Knowledge During Different Era

We want to become a more knowledgeable person: someone less likely to be swing around by people's speaking, have our own thoughts, and make our own decisions for ourselves. That's something deep. Instead, today, we'll look at how knowledge evolved during the past era, in simplified words.

Note: The original full article is published on Mirror. Read the full story there.

At the very beginning, humans are no difference from animals. Knowledge are mostly passed down via genes: we know how to walk when looking at how others' walk. With trials and errors, we manage to learn very quickly. Others tend to discover new stuffs when trying new things: and families whom are keen observer tends to follow and learn those newly discovered traits/behavior. Some learnings are shared among the whole species; while other learnings are specific to a certain culture (a certain tribe).

Then, we discover words. Words are something for communication. One isn't in front of you, my dear reader, right now; yet you know what one tries to convey, because one put it in words. In the early days, words are essential for recordings. These recordings may change the history of the tribe from extinction. These recordings carved somewhere prevent it from being lost forever if it was forgotten, or maybe the people whom knows the knowledge dies before they pass it down. Putting in words allows communication. We can still read books written by people long dead centuries or milleniums ago: just because they put it in words. It is an effective way to communicate across time boundaries, provided it can be decoded by the readers. If future people no longer understand English, then they can't know what one writes now, unless their archaeologists could reverse engineer the meanings: just like our archaeologists reverse engineer ancient words that we don't actually understand; of course, with less accuracy and more guesses.

Is it archaeologists whom try reverse engineer ancient words? Or is it another job?

Then, we have schools. Teachings was limited to parents to children; or maybe parents to neighboring children, whoever lives nearby and are friend to their child. Generally, mass teachings were rare before it turn into schools. Or you could say, any kind of mass teachings are considered schools, even if they didn't officially defined so. Of course, they won't have a pencil and paper like we have today: and consider that carving on rocks or carving on bamboo books are expensive, or just too slow; most teachings transfer knowledge orally. Words are more limited for large events recording. People could learn to read words; but practicing like we have today; maybe they should find some rocks and carving knives to practice, I don't know.

And it turns into multiple levels of education. Normal child that don't need help in the fields could attend elementary education. Girl could also attend girls' school; but mostly to learn homemaking and feminine virtues. Boys learn the other stuffs that we learn today (except not that advance yet). And different country have different laws and culture on learning. Especially when philosophy trives, like during the Ancient Greece era between Plato, Aristotle, Stoicism, etc; or the Hundreds Schools of Thoughts in Ancient China: many opposing philosophies are being taught at the same time. People fight for their philosophy, and want to prove they're right. Other philosophies, though, can co-exist. While majority doesn't have large amount of students, a few manages to grow into the majority schools. It's just like today: the popular universities attract students from all over the world; while the less popular ones we might not even heard of them.

As we mention; it depends on the country's law for schools. Many philosophies co-existing is known to disturb centralization and single-ruling; so if the king doesn't like, they could order the burning of books and libraries, massacre of scholars, while enhancing their supported philosophies to a greater extent, including holding political positions. Words that come from the previous ruling country are banned: and they shall use the new-ruling country's words to signify they aren't rebel. Historians have a difficult time recording truths that sounds not supportive of their countries, and are ordered to change histories or be tortured. It's a wonder how much torture the historians could receive to be strict of not changing histories; and whether the king ordered histories to be forgotten can historians rebel successful against its change.

With larger population gathering comes different classes (one call it rankings rather than classes, just my taste). Higher-rankings (i.e. ruling classes) get to learn different things compared to normal-rankings (i.e. normal people whom are just slightly better than slaves). Normal rankings focus on learning agriculture, or maybe hunting, knowledges for survival. Higher rankings have the privilege to learn enjoyable contents, like music and poetry. Slaves? Well, most country banned slaves from learning, as gaining knowledge means slaves become aware they aren't legal, and they will start rebel. Awareness make a slaves no more slaves. Other countries, after gaining approval from their masters, allow slaves to enter education, and they can even learn to higher education if their masters help them pay or allow them to attend higher education.

