Another great piece of writing, which is incredibly 'think' provoking.
I once published some poetry where I wrote the line "every sentence has been spoken" in consideration of the, I now understand to be, circa "117 billion people" to have been alive.
Mark Dolan mentioned in his comment the Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom discussion. And your words kind of turn that on its head, doesn't it, to a degree. Most of the Knowledge we have can be argued to have started way-back-when, born in the Wisdom of philosophers, becoming interconnected, through time, language, and varying degrees of perceptive reckoning to become foundational Information, that various scientists, doctors, and inventive people are now able to provide to us as Data connecting pure theory and thought to objective and visible fact. Atoms, as an example.
You are right, we have lost so much "human knowledge and discovery" for all the reasons you articulate. But perhaps we need to rediscover the wisdom that brought us here. Or at least rediscover how those philosophers arrived at their Wisdom, without Data.
Love the idea of wisdom getting proved out by data, theories that couldn't be proved at the time they were conceived but only decades or hundreds of years later. The foundation was so different back then. Sparse in data but perhaps rich in... intuition? creative extrapolation? fearlessness? I'm not sure, but you're right, it's an interesting question!
To continue the thought.... and we are flooded in data now! I wonder if it clouds our hypothesis generation. Maybe (pure speculation) we could socialize acceptability of more intuition in hypothesis generation than is in vogue today, and *then* apply our benefit of massive data availability to the testing. By relying too much on available data to generate hypotheses, are we ruling out promising approaches too early in the process, simply because they're different from the prevailing winds of generally accepted beliefs? If we use available data almost exclusively, we maybe more likely get incremental improvements instead of breakthroughs.
Yes I do think it clouds hypothesis generation. I am the first to ask people "what does the data tell you?" in the work I do. But, we have to be respectful and mindful when someone states the data doesn't 'look' or 'feel' right.
We perhaps should try to socialise intuition, so that hypotheses can be created, to more fully identify and pursue innovation and invention.
For you to link in a future article - intuition, AI, AGI, and wisdom, based on our discussion. The atom would be great place to start. It does beg the question, what links intuition and wisdom.
Thales stated in circa 6th century BCE the universe, cosmos, the everything, is made of one substance. Pretty intuitive but he based his thinking on water.
Heraclitus stated in circa 500 BCE stated 'everything' is in a state of continuous change, or flux.
Some time during the 5th century BCE Democritus & Leicippus make the astonishingly intuitive, fearless and creative extrapolation about atoms and the empty space that surrounds them.
When people are eventually proven correct, we call it wisdom. But your use of the word intuition, without data or information, is truly the creative extrapolation that created knowledge. Now we have the data. I hope they are smiling with an awful lot of pride : )
I LOVE this perspective Mark! Many of my most favored insights are those that project belief without evidence. Perhaps intuition? A hypothesis without data! I wrote a post a long while ago about Charles Darwin. He kept a great notebook and his observations were amazing. None of it was proof and it was a full 50 years later when genetics was exhaustively developed and mapped out that the thesis was validated. Most curious of all while genetics was "invented", we had been brushing corn tassels and selecting for peas for a very long time before!
Strange isn't it, we tend to believe a hypothesis, even a null hypothesis, starts with data large quantities of data. Most often though, theories about what the data we have based our idea of a hypothesis on we speak of as expected fact that needs the backup of numbers. In the time of Darwin and the philosophers they could only start with an assumption, guess, idea, or plain observation with no or very minimal data. A more purist view of hypothesis. Anyway, I'm rambling on. Thanks for the reply.
You seem interested in old philosophers and their early insights. I read "The Map of Knowledge: How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found: A History" in our book club a while back. Might be in your wheelhouse. I think there are probably many theories on this rollercoaster Stephanie started us on. I'm a fan of Ockham's Razor. Stick with a simple answer. Amongst animals it is us, the orcas and the elephants that spend an inordinate fraction of our lives being trained and perhaps indoctrinated by our parents and environment. My sense is it is just hard for us to throw off bad ideas because they become ingrained in our minds by tradition. I cannot imagine how people after even a middle school education might cling to a 6000 year old Earth yet there are millions and even a museum wedded to the ideas in Kentucky. I think the scientific method of hypothesis, test, refinement is SO RECENT and it has probably upended more nonsense in the last 300 years than the previous 2M. Maybe just a better way to do things I think.
I think what Darwin accomplishes was partly due to being remote and alone with his thoughts and not listening to the incessant yeah buts of traditionalists. Galapagos was hard to get to and few interruptions :) I am going to search the history of @JillianHess Noted as she did a wonderful post about Darwin and his Notebooks.
