So, I’m reading A Fire Upon The Deep. It features books that instruct you how to speedrun your technological progress all the way from sticks and stones to interstellar space flight. Does anything like that exist in reality? If not, it’s high time we start a project to make one.
A lot of stick and stones civilizations that can read, are there?
Agree that it is a cool idea though, does Vinge give more details?
It strikes me that the most crucial aspects of such a book would probably be mechanical engineering (wheels, mills, ship construction, levers and pullies) and chemical identification (where to find and how to identify loadstones, peat, saltpeater, tungsten) things no one here is going to have much experience with.
What I’d like to know is what the ideal order of scientific discoveries would be. Like what would have been possible earlier in retrospect, what later inventions could have been invented earlier and sped up subsequent innovation the most. Could you teach a sticks and stones civilization calculus? What is the earliest you could build a computer? Many countries went skipped building phone infrastructure and have gone straight to cellular. What technologies were necessary intermediate steps and which could be skipped?
Is the likelihood that future sticks and stones civilizations will know how to read such that the first chapter doesn’t need to be teaching them how to read the rest of the book? It seems to me that the probability a collapsed civilization is mostly illiterate is high enough to justify some kind of lexical key.
In the book it’s chemicals (gunpowder) and radios. The application of radios by Vinge’s version of non-anthropomorphic intelligences is especially interesting.
What about a “Mote In God’s Eye” -style technology bunker? Would having a set of raw materials, instructions, and tomes of information be the ideal setup? Perhaps something along the lines of the Svalbard Seed Vault. What are the most useful artifacts that can survive A) the catastrophe and B) the length of time it takes for the artifacts to be recovered? Such a timeframe could be short or many, many generations long (even geologic time?). Do we want this to potentially survive until the next intelligent being evolves, in the case of total destruction of mankind? What sealing mechanism would still be noticeable and breach-able by a low-tech civilization?
Or do we want to assume there is NO remaining technology and we’re attempting to bootstrap from pure knowledge? Either way, I think it would be an interesting problem to solve.
Basic electrics are possible as soon as you have decent metalworking. Dynamos are just a bunch of spools of copper wires and magnets. Add some graphite, and you have telephones. Greeks could have made them.
Wire making is easy if you have copper. The real problem is insulating the wire, especially with something flexible enough for winding coils. This is part of the problem of infrastructure—and very few people know enough to really even start working on a serious rebuilding problem, for example after a dinosaur killer impact. I know more than anyone else I have ever met, especially in the areas of food (agriculture and cooking) and shelter (designing, concrete, masonry, carpentry, plumbing, wiring, etc), and even I barely know enough to get started. For example, I don’t know of any way to make insulation for wires without an already existing chemical industry, except natural rubber, which would most likely not be available.
If you look closer, you’ll probably find only the outer protective layers are cloth; I’ve seen that on a lot of older wiring, but the ones I have seen all had a thin inner layer of rubber right on the copper. Tarred cloth probably would work, as long as the voltages were low enough and there were multiple layers; paper might be even better though. (Most of the old wiring I have seen was a thin layer of rubber next to the copper, then paper wrapping protecting the rubber and separating the individual wires, and the whole bundle protected with fabric.)
Wrap cloth around it, or coil a single thread around it, then coat with tar. Lots of organics will turn to “tar” if abused properly, even cooking oils. Also, steel will do instead of copper, you just need a few times a much of it.
On the other hand, is any of this really necessary ? If this civilization collapses, there’ll be enough ready-made materials lying around to last for a thousand years.
Wind each layer sparsely so that wires don’t touch and pack insulator (dried leaves) between the layers. Makes for a woefully inefficient spool, but still.
That would probably work, the only problem with it is that you would have to know in advance what you were doing, this isn’t something that would be tried by an experimenter trying to figure things out for example.
I don’t know, but even if they could do it, they had no reason to. So we can’t really tell.
The real question is—if they really really wanted to and had a book of helpful tips, could they have made decent enough wire? (And could they get copper in sufficient quantities? By Roman times they certainly could.)
This reminds me of an episode of Mythbusters where the crew set up a bunch of of MacGyver puzzles for the two hosts—pick a lock with a lightbulb filament, develop film with common household chemicals, and signal a helicopter with a tent and camping supplies.
