Mike writes: >We moderns suffer from temporal chauvisism, the delusion that we are the >smartest of all humanity [which is refuted by any teenager]. It happens that >there are more tech geeks like us than anytime in history, so the odds of >something useful being found are better, but it does not follow that our >individual geekiness woud stand a chance if dropped into, say, King Arthur's >Court like the Conneticut Yankee handyman of Mark Twain's novel. Most of >Edison's inventions could have been built anytime in the Iron Age by someone >"who knew what to do".
Right on the money, Mike! They were us. I was thinking about just what the difference was between then and now, and I came to the same general conclusion as you, sheer numbers. You need say 1000 people to produce one innovator, the two support each other. You can't innovate when the tiger has you treed, there needs to be some kind of infrastructure that the other 1000 provide. I wonder if the trend of greater numbers/more innovation has a saturation point? It seems we may be hitting it now, but perhaps this is just a lacunae. >Our common public education is effectively an indoctrination of the popular >mythology about who we are and how we got here and what is going on. It's >very useful, so we sort of know what to expect from each other and how to >play the game. >But don't pretend that it is 'truth'. Well worth requoting. The lack of recorded history for those 150,000 years in conjunction with the destruction of much of the more recent history by certain parties makes us ignorant indeed. Who benefits? K.
