The older I get, the more it feels like death is a major bottleneck to the accumulation of certain kinds of knowledge and insights.
It’s not much of a blocker to shallow things that are easy to explain precisely. For example:
math
physics
accounting of money
stories (both fictional and historical)
It does seem to be a blocker for deep knowledge that’s hard to easily explain and teach. For example:
rationality
philosophy
public policy & economics (in the broad sense of figuring out policies that organizations should implement to mould incentives in ways that achieve the desired outcomes)
how to live a good life
The former category of things benefit from being easy to put into writing and be transmitted accurately every time. This allows generations to easily build cumulative mountains of knowledge. Yes, each generation a person has to learn more before they can contribute to the mountain and, as of maybe 200 years ago, there’s too much accumulation for one person to know everything known, but we don’t seem especially close to the limit, and very recent advances like LLMs may offer a way to scale our learning further by outsourcing the remembering of many details.
The latter category suffers because each of them is hard to transmit and it’s easy to be confused and transmit the wrong thing. Thus, to some extent, each person needs to rediscover the knowledge of past generations for themselves and only after the fact may recognize that previously generations had some of these same details figured out. Try as we might with institutions that teach young people the best of our wisdom of the past in these areas, it’s imperfect and you have many people who will reject the knowledge because they don’t understand it and will continue to reject it until they work it out for themselves. Thus even if somewhere there is an unbroken line from Socrates to the present day of ever advancing philosophical knowledge manifested in a single person, almost nobody would believe whatever they have to tell us because the inferential gap would be too large.
But is this story right? Can we quantify this? Is there some way we can measure how much knowledge we miss out on because we die and each generation has to spend time rediscovering things before they can advance it further? And how much additional knowledge would we accumulate, and how quickly, if death was not an obstacle?
I don’t actually know, which is why I’m asking. This seems solvable, but I’ve also not looked into the question. Feels like a thing maybe progress studies folks would have a grasp on, but I don’t recall seeing this specific question addressed, especially regarding hard to transmit knowledge where it’s somewhat hard for us to know how much progress it’s even possible to make.
I think in practice roughly the opposite is true.
As people age, they become less flexible in their beliefs and more set in their ways. If they are highly influential, then it’s difficult to make progress when they are still alive.
Science advances one funeral at a time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck’s_principle
It’s true that as you age you accumulate experience, and this stops when you die. For you, death is or course a hard limit on knowledge.
For the world, it’s much less clear.
“Science advances one funeral at a time” → this seems to be both generally not true as well as being a harmful meme (because it is a common argument used to argue against life extension research).
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fsSoAMsntpsmrEC6a/does-blind-review-slow-down-science