For a society to continually progress, it seems necessary that there be an abstraction that allows lower-level knowledge to be dismissed, otherwise we will eventually spend our entire lifetimes learning all that was previously learned by past generations with no time for new discoveries. Herein is a conundrum, though, as times may arise where that lower-level knowledge was critical but is now lost, a concern explored by Nicholas Carr's recently released book The Glass Cage*. Are we to run the risk of building on a foundation that all of us have forgotten the structure of, or are we to live without ever progressing as doing so would require losing something else? It seems obvious that society has chosen to progress and abstract, and can only be expected to continue to do so. Perhaps that doesn't have to be a doomed journey, though. By knowing what the danger is, we have the opportunity now to assess it and accommodate for it. We may yet learn how to forget safely.
*http://www.kansascity.com/ entertainment/books/article2436204.html
My dad says "the dark ages weren't that people forgot how to do the things their ancestors could do, but rather that they didn't know that anyone had ever know how to do it." For example, the best roads in Europe, for centuries, were the roads the Romans built.
ReplyDeletePS I also served in the West Indies Mission, we should talk sometime.
Sounds very interesting. I do believe that abstraction is important, but there must always be some understanding of how things are working under the hood.
ReplyDeleteThe professional world is for building upon abstractions, and academia is for understanding them.
ReplyDeleteThis is a very interesting topic and it brought up in a lot of zombie apocalypse shows and movies. The basic blocks our society is built on can't be forgotten in case things go bad because we will need that information to build again.
ReplyDeleteI love this comment. Considering the explosive progress in technology, I feel this topic is especially relevant in our field. How can one possibly understand all the technology that is present in new products, its background work, and cutting edge new developments? Interesting to think about!
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