Carbon Ablator (PICA) that was then studied by SpaceX to develop their current PICA-X heat shield.

IIRC, there’s a fairly direct line between the Apollo parachutes and SpaceX, https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2017/t_3.html

There are many more big and small examples that I can’t name off the top of my head. From the thermal roll to core sampling, having that knowledge allows us to learn from their experience and do better.

Hundreds of thousands of extremely smart people worked on the program and they came up with some extremely interesting ideas along the way. It’s faster/more useful to have a library of their work to draw from rather than going to the well again and redoing it from scratch.

But this is predicated on a non falsifiable claim that we could have built on these technologies. That they weren't extended to better things just a easily hints at them being technological dead ends.

Consider the massive costs that went into many old structures. Often you could measure them in lives lost during construction.

In the case of asbestos and leaded paint, lives and damage done by having used them.

Now, I do believe we should have people study the past. I still like reading on old programming techniques. But progress is not necessarily held back by not building on what came before.

>Consider the massive costs that went into many old structures. Often you could measure them in lives lost during construction.

Or the simple fact that laborers were not paid. Hard to compete against literal slave labor

Volunteer labor is a thing. That’s how many cathedrals were built.

If you volunteer enough, your salvation is all but assured.

Doesn't exactly sound like volunteering to me.

As a matter of fact, at least here in Germany a lot of cathedrals took decades, some even centuries to build - the Cologne Cathedral, for example, took way over six hundred years. Additionally, they were often built in "batches" and expanded and modified, schedule pretty much depending on some emperor or volunteer donations providing enough funds for the next section.

Me and my s/o, who actually studied a lot of the German cathedrals for her master's degree, went on a tour across a lot of the cathedrals this summer with the 9-euro flat train ticket... it's utterly amazing what medieval people could pull off. If you're interested in old buildings, wait until the successor of the 9-euro ticket comes next summer and go on a trip yourself, it's definitely worth it.

Just because there's something in it for them doesn't mean it's not still volunteering.

Do you also apply such a standard to modern examples of volunteering?

Sadly, I posit that that is the modern definition of volunteering. Doing something without getting paid, typically means no monetary value. And since money is fungible for value in general, it means doing something where you get no value out of it. And there is obvious value in salvation.

That said, I think this is just a misalignment in what "volunteer" means. Historically, it was more like "volunteer trees", in that you didn't specifically recruit or hire them. It did not mean that they did not get benefit out of it.

Cathedral builders were among the most sought after, and highest paid, workers and artisans in medieval Europe. They had de facto unions, free week ends, limited work hours and basic health care. They could enforce that because there were only so many qualified people to build cathedrals back then.

Servitude labour was more of a thing for castles, Cathedrals were build in towns and cities, with free citizens. Castles were build by nobles and those had servitude populations to draw labour from.

This is... probably misalignment with modern definitions. Volunteer for the time was not at all the same as what we think of today. To wit, many of the "volunteers" were as likely getting the only form of compensation that they could get by being there to build something.

Specifically, if there was a local market, it would have been near the cathedral. And if you didn't have a reliable farm or other plot of land to provide food, seems reasonable to assume your best bet was to be compensated in some form for manual labor.

> What if the knowledge behind that device hadn't been lost and we were 1k years further along into our understanding of mathematics and computing?

I believe that knowledge is overrated on the long run. It is methods for knowledge creation what really matters. And incentives to apply the best known methods.

Had you read Bret Devereaux talking on an absence of Roman Industrial Revolution?[1] No practical steam engine before it's time has come. Knowledge is created when it is needed. I believe the same stands for computing. It must be some new demand for calculation that created computing. Probably the development of economics.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

Computing was created because of the demand for calculating artillery trajectories and code breaking in the 1940s

The Z3 was made for aerodynamics calculations, and more generally civil engineering.

I'm not sure that this is the whole story. Analytical Engine of Babbage was designed at 1830. It was not built at the time of course... But the idea was tried again and again unless it made it's way into practical applications. It seems to me that there was a demand. Probably not economics but engineering?

I really enjoyed the post, even though I wasn't clear what part was fictional and what part was truthful.

You might be interested in Lucio Russo's book The Forgotten Revolution. He describes how the Hellenistic scientific and technical culture which gave us Heron's aeolipile, Greek fire, the Antikythera mechanism, Archimedes' method of exhaustion, Eratosthenes' measurement of the Earth's size, Eucid's axiomatization of geometry, etc.†, was lost. Basically what happens was that when centers of science like Syracuse and Alexandria were conquered by the pre-scientific Romans, the philosophers who weren't massacred were dispersed to the four winds, preserving their knowledge in foreign lands if at all. In later generations, Christian fanatics lynched Hypatia and threw down the Egyptian temples, extinguishing the millennia-long knowledge of hieroglyphics.

Russo reaches some conclusions that aren't generally accepted, but much of the history he reviews in the book is uncontroversial, if little-known — but starkly horrifying.

