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Humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge 600k years ago

(news.asu.edu)
273 points geox | 1 comments | 17 Jun 24 21:28 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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monero-xmr ◴[18 Jun 24 00:20 UTC] No.40712749[source]▶
I personally believe forms of writing and record keeping are far, far older than we think, having been discovered and forgotten repeatedly. Very hard for something hundreds of thousands of years old to be preserved. Once you can pass on information orally and written through the generations, knowledge will always improve.
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1. schneems ◴[18 Jun 24 03:32 UTC] No.40713815[source]▶
> Once you can pass on information orally and written through the generations, knowledge will always improve.

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)?