> Very unconvincing article. Would have been better if it had stuck to the core assertion that
Sure is. In the parts of the world where I'm living (EasternEurope - Northern Balkans) the retreat of the Romans and the subsequent waves of migratory peoples sure as hell looked like a civilisational collapse, even archaeologically. When the Romans were here they had indoor bathrooms and heating, they had writing, they had amphitheaters, but after they left (or were wiped out, no-one knows for sure), which happened roughly between 250 CE and 300 CE, then another 600-700 years would pass until writing would make its archaeological presence felt again (around year 1000), ~1400-1500 years until regular theater shows would be held again (in the late 1700s) and even now half of the country doesn't have indoor bathrooms like the Romans did (my parents don't, for example).
Indoor bathrooms did not go away on some specific Tuesday, they also where not that common around 250 CE. The real question is what happens to the 98% of the population that actually maintain day to day civilization not what happens to the people who make it into history books even as a footnote of a footnote.
It takes a single small war for destroying what is already constructed, and then the population realizes they can't build those anymore because the know-how is dispersed, and many key people aren't around anymore.
> ...and then the population realizes they can't build those anymore because the know-how is dispersed, and many key people aren't around anymore.
Yes, this is the "civilization has so far been binary-only, not open source" problem I observed when I started looking into reproducing civilization on a space habitat, for an eventual transition into a generation ship. It turns out a heck of a lot of civilizational artifacts are "write many times, read once" across generations: lots of iterative tinkering, used until the next "git commit"-like widespread adoption, then quickly receding from memory.
It was once known that longbowmen could shoot arrows curving around an obstacle. Scantly recorded, then the actual skill was forgotten until an archer geek who knew about the obscure written references worked out how to do it again from scratch. So we have that skill in our civilization now, yay. Except: he hasn't published his experiences, fleshed out into lessons for newcomers, etc. If he passes away before doing that, then we're likely to lose that skill again.
Piles and piles of human experiential information like this is simply not efficiently recorded, much less transmitted even in our "advanced" civilization today. I'm keen on learning machining and tool making. The more I look into it, the more I realize what is written down barely scratches the surface. Lots of master machinists talk about a feel for doing the job right the first time such that only about 10% of machinists are really good, 20% can follow explicit directions, and the rest should find another line of work.
This is I believe the foundation of why civilizations are so brittle and fragile, and so damnably difficult and time-consuming to build back up aspects that are lost. What worries me these days: the elites do not grasp this; if they did, they'd be a fuck ton more scared of war than they are. They'd also be way less sanguine about globalization and losing vast swathes of this binary-only technological know-how. The Shenzhen ecosystem is starting to show that even the "we'll out-innovate them, and they'll 'just' always manufacture our ideas" canard is wearing mighty thin over time.
If this feels overwhelming, then it gets worse: just tackle a scaled-down problem space, "prepping" or "self sufficiency", and you quickly realize that at an individual level, the challenges are magnified. You have to wind back the technological level (and quality of life) quite a few centuries before you can reasonably do everything yourself...nearly.
It was once known that longbowmen could shoot arrows curving around an obstacle. Scantly recorded, then the actual skill was forgotten until an archer geek who knew about the obscure written references worked out how to do it again from scratch.
I'm not sure if it's a good example of technical knowledge being lost, but I think this video from Lars Andersen a couple weeks ago is the one being referenced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc_z4a00cCQ
I do agree with most of that (as one can deduce from my comment up there), but I have to notice that the general trend is about simplifying things, making procedures more repeatable, and documenting those procedures.
We are much better at preventing knowledge loss than we were even a generation ago. We are still pretty much horrible at it, but we did improve a lot.
Because this stuff is discoverable it's less important than you might think. When you have 10's of millions of archers doing that as a job then curving an arrow is not going to stay secret for that long.
The really major discoveries of our history are things like a positional number system aka zero. That's the kind of thing that's likely to survive because it's both really useful, easy to teach, and really common. Germ theory might not stick around, but it's really widespread and also both useful and the kind of thing we can pick up again.
The jump from an 8080 including an understanding of Quantum Mechanics getting to a modern multi billion transistor i7 is 100's of billions in research. But, going from an 8080's took us less than 100 years and we could do it again assuming a large relatively stable global economy.
