[Anotheroneagain]

What books did Caesar read? In reality, books are not that useful. History doesn't show too much accumulation of knowledge over time - there is virtually no continuity between the bronze age and classical antiquity. Almost everything was lost, and built anew. Then it was all lost in another dark age. A few scraps remained.

In fact, civilisation rises and falls as brainpower rises and falls. There only was a long period of rise recently, but, it's been long over, and we now live off the scraps of what it produced.

[ninalanyon]

Caesar almost certainly read classics of Greek philosophy and Roman literature.

But what does your comment have to do with books? There were none in the Bronze Age, nor for many centuries after it.

[Anotheroneagain]

I was commenting on the absurdity of the story. It just doesn't seem to be how knowledge works. Nothing was discovered by such slow, long term accumulation of knowledge. Instead, knowledge seems to be discovered very quickly when the potential is there, and it decays and gets forgotten if the potential is lost.

For example, it was perfectly possible to be born when there was no powered flight at all, and live to see the moon landing. And, while there are all the plans, and everything there was to write down about Saturn V, we can't do it again, as the human potential isn't there anymore. In fact, we can't even fly supersonic anymore.

[willy_k]

We can make the butt of a rocket with 27% more payload capacity than Saturn V fall out of the sky and slot itself into giant mechanical pincers. More than twice the capacity if you forgo the catch.

The human potential is there.

[Symbiote]

We certainly know how to do both those things (and military planes fly supersonic daily). That's because it's written down.

[Anotheroneagain]

I think it's now a historical fact that we in fact don't, as it's now virtually certain that the Artemis program, with all that knowledge available, will at the very least take longer to send people to the Moon, than the Apollo program did with no prior knowledge at all.

Somebody once claimed that the problem isn't that Johnny can't read, or that Johnny can't think, but that Johnny doesn't even know what thinking is, which is certainly a correct observation, but he incorrectly blamed it on the American schooling system.

But Johnny doesn't know what thinking is the same way that somebody who was born blind doesn't know what seeing is. You don't have to be taught to think, you just do. You figure things out, then you learn that others also know them. Or, sometimes that they don't, and know something completely different about the thing for whatever weird reason.

And such a person can live their entire life without thinking, convinced that being smart is simply about learning more and faster, and if they study hard, they will understand the topic on that deeper level like the old masters did, and perhaps they will also contribute something new one day.

But the thinking never comes.

[mananaysiempre]

By one possible definition, this is the difference between science and everything else like medicine or engineering: science prioritizes advancing knowledge above all else, so (in a system not distorted by publication metrics) that means it prioritizes transmitting and in particular saving it.

Engineering does not—because of commerce, engineering can often even be actively hostile to transmitting knowledge. (I have a person next to me who knows how enterprise SSDs work and refuses to tell me more than “with great difficulty and ingenuity”.) Even without that, the task is difficult enough that without an explicit pressure to refine and preserve explanations that just won’t happen. There always will be people who value and enjoy that, but without a system in place to cultivate and reward them, there won’t arise that a kind of “collective knowledge” akin to collective immunity (or percolation) that the gaps can filled in.

This is actually a problem in the more engineering-oriented parts of science as well. For example, this is one of the problems with Hossenfelder’s suggestion that we stop building colliders: if we do that, in ten to fifteen years (a couple of generations of grad students) it’s fairly certain that we won’t be able to build them on anything like the current level. The US has already experienced this kind of institutional knowledge loss, in fact, with the shuttering of the SSC. So while I agree that they haven’t produced new—not just knowledge, but understanding in quite a while, we need to be really really sure before agreeing to lose this expertise.

And yet, look at physics. Like take a quantum field theory course (taken by what, probably a thousand, ten thousand students per year?) and trace the dependency chain. Even discounting all the backround knowledge we take for granted (e.g. “electricity exists”), the dependency chain is really really deep, probably something like a decade if you count the requisite high-school parts. (It includes some things that might seem unrelated on first glance but are in fact essential, like optics and thermodynamics.) That creates an actual problem in teaching it. And the subject itself is a year to two years deep at least before it becomes wide enough that you can mix and match topics, to say nothing of actual research.

I shudder to think what would happen if you tried to work through all of the materials science you encounter in an average first-world home (and all of the materials science, metallurgy, chemistry required to build that, etc.). An extremely fun project to contemplate, but I suspect too long for a human lifetime.