Except for cultural artifacts, my initial guess would be that not much has been lost.There is an example of this happening in the; Sir George Cayley's advances were forgotten for 50 years until the Wright brothers caught up and built the first airplanehttps://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Flight-John-Anderson/dp/0073380245 …
I worry a lot about Samo's concept of intellectual dark matter. What knowledge have we lost that we don't even know was there? Autopilot "traditionalism" isn't enough to recapture it.https://twitter.com/SamoBurja/status/1114628539725242374 …
-
-
- End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
ime, in historical reenactment, such things are often rediscovered because forgotten practices leave holes that their reinvented versions fit in perfectly
-
that doesn't account for all dark matter but for a surprising amount (motivation is usually, "it's super annoying to do it like that, surely I can improvise with the tools that I allow myself to use, that's not cheating")
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
If we think of knowledge as a graph, then pieces can be lost and recovered (or even replaced with better versions!) by retracing the multiple paths that used to go by any given node. Such a well-connected graph can be considered "healthy". 1/
-
If certain knowledge has been pushed to the edge of the graph and is weakly connected to the rest, then it's at risk. I guess the answer to the question is "why did a piece of knowledge get pushed out, and if it was a bad thing, how can we prevent that/tighten its connection?" 2/
-
But typing through this, I wonder if some forgetting is actually a good thing, helping us re-fill the hole with better/more modern/more connectable versions, making the overall graph healthier and stronger.
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
I'm worrying less about what we might have already lost (we'd notice any that had immediate catastrophic effects, and I'm ~confident we can compensate for non-immediate effects) than about bits of implicit cultural-knowledge infrastructure we may be about to lose.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.