Though knowledge of experience is sometimes wrong as well. Sure it works - unlike print where mistakes (sometimes intentional to hide a secret) can tell you something that cannot work, but that doesn't mean it is a good way to do things.

Give some examples? That kind of 'undocumented' knowledge is lost because better tech has completely replaced it. I'm talking about inventions like the Spinning Mule or the steam engine. We have superseded them with electric motors and logic boards.

First thing that comes to mind is friends father was hitting retirement age after working at a petrochemical/plastics facility for ~20 years, was in charge of maintenance of some section. I think he told me the owner had to call him twice to help diagnose problems that were causing product outages.

These things don't get built on a whim - there's risks, regulations, documentation, procedures, experts, etc. At the end of the day you have people doing the work for decades, with an intuition about how things work.

Given infinite time you can recreate anything - but by the time you're done putting the puzzle together you're out of business.

>At the end of the day you have people doing the work for decades, with an intuition about how things work.

That's exactly my point. This intuition is undocumented however it becomes superseded by new tech. Nobody can (successfully) run a plastics plant with decades of old hardware knowledge and expect to be in business another 20 years.

"In 1991, Aldo retired and Ed took over day-to-day management of the company. First Plastics began the initiative to replace and update its molding equipment with new large capacity presses in 1995. This initiative has placed First Plastics as one of the most technologically advanced injection molders in the Northeast. Today it continues to add the latest technology while increasing its manufacturing capacity."

https://firstplastics.com/about.html

> Nobody can (successfully) run a plastics plant with decades of old hardware knowledge and expect to be in business another 20 years.

You would be surprised - I've seen production lines 30+ years old running profitably.

Note this was not plastics moulding - this was producing raw plastics/petrochemical facility.

One example is how they had to reinvent the material codenamed fogbank.