What about the printing press? My pet theory that is not validated by historians is:
Printing press makes it possible to create many instances of a text containing knowledge, inexpensively.
With more literate readers having access to libraries of books, it allows someone to actually notice when information is contradictory. If you only ever have 1 text on a subject, there’s nothing to compare to.
This ultimately led to an evolution of rules, what we call the Scientific Method, where you need:
falsifiable idea
Peers (which presumably meant other wealthy people, today it seems to be mean high status PhD holders) must review before publication
Publish a Paper in a high status journal
Use mathematics to analyze the probabilities
And so on, though each element must have been gradually evolved.
The drive force that led to all these rules is that if you have a library and many copies of information on the same topics, you will start to notice all the contradictions and conclude all existing knowledge is probably junk. Hence the above. (and I think AI systems will be able to do the same thing on a larger scale)
Anyways, this is what you need to do to put together enough complex ideas to make industrialization possible. The steam engine alone required designs and high quality metallurgy and contributions of materials and knowledge from a broad base of contributors. And it required a way to record the design and record the theories and distribute the information to other people, so that followup inventions could be made.
There likely were many ways to harness energy from nature and industrialize. The obvious being that you didn’t need coal, water wheel powered factories would work until you ran out of rivers to dam, which was only a problem late in industrialization.
* There are also enormous holes in the current scientific method and you could replace it with :
1. idea that can be analyzed probabilistically, you don’t have to be able to prove it false, just more or less likely to be true
2. Multiple AI systems who have been validated find no obvious errors in calculations or methodology
3. Publish the raw data and robotic steps taken to generate and initial analysis
4. Other robotic systems will use the robotic steps to reproduce, until then the analysis is not considered published
5. Many AI systems will be able to use a variety of methods to analyze the raw data, and the initial analysis will be discarded (because any paper that uses old technique f1 on n fields of data is strictly less useful than one that uses new proven better technique f2 on n + m fields of data)
I think everything you say about the printing press is correct and important, I would just caution against overfocusing on the printing press as the one pivotal cause. I think it was part of a broader trend.
There must be some very deep underlying trend that explains these non-coincidences. And that is why I am sympathetic to explanations that invoke fundamental changes in thinking
The question then converts to : why did this happen when it happened, and not earlier or later? The “printing press theory” proposes that people could not change their thinking without the information to show where it was flawed (by having something to compare to), and the other critical element is it’s a ratchet.
Each “long tail” theory that someone writes down continues to exist because a press can make many copies of their book. Prior to this, ideas that only sort of worked but were not that valuable would only get hand copied a few times and then lost.
This is one of the reasons why genomes are able to evolve : multiple redundant copies of the same gene allows for 1 main copy to keep the organism reproducing while the other copies can change with mutations, exploring the fitness space for an edge.
If you think about how you might build an artificial intelligence able to reason about a grounded problem, for example a simple one: Pathing an autonomous car.
One way to solve the problem is to use a neural network that generates manyplausible paths the car might take over future instants in time. (anyone here on lesswrong has used such a tool)
Then you would evaluate the set of paths vs heuristics for “goodness” and then choose the max(goodness(set(generated paths))) to actually do in the world.
Similarly, an AI reasoning over scientific theories need not “stake it’s reputation” on particles or waves, to name a famous dilemma. It’s perfectly feasible to simultaneously believe both theories at once, and to weight your predictions by evaluating any inputs against both theories, and to multiply how confident a particular theory is it applies in this domain.
An AI need not commit to 2 theories, it can easily maintain sets of thousands and be able to make robust predictions for many situations. As new information comes in that causes theory updates, you mechanistically update all theories, and drop the least likely ones and generate new ones.*
I bring up the AI example to create a shim to see how we should have done science (if we had much higher performance brains), and thus explain why becoming even slightly less stupid with the ability to mass produce paper with text allowed what it did.
When you can’t mass produce paper, you’re stuck with 1 orthodox way to do things, and thus you just keep recopying stuff written centuries before, because the new idea isn’t good enough to be worth copying.
A real life analogy would be how streaming video remove the cap on “TV airing slots” and has allowed an explosion in creativity and viewership for even niche foreign shows that would never have received an airing in the US tv market. (squid game)
*this is also the correct way to do a criminal investigation. Start by suspecting every human on the planet, and many natural and accidental mechanisms, and update the list with each new piece of evidence. Once enough probability mass is on one individual you know who probably did it, and an honest investigator would make clear the exact probability numbers to any decisionmakers for punishment.
Conclusion: I’m not saying it’s only the printing press, but there would have to be other changes in human civilization enabled by technology that allowed a shift in thinking to happen. Otherwise it could have happened over many prior centuries. Something like “availability of coal” or “we were doing a lot of sailing in ships” each was possible from an underlying technology change that wasn’t available to the romans.