In all seriousness though, Philisophical Materialism and the Scientific Method are probably the most important things; three years ago I bought my first car for a pack of cigarettes, and a $20 Hayes manual. At the time I didn’t even know what an alternator was; three months later I’d diagnosed a major electrical problem, and performed an engine swap. The manual helped (obviously), but for the most part it was the knowledge that any mechanical device could be reduced to simple causal patterns which allowed me to do this (incidentally, this is a hobby that I strongly recommend to other LW members—you get to put the scientific method into practice in a hands-on manner, and at the end of it you get a car which is slightly less crappy).
I tend to think that the mere knowledge that flying machines are possible will allow the survivors of WWIII to redevelop the prewar tech within a century.
I tried this with one of my first cars back in the early 90s. It turns out that there are a very large number of things that can go wrong with essentially every step of repairing a car, and I didn’t have the money or time to continue replacing parts I’d destroyed or troubleshooting problems I’d caused while trying to fix another problem.
I like programming because it has the same features of tracking down problems, but almost entirely without the autocommit feature of physical reality, as long as you choose to back up and test.
Also, even in the 90s, a computer was far cheaper than a good set of tools.
Could you explain Philosophical Materialism and the Scientific Method without first having the read do science? I agree that these might be the most important things but it isn’t clear to me how they can be explained to a civilization that lacks a general scientific vocabulary or the context to interpret things like falsifiability, hypotheses, ontological fundamental mental entities, etc. Does the most important lesson have to be toward the end of the book?
incidentally, this is a hobby that I strongly recommend to other LW members—you get to put the scientific method into practice in a hands-on manner, and at the end of it you get a car which is slightly less crappy.
Does the same principle apply to motorcycle maintenance? :-)
A book I was reading that suggested doing your own minor auto repairs, warned strongly against doing motorcycle repairs for anything after the late 1970s. He claimed that newer cycles were so tightly integrated and the tools for working on them so specialized, that you were too likely to get something taken apart that you literally could not reassemble.
I’d say that’s true for modern supersports and superbikes, but a beginner bike like a Kawasaki Ninja EX-250 has very little in the way of electrics or other tightly-integrated mechanisms. Just as an anecdote: I do regular maintenance on my 2006 SV-650/S, but anything more complicated than oil changes on my 1972 Honda CB350 is done by a mechanic. While newer bikes have complicated parts like ECUs and fuel injection, those are usually the most reliable parts. Repairing older motorcycles typically involves scrounging e-bay for parts that are no longer manufactured.
The thing I like most about motorcycles is that they are simple, so it’s pretty easy to diagnose any problems. It only takes a minute to tell if you’re running lean or rich. Simply starting, hearing, and smelling an engine can tell you whether you just need new piston rings or if you’ve damaged the crankshaft journal bearings.
If you really want the most mechanically simple vehicle, I’d suggest an old scooter such as a Honda Cub. The set of failure modes for an air-cooled single-cylinder engine is quite small.
What for? There aren’t any stick-and-stones cultures around.
Do you assign significant probability to the need for such a book in humanity’s future? I don’t. It would require that:
No technological human societies survive
Adults who know the relevant things don’t survive
Technological artifacts and particularly sources of knowledge (e.g., copies of encyclopedias or entire libraries-on-disk) don’t survive
But also that:
Some people survive all this
Such a book will survive all this and there will be a high chance of a copy being found by survivor groups
Survivors will be able to use the book (requires resources like extra food/manpower to sink into rebuilding project, and the organization/government to provide this) - in fact survivors will mostly lack for knowledge
There’s a huge different between having the raw knowledge available and simple step by step instructions.
A book created for this express purpose would be an order of magnitude more useful than any number of encyclopedias or even entire libraries. A big challenge would be even knowing what to research—if you don’t have the next technology, you may not even know what it will be.
The biggest obstacle is really distribution. What you’d need its a government, church, or NGO to put a copy in every branch or something.
Maybe you could donate a copy to every prison library. Prisons would actually be a really defensible location to stay post-societal collapse . . .
We can imagine a handbook that is written to be useful for a broad spectrum of possible disastrous situations.