Love this, What if? The first person I thought of was Tesla who apparently knew a way to access electricity for free and was squashed by Edison and died penniless. Conspiracy theory? Maybe. Your piece makes one think.
Yeah, no one else has ever pursued wireless electricity with such zeal, and the idea kind of died with Tesla. (Though, to be fair, I'm not sure how healthy it would be for humans to be surrounded by vast amounts of wireless electricity. Still an incredibly interesting idea!) Apparently Westinghouse paid Tesla's living expenses near the end, a total opposite of Edison's malevolence.
Edison was a Dick. He was a marketing genius getting all the credit when we don’t even use direct current. We went to his workshop and home when we visited our son in NJ. I’m sure you’ve been since you’re there?
I did visit his workshop in Menlo Park! My class was taken there on a field trip when I was maybe 9? Edison was of course presented as an unmitigated hero; they save the juicy bits for the independently curious who look things up on their own :-)
We are all prisoners of where we grow up!!! I grew up in the Buffalo metro area. Lots of trips to Niagara Falls. There is a big statue to Tesla as he is responsible for electrifying the Falls and transferring significant power all the way to NYC! Much of the hardware Tesla developed (the dynamos and inverters) are largely still operational. Amazing.
I love this!!!! If you are ever in the Detroit metro area, there is a wonderful museum partly committed to Edison. Henry Ford, an America firster (nothing is really new) resisted involvement against Nazi Germany. It is said that Hitler had Ford's photo on his desk. He published one of the most anti-semitic of newsletters for a long period. Anyhow, Henry Ford LOVED Edison (birds of a feather) and actually moved Edison's Menlo Park workshop (parts of it) to a museum he built near Dearborn. We took the kids to the museum when we visited family there. It is called Greenfield Village. Ford was quite a nostalgic fellow.
Ugh, I didn't know that about Ford! But glad I do know now. All sorts of assholes have museums. The Frick art museum in NYC is wonderful - terrible human being, great taste in art.
This made me LAUGH. The book about Carnegie profiled Frick a lot. A really horrible person. I am currently time splitting across a series of books. One of them is Walter Isaacson about Musk. I have read his books on Einstein, da Vinci (imagine being born gay in the 1500s), Jobs, Ben Franklin and Jennifer Doudna. I am sure he has written more but I enjoyed each of those. He seems to be fascinated by trailblazers and how the distortion of their early lives can lead to breakthroughs. Very strange. Each of them grew up with completely horrible parents who damaged them immensely. Some came through it without treating others poorly but usually they are profoundly damaged humans. Ben Franklin is my favorite of the Founders. He became a pleaser due to the profound idiocy of his father. The traumas that Musk went through as a child with a severely damaged father were hard to read but lend some understanding to some of his tendencies. Doudna, by the way, shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry with a French woman. I consider her responsible for likely the most significant advancement for humankind with CRISPR. The only time in history that has happened. I plan to write a post about the lot of them down the road. Some were just profound assholes like Jobs. I think Gates had a normal childhood so he lacks the excuse. It is endearing when people transcend a horrible childhood.
America first and anti-semitism seem to go hand in hand through American history. Weird. Since I know you have a connection to Pittsburgh, the legacy of Frick and Carnegie in the Burgh museums is a lot of fun. My two youngest were born there. My kids as adults still love the history museum in Pittsburgh with the dinosaurs. I strongly recommend the book Carnegie by Peter Krass. I read it way back when we lived in Pittsburgh to better understand the place I lived. I loved it.
Because of his Minnesota roots, Charles Lindbergh is an important character here. He was an America First nitwit in WW 2 also and decidedly anti-Semitic. Since the onset of the Republic anti-Semitism and America First are constant bedfellows. Never trust any of them iMO and don't assume one without the other. Closet crackpots without exception. We don't seem to be able to extinguish it and the embers seem to smolder in times of uncertainty. Assholes exploit it whenever they can. Bad ideas are very hard to kill. Every emergence of populism in the US seems to bring it back. Ugh.
The electricity wars are definitely an important path to modernity!!! I think another way to consider Edison and Tesla is they both fell victim to modern economic theory. After the abject failure of his pursuit of DC current, Edison was forced out as the head of General Electric. His time had come and gone. He spent the remainder of his life building his myth. Tesla, similarly eventually wore out his welcome in the capital markets working on what he wanted to rather than what could be commercialized. I am not sure where I saw it (maybe in a Chicago Museum) but Tesla's wireless boat he used to play with in Central Park exists and was a pretty cool RF toy way ahead of its time. I think the original DC power plant that Edison built in NYC (now a Con-Ed property) only has a plaque as a remnant in Manhattan.
