To me this is a mind-numbing display of ignorance. Once you understand that you're not the first human being to ever have existed and that the people that came before you (even way before) are not dumber than you, you will immediately realize that there's a lot to learn from what has happened before.
This should be very obvious when it comes to political/social endeavors (e.g. how to push for substantial social change without having things degenerate into some form of totalitarianism), but it's equally as important for scientific and technological ones. For a simple and increasingly popular example just look at Sabine Hossenfelder's line of criticism of contemporary theoretical physics. A lot of it draws on the sociological and historical study of the scientific process.
This is how this person sees technological progress, and I'm inclined to believe he's right... within the context of technology.
Beyond that, I do think history does matter for understanding how humans interact with each other and with our planet.
Another argument against ignoring the past is it's important to identify what things remain invariant in society as technology evolves. Allowing for a fuller contextualization, understanding and perhaps somewhat anticipation of the on-going changes and their effects.
Technology itself is based on leveraging libraries, tacit knowledge, internet threads and mathematical concepts decades to hundreds of years old. That's a kind of history. It's not uncommon for advancements to occur after revisiting old lines of research that were ahead of their time.
Since when is reality like a game of chess? Setting aside human history for a moment, just think about natural history (Levandowski mentioned dinosaurs and Neanderthals). Evolutionary biology is to a significant extent a historical discipline - it looks at the record and tries to come up with ways in which animals have changed over time under all sorts of pressures. Can that endeavor be done a-historically? How about even something like cosmology - the origins of the universe etc.?
The universe is not a Markov process. Thinking of it as such is incredibly limiting as an intellectual paradigm.
To be honest I'm not even sure I can think of a way you can completely ignore history and still be able to do useful work of any kind.
There will be a historical post-facto rationalization of what went down for anything happening in the recent past, but the meat we draw from historical analogies is often poorly applicable since the divergence between the map and the territory is so large. The difference between reality and a game of chess is indeed paramount here, but for different reasons. The past is so complex that the lessons we draw from it are likely to just be distorted narratives that are already just a reflection of the present.
>To be honest I'm not even sure I can think of a way you can completely ignore history and still be able to do useful work of any kind.
In Levandowski's own example, he learned what existed in his time and then built useful things from there without worrying too much about the details of past beyond the directly visible iceberg spire in the present. This is broadly applicable to many fields and there are many people who did the same. It's tautologically true that disciplines that need to draw on the past to move on will do so, such as biology, but that doesn't say all that much about engineering for instance.
Chess is an abstract turn-based zero-sum discrete 1-on-1 board game with perfect information sharing. In other words, it's completely different from real life in every possible aspect, and thus any drawn parallel is likely to be worthless. Real life is not Chess.
That is an immensely myopic view. Analyzing the game up to now and understanding the opponent's style of play and tactical preferences are very useful in planning your next move, especially when you have multiple, equally weighted choices.
Levandowski may wind up convicted of something else if he doesn't learn from history... his history. So maybe he really ought to look at it a bit.
On the other hand, when you've messed up, and you understand that you've messed up, and you've learned what you can from it, then throwing away the past and moving on is perhaps a psychologically healthy thing.
Nor is every goal of our existence is about “building stuff”, it can also be about just living a just and considered life.
These types of boorish egotistical statements from tech talking heads masquerading as cerebral contrarian thought are much of what’s contributed to our current mess.
It strikes me that this an argument for the uselessness of reading history. People are basically the same as they always have been and just as you can’t simply explain to a teenager that they’ll feel differently about the world when they’re thirty, every generation has to figure life out for itself.
And you came to this conclusion without reading any history? This is too absolutist a statement. Sure, some things need to be relearned through experience, but there are also plenty of cases where you don't want to waste time reinventing the wheel.
This is like arguing about whether dieting "works." On the one hand, obviously, yes, it works. There's no credible debate about the efficacy of calorie restriction for losing weight. It simply works. On the other hand, most human beings can't actually follow a diet, so, no, it doesn't actually work, for any reasonable definition of "works."