The handbook could be written for post-disaster survivors finding themselves in many possible situations. For example, your first bullet “No technological human societies survive” could be expanded to “(No|Few|Distant|Hostile) technological human societies survive”. Indeed, uncertainty about which of the aforementioned possibilities actually hold might be quite probable, given both a civilization-destroying disaster and some survivors.
To some extent, the Long Now’s Rosetta project (to build sturdy discs inscribed with examples of many languages) is an example of this sort of handbook.
I agree a knowledge repository would be very useful for survivors right after the disaster. But I don’t think any scenario is probable that involves a society with a reasonably stable level of technology and food production existing and profiting from such a book.
BTW, the Rosetta project seems to be purely about describing languages so future people can understand them.
For example, your first bullet “No technological human societies survive” could be expanded to “(No|Few|Distant|Hostile) technological human societies survive”.
If a few distant technological societies survive, even just one with some reasonable shipping & industry, then I expect they will quickly establish contact with most of the world, if only to exploit natural resources & farming. Most or all tech. economies today rely on many imports of minerals, food, etc. And knowledge and technology would be dispersed quicker with the assistance of this society than by means of such a book.
If a ‘hostile’ society survives—well, hostile towards whom? Towards all other, non-high-tech survivors? I don’t see this as the default attitude of a surviving society that’s the most powerful country left on Earth, so without knowing more I hesitate to try to empower whoever they’re hostile towards. What did you have in mind here?
Your first point is that the handbook is not likely to be useful for the purpose of helping reconstruction after a disaster, because the chance of a disaster being total enough to destroy technology, but not total enough to destroy humanity, is small. I agree completely—you have a very strong argument there.
However, you go on to argue that IF a technology-destroying-humanity-sparing disaster occured, THEN technological societies would quickly establish contact, disperse knowledge, et cetera. In this after-the-disaster reasoning, you’re using our present notions of what is likely and unlikely to happen.
Reasoning like this beyond the very very unlikely occurrence seems fraught with danger. In order for such an unlikely occurrence to occur, we must have something significantly wrong with our current understanding of the world. If something like that happened, we would revise our understanding, not continue to use it. Anyone writing the handbook would have to plan for a wild array of possibilities.
Instead of focusing on the fact that the handbook is not likely to be used for its intended purpose, consider:
Might it have side benefits, spin-offs from its officially-intended purpose?
If we assume that there is “something significantly wrong with our current understanding of the world” but don’t know anything more specific, we can’t come to any useful conclusions. There’s a huge number of things we could do that we think aren’t likely to be useful but where we might be wrong.
So is writing this book something we should do (as the original comment seemed to suggest)? No. But I agree it’s something we could do, is very unlikely to be harmful, and is neat and fun into the bargain.
With that said, I’m going back to working on my cool, neat, fun, non-humanity-saving project :-)
Actually, all you would need for serious problems is that none of the relatively few people who know the essential details of a critical piece of support technology don’t survive. Or at least don’t survive in your group or that you otherwise have access to. And since if that happens, and you can’t know ahead of time what bits of information you might lose, having references to everything possible only makes good sense. Especially given how relatively inexpensive references are now. Cheap insurance against an very unlikely result (of course, they can also be helpful day-to-day too).
What you seem to be talking about is a group of people a few years to a few decades post collapse, who want to operate or rebuild preexisting tech and need a reference work. If they had a copy of wikipedia plus a good technical & reference library, it would probably answer most of their needs. A special book isn’t essential.
What I was talking about is a group of people completely lacking pre-collapse knowledge and experience. You can’t give them instructions for building a radio because they tend to ask questions like “what’s a screwdriver?” and “how can I avoid being burnt as a witch?” That’s what a real stones-and-sticks to high-tech guide book needs to address.
You might think of “my book” as a subset of yours. My book would be more likely to be useful (though hopefully not) and could be expanded to add the material necessary for yours. And your book would be a library in itself, there is no possible way that such a “book” would not span many volumes.
A single long “book” would have high quality cross links, well ordered reading sequences, a uniform style, no internal contradictions, etc. In that sense it’s a book as opposed to a library collection.
I don’t believe anyone can assign meaningfulvery small or very large probabilities in most situations. It is one of my long-running disagreements with people here and on OB.
