Keith Nagel wrote:
Mike writes:We are indeed. The issue isn't just maximizing the number of innovators, but also maximizing the information available to each innovator so they can innovate most effectively.
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.
And that latter item is most certainly hitting a saturation point: Beyond a certain level of information flow, the "potential innovators" stop innovating and switch to a mode where they spend all their time reading Email.
Who benefits? From the lack of recorded history for the first 150,000 years? Are you suggesting that was caused by a conspiracy??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?
