

The Dead Speak - JoshCole
http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2008/09/the_dead_speak.php

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saurik
Humorously enough, I feel like this site might archive my comment better
(although even if it doesn't, I use this site and will appreciate being able
to find my comment later), so I'm going to cross-post it here. ;P

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The mechanism for interactive communication has gotten faster, but overall the
process hasn't changed in the last two thousand years. The people who study
physics today are continuing conversations that were begun long ago thanks to
the printing press, by publishing papers that reply to people who are now long
dead.

In fact, I think your entire argument could apply to writing of all forms just
as easily as it could apply to the Internet: with people saving their
knowledge in a form that didn't rely on people to actively remember and store
it, the amount of knowledge in the world created by people who are dead should
drastically outstrip the amount of knowledge being created by the people who
are actually alive.

However, that argument is based on two hidden, and yet flawed, assumptions.

The first is that writing is in some way fundamentally more permanent than
memory: that what we write down will last throughout the ages and be available
to all of the people later whom might be interested in finding and responding
to it, without being damaged or lost or simply unfindable in a giant pile of
unindexed information.

Frankly, from my perspective, (and seriously: this is nothing personal to
you), the probability that your website is going to survive for the long haul
and that people will be responding to this comment thread two generations from
now is nearly zero. I'd actually be quite surprised if your website and all of
the comments that are on it are still here in just another ten years.

In fact, in another ten years the entire medium may have changed. The
information placed on the Internet just thirty years ago to Usenet has now
already mostly been lost, with the information from twenty years ago seemingly
being deleted by Google. Websites from the Geocities and AOL era of ten years
ago are now a distant memory of archive.org, and that's assuming it got to
them at all.

In practice, the things that we are saying here are not /fundamentally/ less
transient than they have been in previous eras: it will last for some
dwindling amount of time, and unless I say something interesting enough here
to cause them to rephrase it, to rework it, to keep it alive for the next
generation, this conversation will end. But however I think about it, I doubt
that my specific words will be what survives.

The second assumption is that the number of people remain constant. Putting
aside for a second the possibility that this entire experiment we call
civilization may come crumbling around us in a catastrophic war for water and
oil (if nothing else, because that is likely to destroy the Internet and with
it the premise of the argument), the number of people on earth is currently
doubling every 35 years, a rate that has actually been accelerating (although
maybe our counts of people have just been becoming more accurate ;P).

Assuming the amount of information someone can produce is constant (which is a
conservative assumption, given that new technology may in fact be allowing us
to be more prolific over time), if the population doubles every X years then
the amount of work created during any given X years will be equal to one more
unit of work than the total amount of work ever created before that time
period.

(This is easily demonstrated, in case anyone visiting this site and reading
this doesn't believe that, by taking a single person during the first time
period creating a single unit of work. During the second time period, two
units of work are created, which is one more than during the first. When we
get to the third time period we are now creating four units of work, which is
one more than one plus two. The pattern works just like the digits of a binary
number: adding a number of powers of two together and adding one gets the next
power of two.)

Therefore, not only does old conversation tend to decay faster than we'd hope,
but it actually would rapidly become swamped by new conversation even if it
were perfectly permanent and never rotted or was damaged in any way.

(It also should be pointed out, by the way, that the average mortality rate is
heavily dominated by "old people", a demographic that is unlikely to be
reading your blog, so in fact the likelihood that many of the people who have
read this, or any other, post on your website is much smaller than .8%. You
need not be concerned about the massive dead body count associated with your
viewership, at least for another couple decades.)

That all said, I will say that I was incredibly happy that I didn't notice
that you wrote this over two years ago until I was nearly done typing this
comment. ;P That part was certainly epic: I found this article from a link on
Hacker News (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2106515>).