I don’t know of a unified way of handling extremely small risks, but there are two things that can be helpful. First, as suggested by Marc Stiegler in “David’s Sling”, is to simply recognize explicitly that they are possible, that way if they do occur you can get on with dealing with the problem without also having to fight disbelief that it could have happened at all. Second, different people have different perspectives and interests and will treat different low possibility events differently, this sort of dispersion of views and preparation will help ensure that someone is at least somewhat prepared. As I said, neither of these is really enough, but I simply can’t see any better options.
I’m saying “Black Swan” to compress the following message: We cannot assign probability at all because we don’t have statistics. Nevertheless, the stakes are so high that we should be overly cautious. We need the book “just in case”. It’s a very specific, actionable step in existential threat mitigation. Unlike other measures it requires no new discoveries but just a modest investment of money and time.
You have to assign probabilities anyway. See the amended article:
Considering some event a black swan doesn’t give a leave to not assign any probabilities, since making decisions depending on the plausibility of such event is still equivalent to assigning probabilities that make the expected utility calculation give those decisions.
Okay, okay! How much our civilization is worth? Say, 10^20 dollars. If I had the money, I would be willing to part with 10^6 dollars to develop, manufacture, and distribute the book. Therefore, the probability of the book serving it’s primary purpose is 10^(-14).
How much our civilization is worth? Say, 10^20 dollars.
That’s meaningless. You can’t assign a value in dollars to the continued existence of our civilization. Dollars are only useful for pricing things inside that civilization. (Some people argue for using utilons to price the civilization’s existence.)
If I had the money, I would be willing to part with 10^6 dollars to develop, manufacture, and distribute the book. Therefore, the probability of the book serving it’s primary purpose is 10^(-14).
The amount you’re willing to pay is a fact about you, not about the book’s usefulness. You’re saying you estimate its probability of usefulness at 10^-14. But why?
I see scenarios like the following not impossible.
90% of the human population dies from a plague/meteor along with the knowledge/sufficient numbers to maintain things like power plants, steel mills and the trappings of modern life. Those people that are left with the knowledge have to spend all their time subsistence farming just to survive.
A few generations later when the population has increased a bit and subsistence farming improved in yield due to experience. People want to recreate technology, with just the knowledge passed down by word of mouth.
What if your audience can’t read? What if they don’t understand English, because they’re rural Chinese, or because it’s 3000 AD?
Supposing that they read the first chapter out of curiosity, you need to convince them it’ll be worth their while to read the rest of the book and do what it tells them to, at cost of time, effort, materials, money and reputation.
You also need to choose a catchy title. I recommend From Sticks and Stones to Atom Bombs: How to Build Your Own World-Destroying Civilization In Only 30 Days!!!
Right, I’m thinking the first chapter will have to teach numbers, logical connectors and a basic English vocabulary. Additional vocabulary can be added throughout the book. We’ll just have to hope that the reader can understand more or less universal symbols like arrows to point directions, circles to indicate groupings, proximity indicates labels etc. Also, a section on anatomy will be less helpful the more they’ve mutated.
I think arithmetic can probably be taught with reference to dots. So:
″” =
″“= 4
″ + ” = 4
etc.
Geometry shouldn’t be a problem either. The whole thing would have to be heavily illustrated anyway.
Maybe the first couple pages should just depict really happy people using technology paired with stone agers looking miserable.
This, along with building an AI that can self-improve by reading instructional material intended for humans, was a cherished childhood fantasy of mine.
Now, I implement machine learning algorithms to be used in dumb statistical NLP systems.
So, I’m reading A Fire Upon The Deep. It features books that instruct you how to speedrun your technological progress all the way from sticks and stones to interstellar space flight. Does anything like that exist in reality? If not, it’s high time we start a project to make one.
Edit (10 October 2009): This is encouraging.
A lot of stick and stones civilizations that can read, are there?
Agree that it is a cool idea though, does Vinge give more details?
It strikes me that the most crucial aspects of such a book would probably be mechanical engineering (wheels, mills, ship construction, levers and pullies) and chemical identification (where to find and how to identify loadstones, peat, saltpeater, tungsten) things no one here is going to have much experience with.
What I’d like to know is what the ideal order of scientific discoveries would be. Like what would have been possible earlier in retrospect, what later inventions could have been invented earlier and sped up subsequent innovation the most. Could you teach a sticks and stones civilization calculus? What is the earliest you could build a computer? Many countries went skipped building phone infrastructure and have gone straight to cellular. What technologies were necessary intermediate steps and which could be skipped?
