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Humanities Regression

Posted: Fri Jul 27, 2012 7:22 am
by eddwo
This is quite interesting and
relates to quite a few Jaynesian topics, the split from the gods and the 'fall'.

I really feel like western civilisation is losing it's way. So much of what was once known and
existed seems to be forgotten or dumbed down out of existence.

In the computing/software/technology field, it seems like half the ideas that were developed
in the 1970s have disappeared from the collective imagination.

I look at the huge achievements of Alan Turing, Alan Kay, Donald Knuth, Richard Feynman, John Von Neumann
etc, and then look at what is considered high technology today, Facebook, Twitter, endless iOS Apps etc.
It all seems like one big trap of ego filling, money making, attention grabbing manipulation.

OK, so the people I mentioned were/are all 'top-level' geniuses, but today
I meet so few people who are even aware of their existence or what they achieved.

Obviously intelligence falls into a standard distribution, so we can't expect there to be
many people that many 'levels' above the norm, but the width of the variation seems quite staggering.
Has humanity always been so far divided, between those that can understand the world and those that can't?

Re: Humanities Regression

Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2012 1:39 pm
by martinem
The geniuses you line up are the elite from a century, rather from a specific decade. They were laying out the ground for a whole new science, that had not been described before. Turing's work is not forgotten, look at these recent Minecraft and Conway's game of Life Turing machines:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBDNzMqgJiM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My8AsV7bA94

I dont think facebook application design is considered by anybody to be very high tech, just applied knowledge. I guess today's geniuses will crystallize in the future, in a field so new that it is not even recognized by us old guys that were around in the seventies.