He also makes the point that collapse often happens over the course of many generations. ~100 years for the bronze age collapse and ~300 years for the collapse of the Roman Empire. I think this is a key point because it is something we don't intuit easily. He then goes on to say that the loss of knowledge that results in such collapses is often the result of a lack of generational transfer of knowledge (hence the slow collapse). This is a well known problem, the Bus Factor. If we want to prevent the collapse of our civilization we need to vastly increase that number on a societal level.
I wish, just once, that technology people would actually consult historians of science when making these sorts of claims. There is an entire community of people who study this topic for their entire lives and write books about it.
Yet myths persist. So many of the examples of "civilization forgot" are actually just false or at the very least the conclusions drawn about society from these stories are highly misleading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
"The term employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the era's "darkness" (lack of records) with earlier and later periods of "light" (abundance of records).[3]"
Not having records being categorized metaphorically as darkness, and more records as "Enlightenment" is pretty high regard for a word used the same way in the contemporary context as something an accountant or dentist keeps in a filing cabinet.
I'd say these "historians of science" you speak of would corroborate that the lost works of Euclid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid
and the near permanent loss of Plato's works to the whole of Europe for hundreds if not over a thousand years as, uh, kind of a big deal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato#Textual_sources_and_hist...
Largely yes. The term "the dark ages" was developed by Petrarch, a man who was so obsessed with the Romans that he had himself crowned with laurels to signify his inheritance of Rome. And this is also largely unrelated to history of science, since "the dark ages" (as expressed by both Petrarch and pre-20th century historians) does not refer to loss of scientific knowledge.
> Not having records being categorized metaphorically as darkness, and more records as "Enlightenment" is pretty high regard for a word used the same way in the contemporary context as something an accountant or dentist keeps in a filing cabinet.
But Petrarch was hundreds of years before the Enlightenment and would have hated it. He believed that the Romans were the peak of civilization ever. It was not possible to top them. The idea that modern humans could improve upon what they did would have been anathema to Petrarch and most Renaissance thinkers.
But most importantly, these historians of science would take issue with Blow's conclusions from specific examples. He lists a few "lost" technologies and then concluded methods to prevent technological loss that are entirely unrelated to the examples he lists. At most, all they demonstrate is that it is possible for some things to go unrecorded.
meheleventyone has demonstrated how easily even just referencing the article I myself posted could undermine my argument.
I'm not a historian. But my wife is. And she ranted for a while after the first ten minutes of this talk for precisely this reason. I could have provided more scholarly sources. It is an internet forum - I didn't think people would call me names if I didn't. That historians of science don't like the term "The Dark Ages" isn't exactly cutting edge scholarship.
I don't believe that he did put a lot of research into the historical background. It is possible I am wrong. The reason I believe this is because at least one historian I trust who works in an adjacent subfield went on a big rant about these being classic misconceptions.
I believe that Blow is very smart and quite knowledgeable about software. I also believe that a lot of engineers believe that they can make huge claims about the nature of history without consulting professionals. These errors are often harmless but the are also often harmful, either causing us to draw false conclusions about the past or today.
Like you say below, Blow would have been better off skipping the first 10m of his talk.
Unfortunately as far as I can tell, we don't have a circuit of public intellectuals, who happen to be historians, giving well thought through talks to lay people. We have ted talks on a good day, and those are often filled with dumb things said by smart people who should know better.
You and I haven't even touched with a ten foot pole the other side of the coin of that "Western History" implies. I won't attempt to in this thread either.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2707236?seq=1
The same wikipedia article says that Petrarch noted for initiating the Italian Renaissance by way of rediscovering letters of Cicero who happens to have died in 43bc. He is then credited with founding Renaissance Humanism in the context of the above.
The above claims seem some plausible given the summary texts that mention Petrarch given by the page on Humanism given by the Library of Congress
https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/vatican/humanism.html
One recontextualization of the concept of the dark ages of the type implied by UncleMeat (my interpretation what was implied, not UncleMeats) is given by this publication by The University of Michigan.
https://www.press.umich.edu/15299
This is all very interesting, but I'd like to point out absolutely none of it seems to automatically leave the dilettante historian like myself from coming away with the impression that knowledge, scientific or otherwise, has not been lost in a meaningful way and thus throughout history did not necessitate some obsessed persons to resuscitate it.
