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Comment by ivan_gammel | Hacker News Reader

This is a feature, not a bug. It would be a terrible life in a world that does not forget or forgive. It’s also good that some preservation effort is necessary for worthy content: the value of it gets more appreciated.

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> It would be a terrible life in a world that does not forget or forgive

This is an orthogonal concern, and arguably is mainly about privacy

> It’s also good that some preservation effort is necessary for worthy content: the value of it gets more appreciated.

This same argument seems to imply that virtually everything should be expensive. Cheap storage is bad because we don't appreciate the value of the files we store. Expensive healthcare is good because it really makes us appreciate our organs.

> worthy content

The hard part is looking into the future to determine which content will be considered worthy then. So far no human civilization has managed to figure that out. They mostly seemed to focus on preserving the image of how amazing their kings were.

>This same argument seems to imply that virtually everything should be expensive

Non-zero doesn’t mean “unaffordable” or “expensive”.

> The hard part is looking into the future…

The hardest part is to understand that the content we want to preserve carries more valuable information about us than about itself.

Scientific knowledge can be discovered again, it’s not something to worry about. The preservation shapes the future views of us, leaving the trace in the history of those who preserve, their life and their experiences. Maybe they just needed to accept their mortality and irreversible flow of time?

I don't know. Scientific knowledge is expensive to rediscover. It requires a lot of false starts and often involves a great deal of luck/randomness. Historically, periods of flourishing are often associated with the rediscovery or importing of large collections of wisdom. For example revivals of ancient works or the introduction of works from afar due to newly developed trade routes. If ideas were easy to rediscover, we shouldn't expect those events to have much impact.

There is certainly a cost of storing data, and cost should enter the equation. But we're losing a lot of data for reasons other than cost and we don't have a reasonable way of assigning a value to the lost data.

My point is, we are engaging in a very unnatural process, trying to preserve something against the second law of thermodynamics. We are going to lose the data and things are going to break no matter what. We cannot change the nature, but we can accept it.

> We are going to lose the data and things are going to break no matter what. We cannot change the nature, but we can accept it.

If man was content with the nature of things he would never fly, or go to the moon, or any of the other myriad accomplishments humanity has made. If we can preserve clay tablets from thousands of years ago we can find some way to keep the information we produce today for posterity.

I’m not arguing with that. We can and we will preserve some information. We must not be obsessed with saving everything. Imagine the humankind in a million years from now; if we pick 10 most important facts about each century, that will be a hundred thousand facts to remember. Maybe we develop abilities to know and use them all, but from a modern human perspective that’s already too much. Now, can you reduce the XXI century to 10 facts? How much of those zettabytes of information would be worth keeping for a million years? For ten thousand years? For a thousand years?

I can't imagine an archaeologist or historian studying e.g. Pierre de Fermat ever saying, "Good thing we have so few documents and artifacts! That way we know what was really important to him."

What's the proof for Fermat's Last Theorem again? Doesn't matter, it was just a footnote anyway so let's not bother preserving it. It doesn't matter that it took our smartest minds 358 years of trail and error to rediscover the proof. It can always be discovered again.

We don’t know if the proof did exist. The complexity of the one we have is an indication that he did not tell the truth, whether that was a genuine mistake, a joke or something else. For sure it wasn’t the longest time gap between a problem statement and a solution.

Yes, rebuilding civilization from scratch would be a difficult task, taking centuries if not millennia, if no knowledge is preserved. However we do preserve it and do spend considerable effort, what cannot be said about our culture and individual experiences.

Maybe the complexity of the one we have is an indication that we haven't rediscovered it. We discovered a worse one. Maybe it will take our smartest minds another 350 years to rediscover his. If preserving data was easier in the 1600s we could just grep through Fermat's hard drive and we would know for sure!

Let's keep making preservation easier, and preserving as much as we can. Maybe much of it is worthless, but I guarantee there's at least one document we think is worthless today, that historians 500 years from now will be glad we preserved anyway.

Simple. Store everything. I give you an example: the clay tablets written in cuneiform discovered at Ur. They were disposed of by Sumerians, possibly because they have fulfilled their purpose and were simply thrown away. They deal with important things like commercial transactions, but also unimportant things like a personal letter or a poem. This unimportant things pretty much taught all we know about the Sumerian language: syntax, vocabulary, regional variations, etc. In archaeological terms, a refuse is a huge treasure trove, precisely because no one chose what to throw away. Everything is there. It's entirely up to the archaeologist to comb and come up with an interpretation.

