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After the fall of the Roman Empire in Western Europe, much of what we consider "civilization" ceased to be. Literacy, medicine, science, agriculture, engineering, astronomy, governance, all went into decline or regression for the hundreds of years which we now call "The Dark Ages". During this period monasteries were…
As individuals, we are amazingly ignorant and incapable. How many of us, alone in a wilderness, could make a flint knife? Is there anyone now alive who knows even a tenth of everything there is to know in science? How many of those employed in the electricity industry could make any of its components, such as wires or…
I used to think that the problem of information is that it turns homo sapiens into fools — we gain disproportionately in confidence, particularly in domains where information is wrapped in a high degree of noise (say, epidemiology, genetics, economics, etc.). So we end up thinking that we know more than we do, which…