I have not studied this issue in detail. However,
What about the printing press? My pet theory that is not validated by historians is:
Printing press makes it possible to create many instances of a text containing knowledge, inexpensively.
With more literate readers having access to libraries of books, it allows someone to actually notice when information is contradictory. If you only ever have 1 text on a subject, there’s nothing to compare to.
This ultimately led to an evolution of rules, what we call the Scientific Method, where you need:
falsifiable idea
Peers (which presumably meant other wealthy people, today it seems to be mean high status PhD holders) must review before publication
Publish a Paper in a high status journal
Use mathematics to analyze the probabilities
And so on, though each element must have been gradually evolved.
The drive force that led to all these rules is that if you have a library and many copies of information on the same topics, you will start to notice all the contradictions and conclude all existing knowledge is probably junk. Hence the above. (and I think AI systems will be able to do the same thing on a larger scale)
Anyways, this is what you need to do to put together enough complex ideas to make industrialization possible. The steam engine alone required designs and high quality metallurgy and contributions of materials and knowledge from a broad base of contributors. And it required a way to record the design and record the theories and distribute the information to other people, so that followup inventions could be made.
There likely were many ways to harness energy from nature and industrialize. The obvious being that you didn’t need coal, water wheel powered factories would work until you ran out of rivers to dam, which was only a problem late in industrialization.
* There are also enormous holes in the current scientific method and you could replace it with :
1. idea that can be analyzed probabilistically, you don’t have to be able to prove it false, just more or less likely to be true
2. Multiple AI systems who have been validated find no obvious errors in calculations or methodology
3. Publish the raw data and robotic steps taken to generate and initial analysis
4. Other robotic systems will use the robotic steps to reproduce, until then the analysis is not considered published
5. Many AI systems will be able to use a variety of methods to analyze the raw data, and the initial analysis will be discarded (because any paper that uses old technique f1 on n fields of data is strictly less useful than one that uses new proven better technique f2 on n + m fields of data)
I think everything you say about the printing press is correct and important, I would just caution against overfocusing on the printing press as the one pivotal cause. I think it was part of a broader trend.
Per the link you cited:
There must be some very deep underlying trend that explains these non-coincidences. And that is why I am sympathetic to explanations that invoke fundamental changes in thinking
The question then converts to : why did this happen when it happened, and not earlier or later? The “printing press theory” proposes that people could not change their thinking without the information to show where it was flawed (by having something to compare to), and the other critical element is it’s a ratchet.
Each “long tail” theory that someone writes down continues to exist because a press can make many copies of their book. Prior to this, ideas that only sort of worked but were not that valuable would only get hand copied a few times and then lost.
This is one of the reasons why genomes are able to evolve : multiple redundant copies of the same gene allows for 1 main copy to keep the organism reproducing while the other copies can change with mutations, exploring the fitness space for an edge.
If you think about how you might build an artificial intelligence able to reason about a grounded problem, for example a simple one: Pathing an autonomous car.
One way to solve the problem is to use a neural network that generates many plausible paths the car might take over future instants in time. (anyone here on lesswrong has used such a tool)
Then you would evaluate the set of paths vs heuristics for “goodness” and then choose the max(goodness(set(generated paths))) to actually do in the world.
Similarly, an AI reasoning over scientific theories need not “stake it’s reputation” on particles or waves, to name a famous dilemma. It’s perfectly feasible to simultaneously believe both theories at once, and to weight your predictions by evaluating any inputs against both theories, and to multiply how confident a particular theory is it applies in this domain.
An AI need not commit to 2 theories, it can easily maintain sets of thousands and be able to make robust predictions for many situations. As new information comes in that causes theory updates, you mechanistically update all theories, and drop the least likely ones and generate new ones.*
I bring up the AI example to create a shim to see how we should have done science (if we had much higher performance brains), and thus explain why becoming even slightly less stupid with the ability to mass produce paper with text allowed what it did.
When you can’t mass produce paper, you’re stuck with 1 orthodox way to do things, and thus you just keep recopying stuff written centuries before, because the new idea isn’t good enough to be worth copying.
A real life analogy would be how streaming video remove the cap on “TV airing slots” and has allowed an explosion in creativity and viewership for even niche foreign shows that would never have received an airing in the US tv market. (squid game)
*this is also the correct way to do a criminal investigation. Start by suspecting every human on the planet, and many natural and accidental mechanisms, and update the list with each new piece of evidence. Once enough probability mass is on one individual you know who probably did it, and an honest investigator would make clear the exact probability numbers to any decisionmakers for punishment.
Conclusion: I’m not saying it’s only the printing press, but there would have to be other changes in human civilization enabled by technology that allowed a shift in thinking to happen. Otherwise it could have happened over many prior centuries. Something like “availability of coal” or “we were doing a lot of sailing in ships” each was possible from an underlying technology change that wasn’t available to the romans.