The day Apple bought NeXT somewhere on the internet I read a very funny post that started.

Bow down to Unix children of Macintosh...

The whole post kept the same biblical style while describing why the Mac was conquered buy NexT.

A really great post that every once in a while I try to find on the internet.

Hard to say what is lost when it is unknown.

Hard to say what is lost when it is unknown.

Is it possible to lose something you never knew?

Yes.

But usually you realise after the fact learning that it was when you could have interacted with it.

Those things exist then through legends and the collective that still remembers, though that collective is very prone to just misremember.

That is a good question and I'm struck in the English language between lost and gone.

If it's just lost I might still find it. I believe the post I'm looking for is lost. I don't know if it's gone. If it's gone I will never find it.

Could be it if it's lost there must be knowledge of it?

"we've lost our unborn child"

"Have you checked all the drawers?"

Where do you think we have lived the last 5 thousand years? We have clay tablets written in cuneiform that were excavated in Ur from a refuse, and thanks to those we know the little we know about Sumer. The invention of writing made the exercise of forgetting impossible. This has been thoroughly studied by anthropologists like Jack Goody, James Carey, David Oslon, Barry Powell and some other writers like Walter Ong. We live in fact in a terrible world that is mostly trap in the past, where cultural complexity grows in onion layers. Anyone can go back to the past and yearn for it. We can always go back to the past through our stored knowledge, but that past will mean different things to different people as they have not experienced it. Since the invention of the printing press we have lived in a constant state of information inflation. Middle Ages scholars used to complain that with the printing press anyone could read and write books, scholastics were scandalised by the rise in the vernaculars, Michelangelo complained about Flemish painters and their vacuous form of art and so on. What is worth mentioning here is the rate at which decay is occurring. The articles mentions that 38% of sites that existed in 2013 are no more; that's a decade. How much of that is noise and how much of that is useful information, or at the very least "interesting" content, we don't know. It's gone. How much of that info has been saved by the large web scrappers, or how much is stored by google or twitter is also unknown to us. What do you define worthy content? A tweet with a million views even though is just an actress semi-naked? A tweet with 300 views about breaking discovery? We celebrated like there was no tomorrow when the internet brought down the gatekeepers, those newspaper, books, magazines, tv and radio editors; just to get swamped in noise, conspiracy theories, memes, tik tok and so on. The problem is that we can't barely cope with the huge amounts of information that is thrown at us and we are too many, with too different tastes to even agree what's worth and what's not. The "feature" as you've called it, may be by design, but it doesn't mean is useful or morally correct.

Paragraphs are a wonderful thing, friend.

> What do you define worthy content?

It is highly subjective. I’m very curious about the past, but I don’t care if nobody will know the name of Newton or Mandela in 10000 years, but some YouTube blogger will somehow be a legend.

> morally correct

How can enthropy be morally correct or incorrect?

> How can enthropy be morally correct or incorrect?

You said the disappearance of content was a feature, not a bug. If it is a feature it was designed. I understood your comment as implying that somebody created this feature.

You now speak about entropy, which one? Boltzmann's or Shanon? This doesn't have to do anything with bit rot or the like. When you write a book, you cannot unwrite it. Is a fait accompli. But if I create a website and I load a bunch of content and after few years I don't pay domain, server space, etc. it will be deleted; at that point a webcrawler may have had copied all the info, or not, we do not know, or somebody may have thought it was worth it and saved a link to it. At a fundamental level, who decides what stays and what is deleted, who owns it if the webcrawler stored it without your permission? These are all moral questions, not technical ones...

> You said the disappearance of content was a feature, not a bug. If it is a feature it was designed.

It wasn’t designed, it’s just a very common metaphor about the perception of things rather than the way they came to life. It means that we should embrace it instead of trying to fix it.

> You now speak about entropy, which one?

Boltzmann. A system where information is preserved forever through the arrangement of energy states is highly improbable, so regardless of individual moral choices and the effort it will fall apart by the laws of nature.

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