yep, it takes society. Newton's law is not Newton's law, its a mental state of a bunch of communicating homo sapiens. Had he died of a pandemic somebody else would have "discovered" it in a decade or two.
I broadly agree and many discoveries are made independently at the same time, after that ~199,000ky delay (including some of Newton's, such as calculus).
But what is "society"? What are you proposing as the mechanism?
it is the quality of the communication channels (the signal to noise ratio) between individuals. Diffusion of high quality information (from any early age) is what enables individuals to both internalize state-of-the-art collective mental models and incrementally contribute their own bit.
in theory with the use of digital networks we should have a quantum leap forward but I am not sure we have seen yet any dividend of that. our collective (digitally intermediated) brain has been hijacked by less noble objectives
Very interesting ideas, thanks. At least today, your theory played out.
>in theory with the use of digital networks we should have a quantum leap forward but I am not sure we have seen yet any dividend of that. our collective (digitally intermediated) brain has been hijacked by less noble objectives
It's not just less noble objectives. With high quality information available, people still choose poor info or mis/disinfo. Nobody I know is interested in quality information, even very educated people. Even here on HN, most sources are Wikipedia.
yep, it takes society. Newton's law is not Newton's law, its a mental state of a bunch of communicating homo sapiens. Had he died of a pandemic somebody else would have "discovered" it in a decade or two.