Skip to main content

Lost Forever


If you consider all the knowledge, abilities, skills, and memories people possess, you note enormous knowledge resources contained by society, but maintained by individual agents.  However, when one of these agents passes, this information is abruptly lost forever. Not reclaimable, redeemable, or reconstructible, it is just gone. 

For example, the unrecorded thoughts of Socrates, Kant, and others are gone forever. Sir Isaac Newton, on the other hand, wrote thousands of words on his ideas in multiple notebooks (many bizarre).

Every day, individual deaths carry vast amounts of lost knowledge, factual, operational, skills, and data.  Over all time, you have wealth and knowledge, but you can’t take either along.  You can leave behind wealth but not your knowledge.  Your mind, with its lifetime of accumulations, is often the more valuable. What you know uniquely is lost and must be rediscovered.

So very much of my parents has been lost forever.

Such is the tragic loss to humanity, every day of every year. Yet it’s never much recognized because it has always been. To preserve wealth, we set up trusts, wills, bequeaths, etc. For knowledge, the best we can all do is to communicate with the living while we are living. Family events, writing, speeches, just conversation are a few pathways.  Showing, tutoring, and teaching are others. Loving, caring, and friendships are more still.  Yet, so much is lost, promised for a future day.

What else can we do? Plenty.  There is the trusty diary to record your random memories. You can make a blog to record all your thoughts*. There are now oral history apps you can use with your cell phone.  You could create a private channel on Youtube.com and make notes there.  With this option you can also make picture shows and upload them.

Incidentally, this knowledge loss must affect the entropy of all knowledge.  This has not been discussed in the literature, though the entropy of knowledge has.

*This blog was begun in 2012.

-----------------
For me... The best adjective descriptor of Russian President Vladimir Putin is “reptilian.”  Perfect.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please Comment.

Popular posts from this blog

Behavioral Science and Problem-Solving

I.                                       I.                 Introduction.                Concerning our general behavior, it’s high about time we all had some understanding of how we operate on ourselves, and it is just as important how we are operated on by others. This is the wheelhouse of behavioral sciences. It is a vast subject. It touches our lives constantly. It’s influence is pervasive and can be so subtle we never notice it. Behavioral sciences profoundly affect our ability and success at problem-solving, from the elementary level to highly complex wicked problems. This is discussed in Section IV. We begin with the basics of behavioral sciences, Section II, and then through the lens of multiple categories and examples, Section III. II.     ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Principles of Insufficiency and Sufficiency

   The principles we use but don't know it.  1.      Introduction . Every field, scientific or otherwise, rests on foundational principles—think buoyancy, behavior, or democracy. Here, we explore a unique subset: principles modified by "insufficiency" and "sufficiency." While you may never have heard of them, you use them often. These terms frame principles that blend theory, practicality, and aspiration, by offering distinct perspectives. Insufficiency often implies inaction unless justified, while sufficiency suggests something exists or must be done. We’ll examine key examples and introduce a new principle with potential significance. As a principle of principles of these is that something or some action is not done enough while others may be done too much. The first six (§2-6) of our principles are in the literature, and you can easily search them online. The others are relatively new, but fit the concepts in the real world. At times, these pri...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Lemming Instinct

  In certain vital domains, a pervasive mediocrity among practitioners can stifle genuine advancement. When the intellectual output of a field is predominantly average, it inevitably produces research of corresponding quality. Nevertheless, some of these ideas, by sheer chance or perhaps through effective dissemination, will inevitably gain traction. A significant number of scholars and researchers will gravitate towards these trends, contributing to and propagating further work along these established lines. Such a trajectory allows an initially flawed concept to ascend to the status of mainstream orthodoxy. However, over an extended period, these prevailing ideas invariably fail to withstand rigorous scrutiny; they are ultimately and conclusively disproven. The disheartening pattern then reveals itself: rather than genuine progress, an equally unvalidated or incorrect idea often supplants the discredited one, swiftly establishing its own dominance. This cycle perpetuates, ensurin...
Post a Comment
Read more