Any hypotheses for these questions?
Not yet.
Is the likelihood that future sticks and stones civilizations will know how to read such that the first chapter doesn’t need to be teaching them how to read the rest of the book? It seems to me that the probability a collapsed civilization is mostly illiterate is high enough to justify some kind of lexical key.
In the book it’s chemicals (gunpowder) and radios. The application of radios by Vinge’s version of non-anthropomorphic intelligences is especially interesting.
What about a “Mote In God’s Eye” -style technology bunker? Would having a set of raw materials, instructions, and tomes of information be the ideal setup? Perhaps something along the lines of the Svalbard Seed Vault. What are the most useful artifacts that can survive A) the catastrophe and B) the length of time it takes for the artifacts to be recovered? Such a timeframe could be short or many, many generations long (even geologic time?). Do we want this to potentially survive until the next intelligent being evolves, in the case of total destruction of mankind? What sealing mechanism would still be noticeable and breach-able by a low-tech civilization?
Or do we want to assume there is NO remaining technology and we’re attempting to bootstrap from pure knowledge? Either way, I think it would be an interesting problem to solve.
Basic electrics are possible as soon as you have decent metalworking. Dynamos are just a bunch of spools of copper wires and magnets. Add some graphite, and you have telephones.
Greeks could have made them.A printing press should be easier to make...
Wire making is easy if you have copper. The real problem is insulating the wire, especially with something flexible enough for winding coils. This is part of the problem of infrastructure—and very few people know enough to really even start working on a serious rebuilding problem, for example after a dinosaur killer impact. I know more than anyone else I have ever met, especially in the areas of food (agriculture and cooking) and shelter (designing, concrete, masonry, carpentry, plumbing, wiring, etc), and even I barely know enough to get started. For example, I don’t know of any way to make insulation for wires without an already existing chemical industry, except natural rubber, which would most likely not be available.
I’ve seen cloth-wrapped appliance cords—never tried it, but it might be feasible.
If you look closer, you’ll probably find only the outer protective layers are cloth; I’ve seen that on a lot of older wiring, but the ones I have seen all had a thin inner layer of rubber right on the copper. Tarred cloth probably would work, as long as the voltages were low enough and there were multiple layers; paper might be even better though. (Most of the old wiring I have seen was a thin layer of rubber next to the copper, then paper wrapping protecting the rubber and separating the individual wires, and the whole bundle protected with fabric.)
I think I solved the insulation problem. Cockroach bodies should work if you can gather enough.
Wrap cloth around it, or coil a single thread around it, then coat with tar. Lots of organics will turn to “tar” if abused properly, even cooking oils. Also, steel will do instead of copper, you just need a few times a much of it.
On the other hand, is any of this really necessary ? If this civilization collapses, there’ll be enough ready-made materials lying around to last for a thousand years.
Wind each layer sparsely so that wires don’t touch and pack insulator (dried leaves) between the layers. Makes for a woefully inefficient spool, but still.
Gotta try this out with scrap metal.
That would probably work, the only problem with it is that you would have to know in advance what you were doing, this isn’t something that would be tried by an experimenter trying to figure things out for example.
Hence the book.
Well, did the Greeks have the ability to make decent enough wire in sufficient quantities?
I think they could. Remember the Antikythera mechanism’s high quality of fabrication. And fine metal wire was useful for jewelry and art:
http://store.metmuseum.org/Bracelets/Greek-Filigree-Wire-Bangle/invt/09085051
http://phoenicia.org/dentstry.html
http://www.wireworkscustomjewelry.com/history-of-wire-art-jewelry/
I don’t know, but even if they could do it, they had no reason to. So we can’t really tell.
The real question is—if they really really wanted to and had a book of helpful tips, could they have made decent enough wire? (And could they get copper in sufficient quantities? By Roman times they certainly could.)
Could they make it thin enough (even with insulation) to be able to fit large amounts of windings?
ie, assuming they had reason to try, could they do it based on what we know of their capabilities at the time?
Incidentally, a radio would be much cheaper to make and almost certainly within their capabilities.
Yes.