A fun thought experiment Stephanie!!! While a bit stifling, the relatively new practices of data science are cold-hearted in their classifications. While the pyramid probably didn't exist, I think with the rise of computing and storage, I remember discussion of DATA > INFORMATION > KNOWLEDGE > WISDOM. I do shade toward the Enlightenment as the pivot point. I tend to believe life was a struggle until quite recently and we largely were splashing around in the mud for most of our existence. I think life was just a barely meaningful struggle until then and religion was vital to lend meaning to life in the absence of knowledge accumulation. It was perhaps why religion needed to be hostile or at least controlling toward the trial and error refinement and proferred Divine Revelation in its stead. When men realized the great benefit of such myths we probably ended up with Kings who worked to usurp or at least co-opt the power of religion and their human entities -- the Divine right of Kings. I suppose we have not been methodical about the pyramid until quite recently. Loved this essay for how it made me think.
One of the best features of Substack are the comments as the other ones that precede me here are also interesting.
Profound insight about religion as meaning-provider in the absence of knowledge accumulation. My instinct is that's spot-on, it was the center of life of almost any community, much like a university town today is often built around the university. Religions have evolved to be much less controlling for the most part (fundamentalist sects aside), supply and demand in action. Interesting that religious institutions were once bastions of knowledge (literate people, scholars, libraries), and now there's a lot of competition!
The staggering loss of human knowledge and discovery throughout history is both humbling and poignant. The sheer number of individuals who lived and passed away without the opportunity to pursue scientific and creative endeavours, let alone record and transmit their findings, is sobering.
Another great piece of writing, which is incredibly 'think' provoking.
I once published some poetry where I wrote the line "every sentence has been spoken" in consideration of the, I now understand to be, circa "117 billion people" to have been alive.
Mark Dolan mentioned in his comment the Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom discussion. And your words kind of turn that on its head, doesn't it, to a degree. Most of the Knowledge we have can be argued to have started way-back-when, born in the Wisdom of philosophers, becoming interconnected, through time, language, and varying degrees of perceptive reckoning to become foundational Information, that various scientists, doctors, and inventive people are now able to provide to us as Data connecting pure theory and thought to objective and visible fact. Atoms, as an example.
You are right, we have lost so much "human knowledge and discovery" for all the reasons you articulate. But perhaps we need to rediscover the wisdom that brought us here. Or at least rediscover how those philosophers arrived at their Wisdom, without Data.
Love the idea of wisdom getting proved out by data, theories that couldn't be proved at the time they were conceived but only decades or hundreds of years later. The foundation was so different back then. Sparse in data but perhaps rich in... intuition? creative extrapolation? fearlessness? I'm not sure, but you're right, it's an interesting question!
To continue the thought.... and we are flooded in data now! I wonder if it clouds our hypothesis generation. Maybe (pure speculation) we could socialize acceptability of more intuition in hypothesis generation than is in vogue today, and *then* apply our benefit of massive data availability to the testing. By relying too much on available data to generate hypotheses, are we ruling out promising approaches too early in the process, simply because they're different from the prevailing winds of generally accepted beliefs? If we use available data almost exclusively, we maybe more likely get incremental improvements instead of breakthroughs.
Yes I do think it clouds hypothesis generation. I am the first to ask people "what does the data tell you?" in the work I do. But, we have to be respectful and mindful when someone states the data doesn't 'look' or 'feel' right.
We perhaps should try to socialise intuition, so that hypotheses can be created, to more fully identify and pursue innovation and invention.
For you to link in a future article - intuition, AI, AGI, and wisdom, based on our discussion. The atom would be great place to start. It does beg the question, what links intuition and wisdom.
Thales stated in circa 6th century BCE the universe, cosmos, the everything, is made of one substance. Pretty intuitive but he based his thinking on water.
Heraclitus stated in circa 500 BCE stated 'everything' is in a state of continuous change, or flux.
Some time during the 5th century BCE Democritus & Leicippus make the astonishingly intuitive, fearless and creative extrapolation about atoms and the empty space that surrounds them.
