> Knowledge does not automatically transfer to the next generation.
That's not untrue, but overly simplifies the problem by observing a very narrow slice of a much larger whole. Knowledge does not automatically transfer between people of the same generation, or the same project, or the same team! The misapplication and over-reliance of Taylorism especially in software development projects deserves blame. Ultimately this traces to a root cause in the pedagogy of work evident in the largely uncritiqued popular conception of work methodology itself. Specifically the construction of "collaboration of specializations leads to efficiencies" ignores its creation of systemic forgettance. This oft quoted passage sums it up nicely:
... the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour
is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between
themselves, but between the products of their labor.
That is to say that the transfer of knowledge, being one of among myriad social relations, takes a back seat to the relations between software components in this scenario.
One of my favorite talks was named something like "Writing for Engineers" and had a drawing of what we think human knowledge is (a constantly expanding universe of "things" that we discover), versus what human knowledge actually is (a filter upon a greater set of facts out there that represents the collective views of a group of people alive at the time. Things can appear and disappear from it, knowledge gained does not remain in the public consciousness unless someone actively knows and cares about it).
Just reinforces the thought that discovering something is not valuable in and of itself. You have to also make other people care about the thing that you have discovered.
Absolutely! It brings up and makes accessible some really great epistemological questions that we tend to pass by. For me, it's easy to focus on the grand scientific process at the expense of examining how forgettance operates at the small group or even individual level. Forgetting Practices in the Data Sciences[1] for example, helped me start to identify these sites in my own system of work.
That's not untrue, but overly simplifies the problem by observing a very narrow slice of a much larger whole. Knowledge does not automatically transfer between people of the same generation, or the same project, or the same team! The misapplication and over-reliance of Taylorism especially in software development projects deserves blame. Ultimately this traces to a root cause in the pedagogy of work evident in the largely uncritiqued popular conception of work methodology itself. Specifically the construction of "collaboration of specializations leads to efficiencies" ignores its creation of systemic forgettance. This oft quoted passage sums it up nicely:
That is to say that the transfer of knowledge, being one of among myriad social relations, takes a back seat to the relations between software components in this scenario.