Sometimes, awareness is the only weapon we need. In a good sense, if we're aware that racism and slavery is not right, we go against it. If we are aware that our behavior lead to climate change that make Earth bad, we go against it. At the same time, if we are aware that we can use biological weapons in war, we'll use it. If we aren't aware of biological weapons' existence, we won't use it in war. That's awareness as a weapon.

Mass teachings is not enough. Exchange teachings becomes popular in the previous two centuries: when we could not only study in our country's school, but visit schools in other countries and study from there. Usually, these are study of culture and tradition: to promote peace. We leave our culture and tradition for them to study; and we study their culture and tradition; and upon return, we bring back what we study and teach others at home. As of recent centuries, lots of attempts to promote global education exchanges made easy, including student visas plus scholarships. And international teachings allow people to solve problems on the world's scale: climate change isn't solvable by a single country, but requires global effort.

Though, even till now, not every knowledge is study-able. Military schools are restricted to nationals, plus some allied countries with limited spots. As far as one knows a few years ago, and one is lazy to research whether it has changed or not, US Space companies only allowed US nationality to do an internship there. So, we see, not every knowledge is learnable. It depends on what knowledge countries wish to spread to the world, and what knowledge to keep for themselves, to determine how knowledgeable is the world. Similarly, higher-rankings don't wish normal-rankings to be too knowledgeable; otherwise propaganda cannot influence people on the mass scale to follow whatever propaganda they make. We humans loves control: and anything outside our control, at the extreme thoughts, is to be eradicated.

Today, schools still lays an important role, and is officially supported by world organizations and governments. Despite its effectiveness haven't been better, we still manage to make friends in schools: something that child needs for better growth. If one is a total emotional and social noob (total sad life) and only want to study: one could easily learn them from the internet, more successfully than going to school. Why does Finland thrives in education than most of the rest of the world? We learn how to do math: they learn the platform to do math. We learn how to do differentiation by hand: they learn how to use a calculator to perform differentiation, and their students got interested in paper and pencil differentiation when they're satisfied with differentiation on the calculator. It (might have) got more females to love mathematics, unlike us in the whole world less females take mathematics because it's pencil and paper. Ok, that's just one story. Let's talk about the internet.

Internet promotes self-learning at your own pace on the things you like. That's another thing Finland does compared to most of the rest of the world: they learn less subjects than us, and they learn deeper into each subject than us. While master of one is not good; jack of all trades is also not good. Master of some is the best: at least that's what we should aim for. We can choose to skip the boring lectures (most lectures are boring, believe me) and go straight to how we learn the best. Good! Plus it contains new contains updated more recently than textbooks being published and used in schools. So, you get to learn newer materials than out-of-date materials.

Internet contains Big Data: we can never learn everything on the internet by ourselves. Previously, we move data from being stored in our brain to writings (on stones/bamboo books/papers/manuscripts/etc) to ensure we don't remember wrong, and to free our brains from having to remember these objects. Of course, during the early ages, memory methods like memory palaces (see Sherlock Holmes before?) could remember everything written if you get them right. But as information increases, and remembering exactly becomes important, it's not always possible to remember things in our brain; after all, our brain, however effective and large a memory it is, also have its limitations. We can only take in so much. Big Data is much much more than we could remember in our brains: to the highest precision (quality of data) and incorporates the highest ranges (quantity of data) possible for a given records. Data previously record every day can now record every minutes! These wasn't feasible on paper.

Though, the growth of the internet also facilitates how fake and/or misleading information can transfer. People could post misleading images or tweets (equivalent) on social media to raise upheaval amongst the community, only to get their post the next day on the news to calm the upheaval and tell the community it's fake. People could focus on one-side of telling the story, letting us believe that's the real story without being aware there's "another side" of the story. People could utilize new technology like Machine Learning to generate large amount of similarly looking comments to direct their propaganda, influencing what they need (like voting process) in their direction. People could boast news that are half-true-half-fake, but they seems legit (since it's half-true): which, without comparing to other news sources, cannot be determined its authenticity. (Checkout Snopes). Most probably, people could build walled gardens to hide information from the public. All in all, internet facilitates the manipulation of audiences whom come back from work, hoping to relax by watching or listening to the news, and isn't aware it's a propaganda because they'd been too tired to think after work.