When people are eventually proven correct, we call it wisdom. But your use of the word intuition, without data or information, is truly the creative extrapolation that created knowledge. Now we have the data. I hope they are smiling with an awful lot of pride : )
I LOVE this perspective Mark! Many of my most favored insights are those that project belief without evidence. Perhaps intuition? A hypothesis without data! I wrote a post a long while ago about Charles Darwin. He kept a great notebook and his observations were amazing. None of it was proof and it was a full 50 years later when genetics was exhaustively developed and mapped out that the thesis was validated. Most curious of all while genetics was "invented", we had been brushing corn tassels and selecting for peas for a very long time before!
Thank you. Intersting notes on Darwin.
Strange isn't it, we tend to believe a hypothesis, even a null hypothesis, starts with data large quantities of data. Most often though, theories about what the data we have based our idea of a hypothesis on we speak of as expected fact that needs the backup of numbers. In the time of Darwin and the philosophers they could only start with an assumption, guess, idea, or plain observation with no or very minimal data. A more purist view of hypothesis. Anyway, I'm rambling on. Thanks for the reply.
You seem interested in old philosophers and their early insights. I read "The Map of Knowledge: How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found: A History" in our book club a while back. Might be in your wheelhouse. I think there are probably many theories on this rollercoaster Stephanie started us on. I'm a fan of Ockham's Razor. Stick with a simple answer. Amongst animals it is us, the orcas and the elephants that spend an inordinate fraction of our lives being trained and perhaps indoctrinated by our parents and environment. My sense is it is just hard for us to throw off bad ideas because they become ingrained in our minds by tradition. I cannot imagine how people after even a middle school education might cling to a 6000 year old Earth yet there are millions and even a museum wedded to the ideas in Kentucky. I think the scientific method of hypothesis, test, refinement is SO RECENT and it has probably upended more nonsense in the last 300 years than the previous 2M. Maybe just a better way to do things I think.
I think what Darwin accomplishes was partly due to being remote and alone with his thoughts and not listening to the incessant yeah buts of traditionalists. Galapagos was hard to get to and few interruptions :) I am going to search the history of @JillianHess Noted as she did a wonderful post about Darwin and his Notebooks.
https://jillianhess.substack.com/p/science-notes-part-i-taking-notes @JillianHess
Love this, What if? The first person I thought of was Tesla who apparently knew a way to access electricity for free and was squashed by Edison and died penniless. Conspiracy theory? Maybe. Your piece makes one think.
Yeah, no one else has ever pursued wireless electricity with such zeal, and the idea kind of died with Tesla. (Though, to be fair, I'm not sure how healthy it would be for humans to be surrounded by vast amounts of wireless electricity. Still an incredibly interesting idea!) Apparently Westinghouse paid Tesla's living expenses near the end, a total opposite of Edison's malevolence.
Edison was a Dick. He was a marketing genius getting all the credit when we don’t even use direct current. We went to his workshop and home when we visited our son in NJ. I’m sure you’ve been since you’re there?
I did visit his workshop in Menlo Park! My class was taken there on a field trip when I was maybe 9? Edison was of course presented as an unmitigated hero; they save the juicy bits for the independently curious who look things up on their own :-)
We are all prisoners of where we grow up!!! I grew up in the Buffalo metro area. Lots of trips to Niagara Falls. There is a big statue to Tesla as he is responsible for electrifying the Falls and transferring significant power all the way to NYC! Much of the hardware Tesla developed (the dynamos and inverters) are largely still operational. Amazing.
That is amazing! "Built to last" is the way we need to go in the future, our application of planned obsolescence is a polluter's dream.
I love this!!!! If you are ever in the Detroit metro area, there is a wonderful museum partly committed to Edison. Henry Ford, an America firster (nothing is really new) resisted involvement against Nazi Germany. It is said that Hitler had Ford's photo on his desk. He published one of the most anti-semitic of newsletters for a long period. Anyhow, Henry Ford LOVED Edison (birds of a feather) and actually moved Edison's Menlo Park workshop (parts of it) to a museum he built near Dearborn. We took the kids to the museum when we visited family there. It is called Greenfield Village. Ford was quite a nostalgic fellow.
Ugh, I didn't know that about Ford! But glad I do know now. All sorts of assholes have museums. The Frick art museum in NYC is wonderful - terrible human being, great taste in art.
