Tim Scarfe: disagreement

Transcript context

…Okay? It's the last chapter of, you know, the time section of the book. Decay. Yes. And that's the 1 that has resonated the most with people here. And it connects to what you're saying because after, you know, telling some stories from that chapter, I had a colleague you know from here from The UK that sends me an email, he said, this remind me of the Ise Temple story. Okay, what's the Ise Temple story? So I looked at it, I read it up and there is a temple in Japan that they rebuild every 20 years. Okay? And by rebuilding the temple every 20 years, they basically train the new generation of people that are gonna know how to build a temple and is gonna have to train the next generation of people in 20 more years. So if think about it, you can think of a temple as you know, a structure and you might wanna preserve that structure. Like here in Europe, we love this historical heritage and so forth. But in this particular example, they're deciding not to preserve the structure. It's not that this beam here is 300 years old or 500 years old or no. What they're preserving is the knowledge on how to rebuild the structure by keeping the muscle, you know, fit. You know, by by continued to doing the activity over and over again. Our current state depends on everything that went before. That's not really true because so much knowledge decays and gets lost. So there was this there's this interesting thought experiment that what if we could have a parallel universe, we could do a simulation and we just skip alchemy. Would we still be in the same place now? And in a sense, do you think that garbage collection, you know, like this deliberate kind of pruning of the knowledge tree is actually a feature of evolution? It's hard to know. So what what we do know is that knowledge decays and we maybe don't tend to focus on that as much because it's a more depressing story. But we know that knowledge for instance in the case of the liberty ships was estimated to decay about 3% to 6% per month. You might think 3% sounds like a little bit, but it's 50% a year. Meaning that if an organization were to stop working 1 day and wanted to resume after a year, they would have lost 50% of the knowledge. So knowledge decays really fast, and the reason why we don't observe that decay as frequently is because of course knowledge is being accumulated in a way that offsets those decays. But you have very good examples of knowledge decaying. 1 of them is the history of Polaroid. So Polaroid was an amazing company created by a quintessential Harvard dropout and entrepreneur Edwin Land. It's called Polaroid because what they did was polarized film. They didn't start with instant photography, they started doing polarized film like basically Land figure out a way to create, you know, polarized filters that were large enough to have an industrial use and application by stretching kind of, you know, like this this goo with this, you know, material in a magnetic field so that you could create the polarized filters. And then after the second world war, they need to find a new business model because you know, polarized filters were usually sold to the military. So they come up with this idea of doing instant photography, which was devilishly difficult, involved tons of patents because the chemicals that are used to to develop a photograph are are extremely reactive. So if you put them on an envelope that people are gonna be shaking around and and you're gonna be transporting around the country, most likely they're not, you know, they're gonna react at some point they might mix and you know, your your envelope becomes worthless. And they developed extremely high quality instant photography so that photographers like Ansel Adams and so forth, they would use, you know, Polaroid cameras. Now, in the nineties Polaroid fails to transition into digital. And then in the late 2 thousands, there's 1 plant left in The Netherlands that is producing polarized film. And there's a man in Vienna that has a shop online that sells kinda like this vintage film and so forth. And when he finds out that this plant is gonna close, you know, he flies into The Netherlands and he gets kinda like a group of people together to acquire, you know, the plant. Because Polaroid was just simply gonna close the plant and say, why don't instead of closing it, selling it to ourselves, sold him the plant, you know, and they tried to restart the production of the technology. Now they had access to the factory. They had access to all of the original equipment because they didn't dismantle the factory.…

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