I think everything you say about the printing press is correct and important, I would just caution against overfocusing on the printing press as the one pivotal cause. I think it was part of a broader trend.
There must be some very deep underlying trend that explains these non-coincidences. And that is why I am sympathetic to explanations that invoke fundamental changes in thinking
The question then converts to : why did this happen when it happened, and not earlier or later? The “printing press theory” proposes that people could not change their thinking without the information to show where it was flawed (by having something to compare to), and the other critical element is it’s a ratchet.
Each “long tail” theory that someone writes down continues to exist because a press can make many copies of their book. Prior to this, ideas that only sort of worked but were not that valuable would only get hand copied a few times and then lost.
This is one of the reasons why genomes are able to evolve : multiple redundant copies of the same gene allows for 1 main copy to keep the organism reproducing while the other copies can change with mutations, exploring the fitness space for an edge.
If you think about how you might build an artificial intelligence able to reason about a grounded problem, for example a simple one: Pathing an autonomous car.
One way to solve the problem is to use a neural network that generates manyplausible paths the car might take over future instants in time. (anyone here on lesswrong has used such a tool)
Then you would evaluate the set of paths vs heuristics for “goodness” and then choose the max(goodness(set(generated paths))) to actually do in the world.
Similarly, an AI reasoning over scientific theories need not “stake it’s reputation” on particles or waves, to name a famous dilemma. It’s perfectly feasible to simultaneously believe both theories at once, and to weight your predictions by evaluating any inputs against both theories, and to multiply how confident a particular theory is it applies in this domain.
An AI need not commit to 2 theories, it can easily maintain sets of thousands and be able to make robust predictions for many situations. As new information comes in that causes theory updates, you mechanistically update all theories, and drop the least likely ones and generate new ones.*
I bring up the AI example to create a shim to see how we should have done science (if we had much higher performance brains), and thus explain why becoming even slightly less stupid with the ability to mass produce paper with text allowed what it did.
When you can’t mass produce paper, you’re stuck with 1 orthodox way to do things, and thus you just keep recopying stuff written centuries before, because the new idea isn’t good enough to be worth copying.
A real life analogy would be how streaming video remove the cap on “TV airing slots” and has allowed an explosion in creativity and viewership for even niche foreign shows that would never have received an airing in the US tv market. (squid game)
*this is also the correct way to do a criminal investigation. Start by suspecting every human on the planet, and many natural and accidental mechanisms, and update the list with each new piece of evidence. Once enough probability mass is on one individual you know who probably did it, and an honest investigator would make clear the exact probability numbers to any decisionmakers for punishment.
Conclusion: I’m not saying it’s only the printing press, but there would have to be other changes in human civilization enabled by technology that allowed a shift in thinking to happen. Otherwise it could have happened over many prior centuries. Something like “availability of coal” or “we were doing a lot of sailing in ships” each was possible from an underlying technology change that wasn’t available to the romans.
I think everything you say about the printing press is correct and important, I would just caution against overfocusing on the printing press as the one pivotal cause. I think it was part of a broader trend.
Per the link you cited:
There must be some very deep underlying trend that explains these non-coincidences. And that is why I am sympathetic to explanations that invoke fundamental changes in thinking
The question then converts to : why did this happen when it happened, and not earlier or later? The “printing press theory” proposes that people could not change their thinking without the information to show where it was flawed (by having something to compare to), and the other critical element is it’s a ratchet.
Each “long tail” theory that someone writes down continues to exist because a press can make many copies of their book. Prior to this, ideas that only sort of worked but were not that valuable would only get hand copied a few times and then lost.
This is one of the reasons why genomes are able to evolve : multiple redundant copies of the same gene allows for 1 main copy to keep the organism reproducing while the other copies can change with mutations, exploring the fitness space for an edge.
If you think about how you might build an artificial intelligence able to reason about a grounded problem, for example a simple one: Pathing an autonomous car.
One way to solve the problem is to use a neural network that generates many plausible paths the car might take over future instants in time. (anyone here on lesswrong has used such a tool)
Then you would evaluate the set of paths vs heuristics for “goodness” and then choose the max(goodness(set(generated paths))) to actually do in the world.
Similarly, an AI reasoning over scientific theories need not “stake it’s reputation” on particles or waves, to name a famous dilemma. It’s perfectly feasible to simultaneously believe both theories at once, and to weight your predictions by evaluating any inputs against both theories, and to multiply how confident a particular theory is it applies in this domain.
An AI need not commit to 2 theories, it can easily maintain sets of thousands and be able to make robust predictions for many situations. As new information comes in that causes theory updates, you mechanistically update all theories, and drop the least likely ones and generate new ones.*
I bring up the AI example to create a shim to see how we should have done science (if we had much higher performance brains), and thus explain why becoming even slightly less stupid with the ability to mass produce paper with text allowed what it did.
When you can’t mass produce paper, you’re stuck with 1 orthodox way to do things, and thus you just keep recopying stuff written centuries before, because the new idea isn’t good enough to be worth copying.
A real life analogy would be how streaming video remove the cap on “TV airing slots” and has allowed an explosion in creativity and viewership for even niche foreign shows that would never have received an airing in the US tv market. (squid game)
*this is also the correct way to do a criminal investigation. Start by suspecting every human on the planet, and many natural and accidental mechanisms, and update the list with each new piece of evidence. Once enough probability mass is on one individual you know who probably did it, and an honest investigator would make clear the exact probability numbers to any decisionmakers for punishment.
Conclusion: I’m not saying it’s only the printing press, but there would have to be other changes in human civilization enabled by technology that allowed a shift in thinking to happen. Otherwise it could have happened over many prior centuries. Something like “availability of coal” or “we were doing a lot of sailing in ships” each was possible from an underlying technology change that wasn’t available to the romans.