Nod. (Epistemic status of this post was more ‘brainstorming/writeup’ than anything definitive)
But, the idea was something like:
my vague impression is that cultural fidelity is lost after a few hundred years, except in a few cases where the culture heavily optimized for fidelity.
cultures do have longer term impacts through flow-through-effects, but those are much harder to control
there are probably not many 3000+ year artifacts that are directly influencing the present day. But the two central examples I have in mind are:
the pyramids / stonehenge / other megalithic artifacts clearly last, pretty robustly, even if they don’t have much influence.
i.e. we know very little about whatever culture built stonehenge, but we know they built stonehenge.
books continue to have a fair amount of influence, in ways that can continue despite culture. (I’m not sure what exactly I think of the Protestant Reformation in terms of whether it’s actually ‘truer’ to the spirit of the Bible than Catholic dogma. But, my impression is that Martin Luther at least claimed influence from being able to read the exact text himself, and it suggests that if you wrote a book that was directly optimized for being re-derivable about how to interpret, you could create a cultural artifact that was robust against political forces manipulating it)
The Long Now project that seems most directly agenty in this respect is the Rosetta Project and their “what library would you want to restart civilization” project, both of which involve figuring out ways to archive things that will robustly last and be rederivable by earlier-stage civilizations.
Nod. (Epistemic status of this post was more ‘brainstorming/writeup’ than anything definitive)
But, the idea was something like:
my vague impression is that cultural fidelity is lost after a few hundred years, except in a few cases where the culture heavily optimized for fidelity.
cultures do have longer term impacts through flow-through-effects, but those are much harder to control
there are probably not many 3000+ year artifacts that are directly influencing the present day. But the two central examples I have in mind are:
the pyramids / stonehenge / other megalithic artifacts clearly last, pretty robustly, even if they don’t have much influence.
i.e. we know very little about whatever culture built stonehenge, but we know they built stonehenge.
books continue to have a fair amount of influence, in ways that can continue despite culture. (I’m not sure what exactly I think of the Protestant Reformation in terms of whether it’s actually ‘truer’ to the spirit of the Bible than Catholic dogma. But, my impression is that Martin Luther at least claimed influence from being able to read the exact text himself, and it suggests that if you wrote a book that was directly optimized for being re-derivable about how to interpret, you could create a cultural artifact that was robust against political forces manipulating it)
The Long Now project that seems most directly agenty in this respect is the Rosetta Project and their “what library would you want to restart civilization” project, both of which involve figuring out ways to archive things that will robustly last and be rederivable by earlier-stage civilizations.