Good post, lack of memory on the civ level is a real problem. Local solution is to read more of others, and be less “original.” Imo, LW could stand to move more in that direction.
The story of etiology of scurvy is a sad one also (and that was much shorter time frames and in recent times).
In the past I’ve often waxed lyrical about the benefits of reading other people’s work in other disciplines and not re-inventing the wheel. But now I wonder if it’s really practical advice. Does it truly take less effort to trawl through mountains of literature than it does to simply think for a few minutes and come up with a solution yourself? The only answer I can come up with is: In some cases yes, in some cases no, but not always.
About LW, it’s true that a lot of what people have done here is simply re-invent concepts from philosophy. But in doing so they’ve given a different perspective to existing ideas, and looked at core issues rather than carrying along millenia of philosophical baggage.
A lot of mathematics, for instance, arose many times independently, and that was how people knew what stuff was important. When a concept gets reinvented many times, by people working on vastly different problems, you know it’s something that is important. Calculus, group theory, fourier analysis, etc. all fall under this definition.
This is in the class of “coordination problems”, and as we all know those are hard. I think it’s worthwhile to spend more energy on this particular one, though.
Related anecdote: one of my programmer friends uses the following algorithm for writing certain kinds of programs: “think of a plausible name for such a program had it already existed, then google for that.” This seems to work very often!
The amount of time that understanding of scurvy was lost is short compared to amount of time classical knowledge was lost, but why use that metric? I think a better metric is the speed at which it was lost. That is hard to measure, requiring the reconstruction of history, but Lucio Russo claims that it was quite quick, comparable to the 150 year story of scurvy. Russo suggests that Ptolemy was not the apotheosis of classical astronomy, but someone trying to salvage the wreckage. Russo’s hypothesis was the most interesting thing I got out of the post.
On the other hand, discovering something for yourself is arguably one of the best ways to truly understand it, and it does not require you to read & memorize lots of sundry information for the occasional thing that actually ends up being useful.
Good post, lack of memory on the civ level is a real problem. Local solution is to read more of others, and be less “original.” Imo, LW could stand to move more in that direction.
The story of etiology of scurvy is a sad one also (and that was much shorter time frames and in recent times).
edit : Graphical models must have been rediscovered 4 or 5 times in the 20th century. Info theory people recently “rediscovered” the g-formula: http://infostructuralist.wordpress.com/2010/09/23/directed-stochastic-kernels-and-causal-interventions/
etc, etc.
In the past I’ve often waxed lyrical about the benefits of reading other people’s work in other disciplines and not re-inventing the wheel. But now I wonder if it’s really practical advice. Does it truly take less effort to trawl through mountains of literature than it does to simply think for a few minutes and come up with a solution yourself? The only answer I can come up with is: In some cases yes, in some cases no, but not always.
About LW, it’s true that a lot of what people have done here is simply re-invent concepts from philosophy. But in doing so they’ve given a different perspective to existing ideas, and looked at core issues rather than carrying along millenia of philosophical baggage.
A lot of mathematics, for instance, arose many times independently, and that was how people knew what stuff was important. When a concept gets reinvented many times, by people working on vastly different problems, you know it’s something that is important. Calculus, group theory, fourier analysis, etc. all fall under this definition.
This is in the class of “coordination problems”, and as we all know those are hard. I think it’s worthwhile to spend more energy on this particular one, though.
Related anecdote: one of my programmer friends uses the following algorithm for writing certain kinds of programs: “think of a plausible name for such a program had it already existed, then google for that.” This seems to work very often!
The amount of time that understanding of scurvy was lost is short compared to amount of time classical knowledge was lost, but why use that metric? I think a better metric is the speed at which it was lost. That is hard to measure, requiring the reconstruction of history, but Lucio Russo claims that it was quite quick, comparable to the 150 year story of scurvy. Russo suggests that Ptolemy was not the apotheosis of classical astronomy, but someone trying to salvage the wreckage. Russo’s hypothesis was the most interesting thing I got out of the post.
On the other hand, discovering something for yourself is arguably one of the best ways to truly understand it, and it does not require you to read & memorize lots of sundry information for the occasional thing that actually ends up being useful.