[stephc_int13]

My hypothesis is that this knowledge loss is both widespread and underestimated, but that it is most of the time compensated by innovation.

New blood does not need to learn everything the grey beards knew because they are learning new skills along the way.

What is lost is unfortunately very often valuable and not obsolete, but simply not absolutely necessary to keep going forward.

I also think this is why companies and societies have to constantly expand/innovate to survive, to compensate internal decline/loss.

But there is a critical point, if we stop outpacing the knowledge loss, societies can very quickly regress, in a few generations.

A lot of human knowledge is stored in readable form, but the most sophisticated parts, with all the extremely valuable details tend to live inside human minds, in a form that is not easily translated or stored.