To quote:
"Science historian David C. Lindberg criticised the public use of 'dark ages' to describe the entire Middle Ages as "a time of ignorance, barbarism and superstition" for which "blame is most often laid at the feet of the Christian church, which is alleged to have placed religious authority over personal experience and rational activity".[52] Historian of science Edward Grant writes that "If revolutionary rational thoughts were expressed in the Age of Reason, they were made possible because of the long medieval tradition that established the use of reason as one of the most important of human activities".[53] Furthermore, Lindberg says that, contrary to common belief, "the late medieval scholar rarely experienced the coercive power of the church and would have regarded himself as free (particularly in the natural sciences) to follow reason and observation wherever they led".[54] Because of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire due to the Migration Period a lot of classical Greek texts were lost there, but part of these texts survived and they were studied widely in the Byzantine Empire and the Abbasid Caliphate. Around the eleventh and twelfth centuries in the High Middle Ages stronger monarchies emerged; borders were restored after the invasions of Vikings and Magyars; technological developments and agricultural innovations were made which increased the food supply and population. And the rejuvenation of science and scholarship in the West was due in large part to the new availability of Latin translations of Aristotle.[55]"
ETA: Also didn't realise you're the same person I replied to below!
Your catch proves that issue is not remotely settled, and to my mind, indicates that more rigorous counsel with historians will only add depth to debate, rather than resolve it.
I would suggest UncleMeat just advocate that people like Jonathan Blow take the history out entirely, and argue why this contemporary technology isn't good enough relative to our resources and skills.
Arguments about sourcing feel like face saving rather than legitimate criticism of the view bought forward by UncleMeat. After all the original video is completely unsourced but apparently beyond reproach in that regard. Also where we have sourcing (for example the Dark Ages wiki) it only strengthens the point made by UncleMeat as they were indeed correct about the views of historians.
More broadly if we want discussion to be well sourced we shouldn't apply that selectively and in particular selectively against the people who disagree with us.
I'm not interested in getting suckered into believing some randall carlson gobbledygook, the type I might leap to assume UncleMeat would find quite problematic.
I just think UncleMeat initially came in, said something along the lines "this is bad, don't do this, ask people who know better" and it has been made clear they had the capacity to contribute more that what read to me as nothing more than the logical fallacy that is an appeal to authority. They have clarified their position enough to where I can no longer be left with such impression.
He makes the same claim about alchemists fire. Again, ill supported.
There are a tremendous number of reasons why ancient technology might not have surviving records to today. Amateur historians love to just assume this is due to "civilizational collapse."
He also seemingly inverts things. Is civilizational collapse the cause of loss of technology? Or is it the opposite? Does technological de-sophistication cause civilizational collapse? He seems to argue both in his talk.
To that end, I don't think he needed to consult a historian in order to make his point any more valid, but he could probably have done with a historian proofreader to tidy up any flowery language that might detract from the overall message.
Blow just says "then the roman empire fell and that knowledge was lost" when discussing the Lycurgus Cup. He just states this. No citation or investigation. This is the classic oversimplification of both technological record keeping and the nature of the collapse of rome. There is no clear evidence that the "fall of rome" (which means about a dozen different things that happened over 1000 years) is responsible for the mechanism for creating such glass being unrecorded.
He makes the same claim about alchemists fire. Again, ill supported.
There are a tremendous number of reasons why ancient technology might not have surviving records to today. Amateur historians love to just assume this is due to "civilizational collapse."
We still don't know how to read Linear A; it is on the wrong side of the Collapse and we don't have a Rosetta Stone or other transitional artifact yet which includes it. It is not unreasonable that it could take us millennia to recall how to do things which we've forgotten.
* Knowledge is ephemeral. Even recording knowledge doesn't imply or guarantee that it will be passed down the generations entire. In fact, throughout history there are times when humankind 'forgot' how to do certain things.
* This applies to software. Software is getting so much more complex (as is hardware) that the knowledge for how to do the intricate or demanding things isn't held by many people, which makes it brittle. Adding layers of complexity on top of each other has created a tower of abstraction that people usually only know a part of, which makes the entire stack brittle if not enough people know every part of it and something breaks (maybe in a hundred years, but if that truly happens, there will be no way to fix it).
Jonathan Blow makes some recommendations about how to avert what he calls 'the collapse of civilisation'. To summarise:
* Simplify tools and processes. Reduce complexity, reduce dependencies.
* Get a better, more intuitive understanding of your technologies and tools at a lower level.
He doesn't explicitly solutionise this, but I would argue that his game 'The Witness' discusses this at varying levels of detail. The gameplay and puzzles demonstrate breaking up knowledge into small composable chunks which can be taught intuitively and wordlessly. The additional materials more explicitly discuss knowledge, learning, understanding and (more generally) truth seeking. If one wanted to avoid the collapse of civilisation, as outlined by the talk, one should play this game and contemplate its message deeply.