It wasn't a gradual process of forgetting, but a series of genocidal catastrophes. Similar processes obliterated the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, the Maya codices, the khipu, and in our own time most of the world's languages and folklore, much of the Timbuktu libraries, the Afghan relics of early Buddhism, and the collections of the archaeological museums in Iraq.

______

† I have omitted Roman cement and the separation of gold from silver because I don't have any reason to believe they came from the Hellenistic world.

Exactly. When you look at the actual history of scientific progress or lack thereof, the reasons it stops/regresses are never technical or about people forgetting.

They're about invasion, shifting power centers, economic collapse, societal decay, religious zealotry, and whatnot.

And indeed, many of the moments where massive progress was made were flukes, not the norm -- very happy coincidences that were unlikely to continue for long.

So the idea that we've lost progress due to "forgetting" makes as much sense as saying that a company shut down because the engineers forgot how to work with the codebase. No -- it was all about much larger events. The forgetting was a result, not a cause.

To be honest, I thought long and hard about bringing up what happened at Alexandria, but I thought against it. I wanted the piece to be more solution focused.

The act of preservation in the now, making copies etc. is kind of like a prophylaxis against an adverse event. We are doing the mundane to prepare for the insane.

The solutions for gradual forgetting and catastrophic forgetting are very different, though.

Let's consider the problem of media longevity — while, as you point out, it is not by itself sufficient to preserve knowledge, it does seem to be necessary, at least as we currently understand things. (Scholars of songlines may disagree, but of course oral traditions like songlines are even more vulnerable to catastrophic forgetting; even half a century of prohibition can obliterate them.)

If you preserve data on Flash, you need to refresh it every few years before the stored electrons leak away; standard datasheet retention times are 10–20 years, though presumably that's at 80°, so maybe you'll get a few centuries at room temperature. If you can trust in continuity of institutions, this is not a big problem; you just have an endowment sufficient to support a small number of sysadmins who make sure the SSD arrays get resilvered at the right interval, replace broken devices, etc.

But if your preservation medium has to survive the PRC nuking TSMC 18 months from now — or an invasion by a military dictatorship of genocidal religious fanatics who hunt down and kill the sysadmins and burn the archives, as happened with the Maya codices — Flash looks much less appealing (though perhaps still viable; see http://canonical.org/~kragen/eotf/ and https://dercuano.github.io/notes/atmospheric-pressure-harves...).

— ⁂ —

I think this also bears on the question you're focusing on in the post, which as I understand it is more a question of curriculum design than of preserving physical storage media. If the target audience for the curriculum is the next generation, or three generations down the line, you can assume a lot of shared cultural background: shared celebrities, shared neologisms and modisms, shared values in a lot of ways. Hipparchos, by contrast, was writing for Ptolemaios, though he didn't know it. He died in 0120 BCE, and Ptolemaios was born in 0100 CE, 220 years later. Hipparchos was the most recent astronomer he could find to cite in the Almagest.

Amongst the civil warfare of the late Ptolemaic dynasty, none of the succeeding eleven generations had produced new astronomical observations, and the line of philosophical mentorship was broken, at least within the Hellenistic world. This bears quite directly on the problem of lost tacit knowledge you focus on in your post. Even Hipparchos was only able to do his work because he lived in Rhodos, on the periphery of the Alexandrian scientific world, which was sacked by Cassius in 043 BCE after a century of gradual reduction to servitude by Rome.

How do you design a curriculum so that it is still intelligible after eleven generations of cataclysmic cultural collapse, largely under a prescientific genocidal military dictatorship like that installed by the Roman invasion? The solution might look more like the Rosetta Project or the Cult of the Bound Variable and less like Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. If Hipparchos had done a better job, maybe Ptolemaios (and consequently Colombo) wouldn't have gotten the size of the Earth so badly wrong. Maybe Ptolemaios, like Archimedes before the Romans killed him, would have followed the heliocentric model Aristarchos had developed 500 years before him (though Hipparchos did not.)

We really need to continue this conversation over email. The egg of the phoenix piece is spectacular.

One of the things I really like about the work that the Long Now Foundation has done and does is that they've defined their threat model and retrieval requirements with precision. They're okay with things being inconvenient to retrieve in the short term as long as they can be retrieved by beings with extremely different tooling in the long-term.

I think depending on the model, the threat form can change. The implicit assumption that I was thinking about while trying to come up with a "solution" (I did emphasize that it's a solution, and not even a good one at that, just my stab at it) was that the information would be for the world of 2070. Or, 2080.

I chose that for two reasons, one was that a lot of people have done long-term things, and depending on how long-term you go, you start getting into really interesting territory. And the second is that there's a need to start from a positive place/assumption (i.e. it's implicitly baked in that our civilization will still be around and kicking at said time without a catastrophic collapse) to make it more relatable for the reader so that they're likely to do something. Even if that something is a half-hearted attempt at documenting their personal projects with a higher degree of fidelity.