This reminds me of an episode of Mythbusters where the crew set up a bunch of of MacGyver puzzles for the two hosts—pick a lock with a lightbulb filament, develop film with common household chemicals, and signal a helicopter with a tent and camping supplies.
In all seriousness though, Philisophical Materialism and the Scientific Method are probably the most important things; three years ago I bought my first car for a pack of cigarettes, and a $20 Hayes manual. At the time I didn’t even know what an alternator was; three months later I’d diagnosed a major electrical problem, and performed an engine swap. The manual helped (obviously), but for the most part it was the knowledge that any mechanical device could be reduced to simple causal patterns which allowed me to do this (incidentally, this is a hobby that I strongly recommend to other LW members—you get to put the scientific method into practice in a hands-on manner, and at the end of it you get a car which is slightly less crappy).
I tend to think that the mere knowledge that flying machines are possible will allow the survivors of WWIII to redevelop the prewar tech within a century.
I tried this with one of my first cars back in the early 90s. It turns out that there are a very large number of things that can go wrong with essentially every step of repairing a car, and I didn’t have the money or time to continue replacing parts I’d destroyed or troubleshooting problems I’d caused while trying to fix another problem.
I like programming because it has the same features of tracking down problems, but almost entirely without the autocommit feature of physical reality, as long as you choose to back up and test.
Also, even in the 90s, a computer was far cheaper than a good set of tools.
Could you explain Philosophical Materialism and the Scientific Method without first having the read do science? I agree that these might be the most important things but it isn’t clear to me how they can be explained to a civilization that lacks a general scientific vocabulary or the context to interpret things like falsifiability, hypotheses, ontological fundamental mental entities, etc. Does the most important lesson have to be toward the end of the book?
Does the same principle apply to motorcycle maintenance? :-)
A book I was reading that suggested doing your own minor auto repairs, warned strongly against doing motorcycle repairs for anything after the late 1970s. He claimed that newer cycles were so tightly integrated and the tools for working on them so specialized, that you were too likely to get something taken apart that you literally could not reassemble.
I’d say that’s true for modern supersports and superbikes, but a beginner bike like a Kawasaki Ninja EX-250 has very little in the way of electrics or other tightly-integrated mechanisms. Just as an anecdote: I do regular maintenance on my 2006 SV-650/S, but anything more complicated than oil changes on my 1972 Honda CB350 is done by a mechanic. While newer bikes have complicated parts like ECUs and fuel injection, those are usually the most reliable parts. Repairing older motorcycles typically involves scrounging e-bay for parts that are no longer manufactured.
The thing I like most about motorcycles is that they are simple, so it’s pretty easy to diagnose any problems. It only takes a minute to tell if you’re running lean or rich. Simply starting, hearing, and smelling an engine can tell you whether you just need new piston rings or if you’ve damaged the crankshaft journal bearings.
If you really want the most mechanically simple vehicle, I’d suggest an old scooter such as a Honda Cub. The set of failure modes for an air-cooled single-cylinder engine is quite small.
http://www.amazon.com/Caveman-Chemist-Circumstances-Achievements-Publication/dp/0841217874
http://www.amazon.com/Caveman-Chemistry-Projects-Creation-Production/dp/1581125666/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b
What for? There aren’t any stick-and-stones cultures around.
Do you assign significant probability to the need for such a book in humanity’s future? I don’t. It would require that:
No technological human societies survive
Adults who know the relevant things don’t survive
Technological artifacts and particularly sources of knowledge (e.g., copies of encyclopedias or entire libraries-on-disk) don’t survive
But also that:
Some people survive all this
Such a book will survive all this and there will be a high chance of a copy being found by survivor groups
Survivors will be able to use the book (requires resources like extra food/manpower to sink into rebuilding project, and the organization/government to provide this) - in fact survivors will mostly lack for knowledge
There’s a huge different between having the raw knowledge available and simple step by step instructions.
A book created for this express purpose would be an order of magnitude more useful than any number of encyclopedias or even entire libraries. A big challenge would be even knowing what to research—if you don’t have the next technology, you may not even know what it will be.
The biggest obstacle is really distribution. What you’d need its a government, church, or NGO to put a copy in every branch or something.
Maybe you could donate a copy to every prison library. Prisons would actually be a really defensible location to stay post-societal collapse . . .