Reading history is probably a lot like that.
And we know this... how? Studying history!
> and there's no library big enough to change that
Who's trying to change human nature? This is a strawman you are thrashing. Studying history is about understanding human nature, not changing it. Just like studying physics is about understanding projectile motion, not about changing the gravitational constant.
The idea behind studying history is that we use the insights gained from it to try to solve new challenges in reasonable ways, instead of ways we'd know were likely to fail if we'd just cracked open a book.
The idea that we all just “appear” on Earth from some formless void, then subsequently make totally independent decisions, devoid of any previous influence, is both highly naive and far too common.
1. People are rarely in a position to effect changes or draw from historical lessons in the first place
2. Whatever lessons you can draw are often very contingent on the time and place and even taking into account patterns, we still end up in a situation where the lessons can't really be applied beyond general principles that are already well known without much study involved.
3. Often the understanding we think we have of historical events is hopelessly distorted anyway, and colored by the sources and narratives we have read or composed in our minds.
In the end, the people who do change history tend to barrel away at problems without taking the past all that much into account beyond some general references. Even if we take into account survivorship bias this is still an important phenomenon to consider. Hence the conclusions that there is much to learn from history is either trivial or actually under its own layer of naivete.
After asking what he would change, he told me he had no time to look at the past and could only look ahead.
I learned if you have enough money and lawyers, the past doesn't matter because you can enforce trust through litigation. But if you have to take people on their word, then their history becomes important. I didn't rebuild the team.
I'm sure there is some deeper lesson here between "smarmy business folks" and more principle driven individuals.
This is far more important than this vague idea of reputation. Just because a person has a good reputation doesn't mean they are respected or loved. It could just be that they do not figure at all in people's minds. You can live up to people's expectations and die having never really lived.
Honestly it's somewhat reflective of the infamous slave morality vs. master morality debate
However, people put way too much emphasis on history - their personal history - and it affects them in all kinds of unhealthy ways. In my opinion it's so much better to leave the past in the past and focus on making a better future. Learn the lessons that can be learned and then move on (easier said than done.) I'm not an expert, but that's my take on it from my life experience and also watching others struggle with their historical baggage.
Santayana was pithier.
His parents were a Diplomat and a Businessman and he graduated with 2 engineering degrees from Berkeley. So we should be lauding him for winning a game of poker when he was dealt a Full House? Lol
Lots of people start life with a lot more than he was given and walk away with a lot less.
Rich friends, a presidential pardon and no doubt a rich and easy life going forwards.
Here’s an example:
What do you think the global acceptance of capitalism is?
The story of Levandowski appears to be a story about consequences being something other people experience.
One quote stood out to me at the very end of the article:
“The only thing that matters is the future,” he told me after the civil trial was settled. “I don’t even know why we study history. It’s entertaining, I guess—the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow.”
I've always been obsessed by history but always struggled with this same sentiment: that I was escaping reality and my responsibility to try interesting things by plunging into the past.
[0]https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/did-uber-steal...
edit: to clarify my thoughts given the sudden replies: I don't mean to say I argue for a wholesale casting off of the past. Clearly, I understand the trivial observation that such a view of history has naive aspects, but that's not at all what I am interested in. For me and most other people here that enjoy history and such things, ignoring history would be impossible anyway because the draw is too great. I'm merely putting out a reminder that all our inner or outer debates about the finer points of politics or history or other such topics are often a way to escape seeing what we can do in the present.
Looking at people like Levandowski, you might see yet another arrogant techie that has a blinkered view of the world, (and that is more or less true) but at the same time they are out there doing bold things and living life on the edge for better or for worse. They essentially act like the historical figures we read about, although I am not implying that he is some important figure as of yet (though who knows in the future) just that he shows the same zest for life.
I'm essentially speaking for those whose main problem is the opposite of Levandowski: too much intellectual masturbation, too much thought as entertainment, and too little meaningful application of whatever lessons you may or may not have learned. You may harp on about how history matters, but how many of you have actually been presented with choices that mattered beyond the parameters of your own life?