Love the Frick. What is it about genius jerks? Gates, Jobs…
This made me LAUGH. The book about Carnegie profiled Frick a lot. A really horrible person. I am currently time splitting across a series of books. One of them is Walter Isaacson about Musk. I have read his books on Einstein, da Vinci (imagine being born gay in the 1500s), Jobs, Ben Franklin and Jennifer Doudna. I am sure he has written more but I enjoyed each of those. He seems to be fascinated by trailblazers and how the distortion of their early lives can lead to breakthroughs. Very strange. Each of them grew up with completely horrible parents who damaged them immensely. Some came through it without treating others poorly but usually they are profoundly damaged humans. Ben Franklin is my favorite of the Founders. He became a pleaser due to the profound idiocy of his father. The traumas that Musk went through as a child with a severely damaged father were hard to read but lend some understanding to some of his tendencies. Doudna, by the way, shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry with a French woman. I consider her responsible for likely the most significant advancement for humankind with CRISPR. The only time in history that has happened. I plan to write a post about the lot of them down the road. Some were just profound assholes like Jobs. I think Gates had a normal childhood so he lacks the excuse. It is endearing when people transcend a horrible childhood.
America first and anti-semitism seem to go hand in hand through American history. Weird. Since I know you have a connection to Pittsburgh, the legacy of Frick and Carnegie in the Burgh museums is a lot of fun. My two youngest were born there. My kids as adults still love the history museum in Pittsburgh with the dinosaurs. I strongly recommend the book Carnegie by Peter Krass. I read it way back when we lived in Pittsburgh to better understand the place I lived. I loved it.
Ever thought of being a substitute history teacher in your retirement?
Yes Ford was a great Jew hater.
Because of his Minnesota roots, Charles Lindbergh is an important character here. He was an America First nitwit in WW 2 also and decidedly anti-Semitic. Since the onset of the Republic anti-Semitism and America First are constant bedfellows. Never trust any of them iMO and don't assume one without the other. Closet crackpots without exception. We don't seem to be able to extinguish it and the embers seem to smolder in times of uncertainty. Assholes exploit it whenever they can. Bad ideas are very hard to kill. Every emergence of populism in the US seems to bring it back. Ugh.
The electricity wars are definitely an important path to modernity!!! I think another way to consider Edison and Tesla is they both fell victim to modern economic theory. After the abject failure of his pursuit of DC current, Edison was forced out as the head of General Electric. His time had come and gone. He spent the remainder of his life building his myth. Tesla, similarly eventually wore out his welcome in the capital markets working on what he wanted to rather than what could be commercialized. I am not sure where I saw it (maybe in a Chicago Museum) but Tesla's wireless boat he used to play with in Central Park exists and was a pretty cool RF toy way ahead of its time. I think the original DC power plant that Edison built in NYC (now a Con-Ed property) only has a plaque as a remnant in Manhattan.
There are some great documentaries about this.
Which one or two would you recommend?
American Genius- Edison vs Tesla
The Machines that Built America is a fabulous docu series.
Thanks! I have some time this weekend so will watch at least one.
The story of Edison and Tesla is very interesting! It is cool how an essay like this can lead our minds.
This is mind blowing.
A fun thought experiment Stephanie!!! While a bit stifling, the relatively new practices of data science are cold-hearted in their classifications. While the pyramid probably didn't exist, I think with the rise of computing and storage, I remember discussion of DATA > INFORMATION > KNOWLEDGE > WISDOM. I do shade toward the Enlightenment as the pivot point. I tend to believe life was a struggle until quite recently and we largely were splashing around in the mud for most of our existence. I think life was just a barely meaningful struggle until then and religion was vital to lend meaning to life in the absence of knowledge accumulation. It was perhaps why religion needed to be hostile or at least controlling toward the trial and error refinement and proferred Divine Revelation in its stead. When men realized the great benefit of such myths we probably ended up with Kings who worked to usurp or at least co-opt the power of religion and their human entities -- the Divine right of Kings. I suppose we have not been methodical about the pyramid until quite recently. Loved this essay for how it made me think.
One of the best features of Substack are the comments as the other ones that precede me here are also interesting.
Profound insight about religion as meaning-provider in the absence of knowledge accumulation. My instinct is that's spot-on, it was the center of life of almost any community, much like a university town today is often built around the university. Religions have evolved to be much less controlling for the most part (fundamentalist sects aside), supply and demand in action. Interesting that religious institutions were once bastions of knowledge (literate people, scholars, libraries), and now there's a lot of competition!
I love the joke there is nothing wrong with fundamentalism that a good reformation can't fix
The staggering loss of human knowledge and discovery throughout history is both humbling and poignant. The sheer number of individuals who lived and passed away without the opportunity to pursue scientific and creative endeavours, let alone record and transmit their findings, is sobering.