We can imagine a handbook that is written to be useful for a broad spectrum of possible disastrous situations.
The handbook could be written for post-disaster survivors finding themselves in many possible situations. For example, your first bullet “No technological human societies survive” could be expanded to “(No|Few|Distant|Hostile) technological human societies survive”. Indeed, uncertainty about which of the aforementioned possibilities actually hold might be quite probable, given both a civilization-destroying disaster and some survivors.
To some extent, the Long Now’s Rosetta project (to build sturdy discs inscribed with examples of many languages) is an example of this sort of handbook.
http://rosettaproject.org/
I agree a knowledge repository would be very useful for survivors right after the disaster. But I don’t think any scenario is probable that involves a society with a reasonably stable level of technology and food production existing and profiting from such a book.
BTW, the Rosetta project seems to be purely about describing languages so future people can understand them.
If a few distant technological societies survive, even just one with some reasonable shipping & industry, then I expect they will quickly establish contact with most of the world, if only to exploit natural resources & farming. Most or all tech. economies today rely on many imports of minerals, food, etc. And knowledge and technology would be dispersed quicker with the assistance of this society than by means of such a book.
If a ‘hostile’ society survives—well, hostile towards whom? Towards all other, non-high-tech survivors? I don’t see this as the default attitude of a surviving society that’s the most powerful country left on Earth, so without knowing more I hesitate to try to empower whoever they’re hostile towards. What did you have in mind here?
Your first point is that the handbook is not likely to be useful for the purpose of helping reconstruction after a disaster, because the chance of a disaster being total enough to destroy technology, but not total enough to destroy humanity, is small. I agree completely—you have a very strong argument there.
However, you go on to argue that IF a technology-destroying-humanity-sparing disaster occured, THEN technological societies would quickly establish contact, disperse knowledge, et cetera. In this after-the-disaster reasoning, you’re using our present notions of what is likely and unlikely to happen.
Reasoning like this beyond the very very unlikely occurrence seems fraught with danger. In order for such an unlikely occurrence to occur, we must have something significantly wrong with our current understanding of the world. If something like that happened, we would revise our understanding, not continue to use it. Anyone writing the handbook would have to plan for a wild array of possibilities.
Instead of focusing on the fact that the handbook is not likely to be used for its intended purpose, consider:
Might it have side benefits, spin-offs from its officially-intended purpose?
Is it harmful?
Is it neat, cool, and fun?
If we assume that there is “something significantly wrong with our current understanding of the world” but don’t know anything more specific, we can’t come to any useful conclusions. There’s a huge number of things we could do that we think aren’t likely to be useful but where we might be wrong.
So is writing this book something we should do (as the original comment seemed to suggest)? No. But I agree it’s something we could do, is very unlikely to be harmful, and is neat and fun into the bargain.
With that said, I’m going back to working on my cool, neat, fun, non-humanity-saving project :-)
Actually, all you would need for serious problems is that none of the relatively few people who know the essential details of a critical piece of support technology don’t survive. Or at least don’t survive in your group or that you otherwise have access to. And since if that happens, and you can’t know ahead of time what bits of information you might lose, having references to everything possible only makes good sense. Especially given how relatively inexpensive references are now. Cheap insurance against an very unlikely result (of course, they can also be helpful day-to-day too).
There’s a mixup of two different scenarios here.
What you seem to be talking about is a group of people a few years to a few decades post collapse, who want to operate or rebuild preexisting tech and need a reference work. If they had a copy of wikipedia plus a good technical & reference library, it would probably answer most of their needs. A special book isn’t essential.
What I was talking about is a group of people completely lacking pre-collapse knowledge and experience. You can’t give them instructions for building a radio because they tend to ask questions like “what’s a screwdriver?” and “how can I avoid being burnt as a witch?” That’s what a real stones-and-sticks to high-tech guide book needs to address.
You might think of “my book” as a subset of yours. My book would be more likely to be useful (though hopefully not) and could be expanded to add the material necessary for yours. And your book would be a library in itself, there is no possible way that such a “book” would not span many volumes.
A single long “book” would have high quality cross links, well ordered reading sequences, a uniform style, no internal contradictions, etc. In that sense it’s a book as opposed to a library collection.
Black Swan.