Concrete is really useful. We lost it for 1,300 years. Calculus is really really useful. We figured out the basics, and then lost them for 2 millennia.[1] Flexible glass would be really useful. We apparently had it, then lost it, and never got it back.[2]
Calculus was not lost as many original texts where preserved, however it was of limited use prior to Algebra being invited. Gothic cathedrals demonstrate a much more advanced practical matimatics than available to the Romeans. Who again could gather and transport resources over vast areas, but had a very low standard of living for the population on average.
Flexible glass was likely a tall tale instead of an actual thing with a several versions of the story existing, but no actual use of the substance.
Concrete was in continuous but limited use for the period your referring to. The limitation was transportation networks not knowledge.
I thought the same, until I looked back at when experiential knowledge was lost and then reacquired. If it is within a generation or two of loss and recovery, the process seems to proceed along the lines of what you mention. Beyond that, and recovery success rates looks like a cliff function. Metallurgy has been independently worked upon around the world, and specific aspects lost many times over. Someone demonstrated they were on the right path to working out precision hand-built gearing with the Antikythera mechanism. The discovered mechanism wasn't very accurate, but we lost that tech for about 13 centuries. Another way of considering that lost tech: it took about three centuries to get the first mechanical computers from the 14th century onwards (about when we recovered the level of the Antikythera mechanism's tech); we could potentially have had software on mechanical if not electronic computers say, 7 centuries ago, if the Antikythera tech was not lost.
Fast, bi-directional mass communications seems to be key to discoverability. Lose that, and all sorts of losses apparently accumulate quickly.
Of more immediate concern to me is the economic effects of classifying certain economic verticals as "low margin" and then deprecating them, as if some kind of central planning committee decreed that the industry shall forevermore never cross-pollinate or value-add any other industries. I'm not convinced it is that straightforward nor predictable. Somewhere in China at this moment, some college kid studying materials science has parents who work at a "low margin" garment factory, who through osmosis over the decades taught her about the ins and outs of industrial-scale, high-precision thread-manufacturing and tight weaving, and she's noodling about adapting that tech to manufacture say, glass foam insulation at 1/1000th the current cost, and revolutionize the global insulation industry forever.
It certainly is economically efficient in our local maxima to arrange our "developed-world's" industrial policy in this manner, but I think the jury is still out on whether or not it is sustainable; final arbitration will be history in a hundred years, but my bet is on China, who seems to have no qualms absorbing the industries "developed nations" no longer want, and doesn't seem as eager to divest as much or as fast to "lower tier" economies.
> ...and we could do it again assuming a large relatively stable global economy.
Here is where I have concerns "there be dragons". I've yet to read of many losses of industries (much less civilizational collapse) where there was sufficient stability to quickly recover; usually the recovery process, even when successful, was arduous and time-consuming. As rapidly as the global economy changes now, and with the global economy's new normal turbulence, I'm not convinced that recovery is any easier today than in earlier eras.
I am thankful for people who publish information like "From NAND to Tetris".
Don't forget the role simple population size presents in terms of economic activity. Ancient Rome covered a huge territory, but a smaller population and GDP than Ethiopia does today.
Going from 1 billion to 7.5+ billion people world wide allowed for a huge increase in specialization and the sharing of knowledge. The benefit of building just one part of just one thing per day end up being huge.
That longbow story seems similar to one I had heard about the martial art of two-handed sword combat being largely lost. The argument was essentially that a late medieval European knight with two-handed sword and pike was actually a more effective soldier than the Japanese samurai with daisho and bow, but the latter had been better remembered and afforded better retroactive status, since their military tradition has been preserved via traditions of pseudo-religious martial arts societies.
In Europe, soldiering moved on to muskets, and fencing became an aristocratic pastime, preserving only epee and foil--weapons that could still be used effectively by people that were not professional soldiers. The techniques of two-handed sword fighting were recorded on a handful of pages, which are now the sole historical basis for academic reconstructions of typical combats. The remainder was reconstructed by history academics and medieval combat geeks.
Nobody thought it was important to preserve the state of the art of two-handed sword combat once you could stand back and punch holes in a big, armored man with a thicket of pikes, or a swarm of bullets, darts, arrows, or bolts. War evolved, and the formerly effective techniques were forgotten. The last surviving military blades were variations on the cavalry saber and naval cutlass, and were rarely used outside of ceremonial occasions. They just don't work very well against a guy with a machine gun. But the (dueling) saber was shoehorned back into the sport of fencing as its third blade, and other sabers have been fixed in various military traditions, being the last swords considered to be militarily useful.