Depending on the threat model, the following would change,

    - the information encoded/form of encoding

    - how many copies would be necessary

    - maintenance specs

(the LoC was used as an example as their entire being is a shrine to American and human endeavor, but it's tied to the health of the US as a whole)

I don't have the answer to the fascinating question that you've mentioned. I need to think about it more and we should continue this conversation. Lemme know how I can connect. I'm available via twitter etc. (see profile)

Hey, thanks! I'd like that very much too. I hope you didn't feel I was attacking your thoughts on solutions, which I think are interesting and worthwhile; I was just pointing out the likely relevance of catastrophic forgetting. Send me an email that says "areoform".

Not at all! I've deeply enjoyed engaging with you. It's why I write.

And will do :)

Don't see any email yet!

Your comment just gave me an epic story idea. Where our society collapses and far into the future, there are only stories about our age. Then they manage to build a computer, and watch a movie about space (with aliens!) Thinking there are people waiting for them in space, all of humanity gets behind creating an interstellar civilization…

So thanks for that.

Distribution of knowledge is the only way forward. There where probably only a few people that had key knowledge to these technologies. Once they disappeared, so did the technology.

>"The point is that those technologies were exceptional at their time, but were still lost, and we are poorer for it, because it took away hundreds of years of erstwhile progress that could have been made had we remembered and kept building on them."

I agree with you point. On the other hand I think if we did not forget anything and kept improving while still having medieval views we might have had exterminated ourselves already.

Roman concrete is simply concrete made by pozzolan cement. You make pozzolan cement by grinding quicklime together with volcano ash, fly ash from coal power plants, or metallurgical slags.

But the author’s point still stands. That knowledge was lost and then rediscovered.

>Heron of Alexandria described building steam engines, what if we had continued to experiment on them for over 2k years? Where would we be now?

Dead from climate change most likely.

> how much better would it have been if we hadn't forgotten about these technologies in the first place and had continued to improve on them? Heron of Alexandria described building steam engines, what if we had continued to experiment on them for over 2k years? Where would we be now?

I don't think this is a possible world in the first place. The knowledge of steam engines and intricate mechanical machines wasn't "lost" by accident: it was lost because there was no good reason to develop it further. The Greek steam engine was a cool demo, neat little piece of stage magic for the temple whose doors it powered, but there weren't any practical applications in sight. I bet it also was a hell of a maintenance burden.

The unfortunate reality of our lives seems to be that technology only propagates as long as there's enough funding for it. That means at least several people have to need it very much to support a single inventor. Many more people if there's a need for extra labor, or expensive resources (such as metals). That's as true today as it was 2000 years ago.

What I'm saying is: the reason the Greek steam engine was forgotten is that there was no demand for it back then, and that's because of a combination of factors, such as:

- It could do only so much, because other important technologies - such as precision manufacturing - weren't in place;

- The things it could do could be served better and cheaper by other means - such as hired, slave[0] or animal labor;

Learning history on my own[1], past the school curriculum, I was surprised to discover that a lot of technology was always there in the background. Medieval times weren't just a long period of stagnation - it's when the building blocks for industrial evolution were slowly invented. A lot of important developments happened in mining, where increasingly powerful and reliable pumps allowed people to dig deeper. The progress here was sustained, because it was paying for itself.

The industrial revolution happened when things aligned just right. The steam engines could be manufactured cheaply and robustly enough, and put to important enough work, that they paid for themselves - which financed their improvements, which opened more net-profitable applications, and so on - creating a positive feedback loop that run so long, it triggered more feedback loops, and turned humanity into proper technological civilization.

Note that there's a lot hiding in the "put to important enough work". The overall political and economic situation of the era was what created the "jobs" for steam engines, and that situation is downstream from technologies developed for sailing (progress in astronomy, healthcare and shipbuilding), communications (the printing press), and many others.

Point being: inventions aren't islands; they can't sustain their existence if there isn't a need for them. The question "where would we be if we didn't forget ${technology that we 'forgot' and 'rediscovered' centuries later}" doesn't seem valid to me.

----

[0] - There's an argument I see raised every now and then that historically, technology made jumps when labor was expensive; conversely, cheap labor meant it was cheaper to just throw more bodies at any problem.

[1] - I'd like to say "studying history", but what I really mean is just occasionally watching some high-quality documentaries and reading blog posts by people who (claim to) know this stuff.

It's amazing to me how eloquently you explain what I understand to be exactly the author's original point. You're right, the knowledge doesn't just disappear, it is forgotten because it doesn't serve any obvious short-term purpose. The author argues that, on the time scale of humanity, we would be better off if we didn't let such myopia force us to start anew every time the cycle repeats.

I'm not personally convinced of the specific proposed solution, since it's "Just Another Technology", but I wholly agree that the problem exists, and I think you argue effectively for some of the reasons why.