Just saying “black swan” isn’t enough to give higher probability. If you think I can’t assign any meaningful probability at all to this scenario, why?
I don’t believe anyone can assign meaningful very small or very large probabilities in most situations. It is one of my long-running disagreements with people here and on OB.
There are indeed many known human biases of this kind, plus general inability to predict small differences in probability.
But we can’t treat every low probability scenario as being e.g. of p=0.1 or some other constant! What do you suggest then?
I don’t know of a unified way of handling extremely small risks, but there are two things that can be helpful. First, as suggested by Marc Stiegler in “David’s Sling”, is to simply recognize explicitly that they are possible, that way if they do occur you can get on with dealing with the problem without also having to fight disbelief that it could have happened at all. Second, different people have different perspectives and interests and will treat different low possibility events differently, this sort of dispersion of views and preparation will help ensure that someone is at least somewhat prepared. As I said, neither of these is really enough, but I simply can’t see any better options.
I’m saying “Black Swan” to compress the following message: We cannot assign probability at all because we don’t have statistics. Nevertheless, the stakes are so high that we should be overly cautious. We need the book “just in case”. It’s a very specific, actionable step in existential threat mitigation. Unlike other measures it requires no new discoveries but just a modest investment of money and time.
You have to assign probabilities anyway. See the amended article:
Okay, okay! How much our civilization is worth? Say, 10^20 dollars. If I had the money, I would be willing to part with 10^6 dollars to develop, manufacture, and distribute the book. Therefore, the probability of the book serving it’s primary purpose is 10^(-14).
That’s meaningless. You can’t assign a value in dollars to the continued existence of our civilization. Dollars are only useful for pricing things inside that civilization. (Some people argue for using utilons to price the civilization’s existence.)
The amount you’re willing to pay is a fact about you, not about the book’s usefulness. You’re saying you estimate its probability of usefulness at 10^-14. But why?
Clearly the market for civilization creation books is efficient.
Nice point. Maybe we should instead talk about scenarios where humanity (including us) no longer suffers aging but a collapse still occurs.
Incidentally, I wonder what the market price for writing a civilization-destroying book might be?
I believe the going rate is 45 virgins in the afterlife.
I see scenarios like the following not impossible.
90% of the human population dies from a plague/meteor along with the knowledge/sufficient numbers to maintain things like power plants, steel mills and the trappings of modern life. Those people that are left with the knowledge have to spend all their time subsistence farming just to survive.
A few generations later when the population has increased a bit and subsistence farming improved in yield due to experience. People want to recreate technology, with just the knowledge passed down by word of mouth.
There’s a time-traveler’s cheat sheet that covers a lot of the basics. (Credit goes to Ryan North. )
TAKE THE CREDIT
I’m going to go back in time and take credit for that cheat sheet.
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2006/02/the_forever_boo.php ?
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2006/02/the_forever_boo.php
So, does anyone want to write out a very preliminary table of contents? Other ideas about how such a book would be organized?
You have to handle two issues first:
What if your audience can’t read? What if they don’t understand English, because they’re rural Chinese, or because it’s 3000 AD?
Supposing that they read the first chapter out of curiosity, you need to convince them it’ll be worth their while to read the rest of the book and do what it tells them to, at cost of time, effort, materials, money and reputation.
You also need to choose a catchy title. I recommend From Sticks and Stones to Atom Bombs: How to Build Your Own World-Destroying Civilization In Only 30 Days!!!
Right, I’m thinking the first chapter will have to teach numbers, logical connectors and a basic English vocabulary. Additional vocabulary can be added throughout the book. We’ll just have to hope that the reader can understand more or less universal symbols like arrows to point directions, circles to indicate groupings, proximity indicates labels etc. Also, a section on anatomy will be less helpful the more they’ve mutated.
I think arithmetic can probably be taught with reference to dots. So:
″ ” =
″ “= 4
″ + ” = 4 etc.
Geometry shouldn’t be a problem either. The whole thing would have to be heavily illustrated anyway.
Maybe the first couple pages should just depict really happy people using technology paired with stone agers looking miserable.
This, along with building an AI that can self-improve by reading instructional material intended for humans, was a cherished childhood fantasy of mine.
Now, I implement machine learning algorithms to be used in dumb statistical NLP systems.