"So much so that people sometimes claim that the Egyptians and the Incas used some kind of now-lost technology. But they most likely didn’t: they were just really good at cutting stone." This and the other examples "just really good" doesn't make sense. It's basically handwaving and begging the question.
Good in such craftmanship means they had developed techniques (doesn't have to involve new tools or technology in the sense of an invention: specific moves, or specific way or applying existing tools still quality) that a modern expert on those areas doesn't know how to replicate.
"We don’t really know how the ancient Indian metallurgists did it, which means it could be an actual lost technology. Or maybe they just got lucky."
Again, hardly probable. It's obviously this wasn't their first rodeo, or rather first steel coated using this technique. If they got lucky at some earlier point making steel columns and landed at the technique, it still qualifies as a lost technology, since they knew the technique and we don't. Many of our mordern technologies are also discovered by accident, doesn't mean they're not technologies but "luck".
Fair, but the full argument is that we can do just as much precision stone-cutting or whatever, it's just that we don't know exactly how these specific civilizations and craftsmen did it. Yes, there's some kind of very specific knowledge that doesn't exist now, but it's a stretch to say we lost the technology. It's true that there's a blurry line between clear-cut "inventions" and "specific moves, or specific way or applying existing tools" — the word technology could refer only to the first, or to both.
This reads a bit like “bitcoin price can ever only go up” said at its all time high. Surely today at a local peak of technological capability we can replicate the Antikythera mechanism, but for centuries that was impossible. Even basic notions such as heliocentrism, mathematical cartography and atoms were lost for over a millennium and have been recovered thanks to the translation of greek manuscripts from the late middle ages to early modernity.
Well I certainly didn't say, or meant to imply, that we can't ever lose technology (or knowledge more generally). It does happen. But in practice, it's a rare phenomenon. In your analogy, the equivalent bitcoin statement to my thesis wouldn't be "bitcoin can ever only go up," but rather "historically, bitcoin has rarely collapsed."
I haven't read all of this, but I read enough to get your general sentiment on the matter.
I can understand why you didn't touch on some of the unstated things (to avoid sounding like a conspiracy nut), but the lack of mention should merit at least a cursory examination as a possibility.
As a thought experiment have you done a Bayes risk analysis of the possibility that there is some entity out there not bound by law, killing off extraordinary inventors or driving them to ruin through indirect means?
With today's tech imposed dystopia, it would be relatively trivial for any number of entities to isolate an individuals communications in an intermittent way from the larger whole, and by extension drive them into madness/poverty where they may finish the job in a "Kovak Box" style movie plot; only in reality.
Sure some of the inventors may have been frauds, but there are enough where they seemed to pass muster and then mysteriously died especially in the last 50-100 years. There is a point where statistically it becomes significant especially given that such individuals are naturally rare among the population demographics.
If a good amount of them are dying, and they naturally fall into a small 0.2% of the population bucket, the actuarial data or comparative statistics might inform how real this possibility might be. Statistical significance of fatality for such a group should be easily measurable.
This doesn't seem like an unreasonable risk to consider.
A friend of mine back 20 years ago in our college days used to joke about how he'd never release anything he discovered because doing so would be a death flag for him. I thought it was a joke at the time but his comments were very prescient. I've outlived him, he died in a freak accident, and he was doing ground-breaking work with encoding/encryption at the time.
Its important to keep an open mind on things until they can be disproven or refuted. There are more things in heaven and earth than exist in a particular person's world philosophy, and while scientific theory is our best guess at the world, its not gospel if there is a path around or through constraints that are ill defined.
"So much so that people sometimes claim that the Egyptians and the Incas used some kind of now-lost technology. But they most likely didn’t: they were just really good at cutting stone." This and the other examples "just really good" doesn't make sense. It's basically handwaving and begging the question.
Good in such craftmanship means they had developed techniques (doesn't have to involve new tools or technology in the sense of an invention: specific moves, or specific way or applying existing tools still quality) that a modern expert on those areas doesn't know how to replicate.
"We don’t really know how the ancient Indian metallurgists did it, which means it could be an actual lost technology. Or maybe they just got lucky."
Again, hardly probable. It's obviously this wasn't their first rodeo, or rather first steel coated using this technique. If they got lucky at some earlier point making steel columns and landed at the technique, it still qualifies as a lost technology, since they knew the technique and we don't. Many of our mordern technologies are also discovered by accident, doesn't mean they're not technologies but "luck".
Fair, but the full argument is that we can do just as much precision stone-cutting or whatever, it's just that we don't know exactly how these specific civilizations and craftsmen did it. Yes, there's some kind of very specific knowledge that doesn't exist now, but it's a stretch to say we lost the technology. It's true that there's a blurry line between clear-cut "inventions" and "specific moves, or specific way or applying existing tools" — the word technology could refer only to the first, or to both.
This reads a bit like “bitcoin price can ever only go up” said at its all time high. Surely today at a local peak of technological capability we can replicate the Antikythera mechanism, but for centuries that was impossible. Even basic notions such as heliocentrism, mathematical cartography and atoms were lost for over a millennium and have been recovered thanks to the translation of greek manuscripts from the late middle ages to early modernity.
Well I certainly didn't say, or meant to imply, that we can't ever lose technology (or knowledge more generally). It does happen. But in practice, it's a rare phenomenon. In your analogy, the equivalent bitcoin statement to my thesis wouldn't be "bitcoin can ever only go up," but rather "historically, bitcoin has rarely collapsed."
I haven't read all of this, but I read enough to get your general sentiment on the matter.
I can understand why you didn't touch on some of the unstated things (to avoid sounding like a conspiracy nut), but the lack of mention should merit at least a cursory examination as a possibility.
As a thought experiment have you done a Bayes risk analysis of the possibility that there is some entity out there not bound by law, killing off extraordinary inventors or driving them to ruin through indirect means?
With today's tech imposed dystopia, it would be relatively trivial for any number of entities to isolate an individuals communications in an intermittent way from the larger whole, and by extension drive them into madness/poverty where they may finish the job in a "Kovak Box" style movie plot; only in reality.
Sure some of the inventors may have been frauds, but there are enough where they seemed to pass muster and then mysteriously died especially in the last 50-100 years. There is a point where statistically it becomes significant especially given that such individuals are naturally rare among the population demographics.
If a good amount of them are dying, and they naturally fall into a small 0.2% of the population bucket, the actuarial data or comparative statistics might inform how real this possibility might be. Statistical significance of fatality for such a group should be easily measurable.
This doesn't seem like an unreasonable risk to consider.
A friend of mine back 20 years ago in our college days used to joke about how he'd never release anything he discovered because doing so would be a death flag for him. I thought it was a joke at the time but his comments were very prescient. I've outlived him, he died in a freak accident, and he was doing ground-breaking work with encoding/encryption at the time.
Its important to keep an open mind on things until they can be disproven or refuted. There are more things in heaven and earth than exist in a particular person's world philosophy, and while scientific theory is our best guess at the world, its not gospel if there is a path around or through constraints that are ill defined.