Though, some (but not all) of these problems could be solved by the blockchain. For example, aiming for transparency might not need "privacy policy" anymore. After all, if everything is transparent on the internet, why do you need privacy policy? And if you need them private, don't share them on the internet. Privacy policy is a stupid policy that forces people to accept it or they cannot use the software, whereas dumping it means people could continue to use the software without accepting the stupid privacy policy that anyone could change it at any time, with a single notice on the email, which probably nobody cares reading that email, and when problems came, they'll say you didn't read the email, so you can't complain them for say, sharing your private information with a third party or something, and even if you go to court you're in the disadvantaged side. With Blockchain's anonymity, by only linking the information to your wallet but not linking your wallet to you (nobody knows its your wallet if you choose not to share it; plus you can open a new wallet that has no relationship with your main wallet, thereby hiding identity), it's now a private information, no?

Similarly, private operations inside a corporation are made public via transparency aim. People now knows how data is used on-chain; and they can choose what's saved on-chain. It's also important for software designers to carefully design their software such that it doesn't force the user to give in their "considered private" information before they're allowed to use the software; otherwise they could just open another Facebook or Twitter or whatsoever than building on the blockchain.

Furthermore, information that could easily be deleted on Web2 isn't easily deleted on Web3 (though it's not impossible to do so). IPFS especially aims for immutability, hence write once read many operations, on their data stored. Unless everyone has a consensus on removing the content (particularly non-healthy contents like hate speech that promotes war or racism, or perhaps pornography contents, etc), it couldn't be removed from the IPFS.

Though, consider how it disrupt the current technology. Many contents like YouTube, Spotify, Book-selling websites, are selling the contents to the audience. With the blockchain, it's impossible to hide the contents unless it uses old web2 technology: storing behind a database. So, it cames to re-think how we should re-access the information if they're not being locked behind walled gardens. What do people want to buy and they would like to pay if it's not for the contents? Generally, many people would take advantage from free contents without considering paying to the author even a cent, either legally (from a library, from online libraries, borrow from friends) or illegally (pirating websites). Even today, contents locked behind walled gardens are doomed to be pirated. Unless the content is super not popular there's no one taking the effort to pirate it, otherwise, most popular contents that's been some year old would have their piration online; even if their copyrights is still active, there certainly will be people pirating it, gets some download, before being taken down by copyrights policy. But of course, we must re-think and encourage people to pay for author: otherwise, it's not fair for the author to write something and don't get paid, finally becoming a beggar. We don't want to make sure that this starting age of web3 is the ending age for authors, that there will be no more authors writing long contents because they couldn't earn from it; that they will only write blogs and all we have is blogs but not books (even novels are blogs, which are written only on demand -- that someone pays, they'll continue write; otherwise, it'll stop if no one pays). So, let us be careful to proceed.

Conclusion

We have looked at how knowledge evolves (in simplified format of course, still pointing you towards the original article) and some of the drawbacks as they evolved. Finally, one wants to say, human demands control. Though most of us could resist from trying to control another person as if they're an object; it's true that, we possess powers more than our morals could take: we don't have the morality to suppress ourselves from trying to control things when we have enough power; at least for most people. If a conglomerate wants control, they need to make sure people are still dependent on them, such as via propaganda saying that blockchain is a scam, a Ponzi scheme: that could keep people from joining blockchain, hence still using their product. Though, crypto might be a scam, crypto might be a Ponzi scheme; but not blockchain. Blockchain is not crypto. Crypto is high risk, blockchain isn't. Conglomerate sends the opposite message.

And finally, let us appreciate that the growth of knowledge and it's openness makes us a more knowledgeable person today: one that cannot be easily manipulated by others; one that can make decisions for ourselves compared to milleniums ago; and one that have knowledge to learn infinitely long when we feel like learning. :)

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References

• The Evolution of Knowledge

• And the other references on The Evolution of Knowledge: please refer there for its reference section.