Let’s talk generations for scale.
Forget everything you about them already and follow the example below:
2100 You die at 100.
2090
2080
2070 You retire at 70?
2060
2050
2040 Loss of your youth.
2030
2020 Here you are right now! 20-years old and ready to take on the world.
2010 Apple invents the iPhone.
2000 You are born.
1990 The Internet begins.
1980 Your Mother was born.
1970 Man lands on moon.
1960 Your grandMother was born.
1950 The first commercial computers.
1940 Your 2gMother was born. WWII. Man drops atomic bomb.
1930 First passenger airline service.
1920 Your 3gMother was born.
1910 WWI, Ford Model-T
1900 Your 4gMother was born.
I hope these 200 years speak volumes. The first thing you should do after reading it: write down the things that you think I missed.
The next thing: try to remember your great grandmother (2gM), and if you can remember her, then try your 3gMother. If you are in a lucky family with women that like to have babies at young ages, then think of your 4gM.
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We will just make the assumption that no one alive today is remembering the year 1920. The people that are 100-years old in 2020 might have a memory from 1922-1925 but I wouldn’t count on it.
Well then, what do you remember about your 2/3/4gM? What did they teach you? Find them on the timeline above and recognize that you learned everything after them. Were they alive when the Model-T was built — yes? — then how would they or their children, or you ever know how to build a car from scratch? You’ve always had the blueprints. Go look at where you were born on the timeline and where the internet was born and you will see that you have always had the blueprint for that too.
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If you think my timeline is bad, then make your own, and I suggest: don’t go any further in the future than you or your children dying because it’s unnecessary; the real exploration is going back as far as you can. It won’t take more than a few more generations (you certainly won’t hit 20gM) before you hit the birth of electricity and capitalism.
How could you be creative or novel? You’re ancestors (you know, your grandma’s grandma that you have never heard about ever) was born after capitalism had become the norm. Before that, there were knights. And before them centurions. And before them alpha-apes. We see a distinction between these eras but they blended in to one another in reality. The change was gradual and learned over generations because a new technological introduction altered the way people acted during their everyday.
You didn’t learn from the technology, the technology adapted the way you were being taught. We know it’s technically not genetic but for lack of a better term, it’s all you’ve ever been; you can know the theories of socialism, sure, but the generation before you and before them didn’t use those theories in their everyday life; it isn’t what you’ve been taught to do. The way humans have progressed is by making sure you don’t have to learn those things — to have each person reinvent the wheel would have been the end of our species because we all use wheels everyday — but that doesn’t mean the wheel doesn’t need reinvented by some one at some point.
The issue comes when too many generations have passed, too much learned behavior in one direction has occurred: the basics have been all but lost in favor of optimization or gaming the systems in place. The example of the wheel might be a bad one (they’re good at rolling), but there might be better examples in that of market exchange, communication, social sciences (math too, actually), diet, agriculture, city planning, energy production, society. We’re creating endless supplies of specialists, and letting the generalists fall into whatever roles serve those specialists best; we want to continuously push the boundaries so that we never have to go back and admit failure by redrawing them (maybe because that failure is often grossly painful upfront).
"The scientists were too busy asking how to wonder if they should be asking why."
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Now go back to your timeline and place the birth of public education on it.
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