I don't think the claim "we rarely lose technology" is even possible to justify. This small subset of "known" lost technology cannot possibly be the full set of lost technology, as evidenced by the fact we had to rediscover or reverse engineer a lot of this stuff in the first place. Wish this counterfactual had at least been alluded to in the article, even if they still want to discard it. Hard to take the argument seriously without this being addressed, imo.
So most of these examples are about "we know how": "we have figured out why Roman concrete was so great"; we can make napalm today; we can do numerous other things. Yet many inventions listed spent centuries genuinely lost. The goalposts are not exactly moved, but left unclear. The conclusion in the title is less of description of process of *rarely losing* technology, but more about the great relatively recent *regain* of technology, specifically technological process that can not only rediscover Roman concrete but explain why Roman concrete works or create better Greek fire.
Point of Antikythera device is not that we can't compute orbits of planets: the point is that Greeks were able to produce such a sophisticated apparatus for computing them, then both the knowledge of making such devices and their purpose was lost so thoroughly that we have no knowledge what it exactly was; some researchers looking at it first thought it was a mislaid object from later times. If one shipwreck was never found, we still wouldn't know the Greeks 2BC were capable of such clockmaking.
I think with inventions there gathers a sort of a cultural atmosphere to regard them, and we lose both some of the inventions and almost all of the atmosphere. There's also the lost book-knowledge and not yet deciphered or well understood old - somehow known knowledge (like the Sumerian tablets)
Another aspect is hype (aura) is a general phenomena, and sometimes people don't recognize the significance of their inventions (like in mathematics). What we call inventions are probably a modern phenomena, signified by real persons
I don't think the claim "we rarely lose technology" is even possible to justify. This small subset of "known" lost technology cannot possibly be the full set of lost technology, as evidenced by the fact we had to rediscover or reverse engineer a lot of this stuff in the first place. Wish this counterfactual had at least been alluded to in the article, even if they still want to discard it. Hard to take the argument seriously without this being addressed, imo.
So most of these examples are about "we know how": "we have figured out why Roman concrete was so great"; we can make napalm today; we can do numerous other things. Yet many inventions listed spent centuries genuinely lost. The goalposts are not exactly moved, but left unclear. The conclusion in the title is less of description of process of *rarely losing* technology, but more about the great relatively recent *regain* of technology, specifically technological process that can not only rediscover Roman concrete but explain why Roman concrete works or create better Greek fire.
Point of Antikythera device is not that we can't compute orbits of planets: the point is that Greeks were able to produce such a sophisticated apparatus for computing them, then both the knowledge of making such devices and their purpose was lost so thoroughly that we have no knowledge what it exactly was; some researchers looking at it first thought it was a mislaid object from later times. If one shipwreck was never found, we still wouldn't know the Greeks 2BC were capable of such clockmaking.
Great article.
I think with inventions there gathers a sort of a cultural atmosphere to regard them, and we lose both some of the inventions and almost all of the atmosphere. There's also the lost book-knowledge and not yet deciphered or well understood old - somehow known knowledge (like the Sumerian tablets)
Another aspect is hype (aura) is a general phenomena, and sometimes people don't recognize the significance of their inventions (like in mathematics). What we call inventions are probably a modern phenomena, signified by real persons