That same disregard for historical preservation seems very common, especially considering technological obsolescence.
But in that case, do we really need it? That knowledge is mostly dead-end knowledge, useful only at the apex of a local maximum that has since been bypassed. The 70% that the master machinists believe should leave the field are the perfect candidates to improve CNC machines and 3D printers. Certainly, they would be useless if someone bombed all the chip fabs and murdered the lithographic mask designers, but then so would the bomb-droppers, who also rely on electronics packages to hit their targets.
It might actually be more effective to record all the things that became obsolete, and only keep details if they can be used as a stepping stone to the next thing. Then you only need to build vacuum tubes until you can build discrete transistors again, and you only need to build discrete transistors until recovering integrated circuits. In a civilization-preserving bunker or space habitat, nobody needs the expert-level knowledge on those stepping stones. The basics will do, until next month when the 3000 nm 8088-like chip fab comes online, and then that can leapfrog to an 800 nm MIPS chip fab, and those are only needed to control the machines making the 100 nm chips, and those run the machines that manufacture the universal hardware controller systems-on-a-chip that everyone needs to run the water purifiers, aeroponics tube farms, elevators, smart power inverters, and everything else. You don't need to remember the ox-drawn plow if you can jump straight to a small tractor, and you don't need to remember the tractor if you already know how to farm with PVC pipe, PEX plumbing, and a chem lab, instead of dirt.
Though it took civilization thousands of years to get where we are now, rebuilding from stone age to modern age could be done in a century or less, provided that someone is still around to remember the critical path to it. The scary part is that some of those critical sections may only be remembered by a few people, and they might be concentrated enough to all be killed by the same bomb. In that case, you're back to waiting through those thousands of years again.
I don't think this was a know how thing so much as an efficiency issue. If you're rich you can have a servant to draw water and maintain a chaimber pot easily.
However, having indoor plumbing in an area that freezes is a complex issue that requires a lot of infrastructure and maintenance. Outside of novelty factor the gains seem minimal relative to the costs.
Now, indoor plumbing has larger benifits for city's, but again I suspect it was considered not worth the cost instead of simply being 'lost'.
I don't agree that economic collapse is the correct term as it suggests total production drops alongside things like hyperinflation etc.
Rome allowed for an incredible amount of wealth transfer, but the total economic output of Europe at say 500CE was not significantly lower than the total economic output of Eurpoe at say 200CE.
Watermills were developed by the Romans, but continued to improve though the middle ages. Iron smelting has a long history, but was improved though the middle ages. You can look at a huge range of productivity increases throughout the middle ages as yields improved due to constant innovation.
Lead refining collapsed after Rome's crisis of the third century. There are Greenland ice cores saying so. Lead production didn't recover to Roman levels until the 16th century.
A few individual technologies progressed through the middle ages (but noticably not during the dark ages in the west), but social organization to build large scale projects is also technology, and that technology was utterly lost for a thousand years.
Rome had what we would recognize as Adam-Smith-like industry, a market economy, long distance trade, and mass production. It was a surprisingly modern world, and it collapsed. We're basically the second modern world, and we can collapse too.
Lead is a very poor proxy for economic development. It was actually known to be somewhat toxic though very useful even back then. And it's use declined in part because people got better at metallurgy not simply because the overall economy declined.
Flying buttress are an example of a significant and complex innovation in architecture developed soon after the fall of the Rome. Though it took a while to really develop. So, evidence for 'loss of knowledge' with building large structures is rather simplified. Loss of political and economic structures to build large scale projects is far more clear.
Rome at it's peak had ~70 million people across Europe, the middle east, and North Africa. Adding up all the individual peaces after it's fall presents a different story than looking at just Europe while ignoring the huge influx of goods and slaves from other territories.
Sure is. In the parts of the world where I'm living (EasternEurope - Northern Balkans) the retreat of the Romans and the subsequent waves of migratory peoples sure as hell looked like a civilisational collapse, even archaeologically. When the Romans were here they had indoor bathrooms and heating, they had writing, they had amphitheaters, but after they left (or were wiped out, no-one knows for sure), which happened roughly between 250 CE and 300 CE, then another 600-700 years would pass until writing would make its archaeological presence felt again (around year 1000), ~1400-1500 years until regular theater shows would be held again (in the late 1700s) and even now half of the country doesn't have indoor bathrooms like the Romans did (my parents don't, for example).