Also, while some central Asians could read and write (they had courrier relay to deliver letters), their administrative/taxing/military system, the decimal system, worked without any writing for two thousand years, only by making a mark on a wooden branch for each person in an Arban, a mark on another for each Arban, again for each Ja'un, again for each minggan. That's how they counted and this was taught without text for at least 1500 years (Mongols wrote something about it in the 13th century, but this system is at least from 300BCE and the Xiongnus)
I suggest reading up about how we found the cure for scurvy and then lost it. The problem wasn’t that someone forgot to record “the cure for scurvy is vitamin C” the problem is that people were wrong with what they “knew” cured the disease.
Basically: the act of preserving and carrying on the wrong bits of knowledge lead to a regression with deadly consequences.
The social side of things can’t be ignored either. Rulers, religions, and pop culture can and does choose to selectively remember history. In recent years people even take delight in being uninformed about various topics.
So it seems like there’s a sort of knowledge decay working against general progress. The question is: will progress always (on average) increase faster than that decay or will we reach some kind of equilibrium or perhaps even regress (idiocracy, for example)?
I'd strongly suggest not getting bogged down in the details of what various forms of notional recording are --- ink on paper, etching on stone, holes punched in paper, magnetic field alignments in rust (spinning, sequential, or otherwise), bitfields in memory arrays, holographic images ...
Records are created by varying matter in space to transmit messages over time.
Signals are created by varying energy in time to transmit messages over space.
Signals transmit encoded symbolic messages from a transmitter across_ space_ through a channel by variations in energy over time to a receiver potentially creating a new record.
Records transmit encoded symbolic messages from a writer through a substrate across time by variations in matter over space to a reader potentially creating a new signal.
Nope. You can pass on myths the same way. All that happens is that you get more refined myths, that always have "evidence" for them at any point in time because they are refined by each generation to fit any new observations.
It's worse with oral knowledge[1]: oral "knowledge" that is passed down is frequently more damaging than not passing anything down at all, because in the lack of any knowledge on the subject, people will try to gain some knowledge (whether experimentally or not), but with "knowledge" passed down, there will exist pockets of people who will actively resist any attempt to discard that "knowledge".[2]
[1] Ever play a game of telephone? Each generation changes the message enough so that even a short period of 30 generations is enough to completely obliterate any of the original message.
[2] See every religion ever.
Wouldn't multiple transmission between generations and the comparison of diverging stories of the older generation in a newer generation work like an error correction?
I doubt it - which one is the "correct" message is going to be up to chance, not up to a network effect.
Even if you take the optimistic approach and only retain that knowledge that is common to all branches, there is a vanishingly small chance that the correct knowledge would be retained, because the errors in transmission are not going to be completely random - the sort of error one oral storyteller introduces is going to be similar to the errors introduced by other storytellers.[1]
It's why the history of tribes who did not write things down is treated as myths: the myth-makers are likely to weave whatever current affairs into existing mythology to "explain" new observations, in the process discarding what was there in the first place.
When the record is written down, at least we can read what was thought at the time of writing.
[1] Completely made-up example: Original story -> Crocodile dragged off tribes best warrior. Probable error after gen-10 -> Crocodile is double the original size. Probable error after gen-20 -> Longer than a man. Probable error after gen-30 -> Taller than a man. Probable error after gen-40 -> Walks around, bipedal.
The symmetric equivalence between records and signals is one that I seem to have come up with myself (I'm unaware of it being noted elsewhere, though bits of it have been observed, e.g., speech is conversation in space, writing is conversation in time). How significant it is I really don't know, though something tells me it should be important.