Thread by @conways_law

Human knowledge has been structured to optimize its intergenerational propagation.

This is not a law. It’s a fact of history determined by three human limitations:

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1. The durations of the major stages of human life.
2. The rate at which humans can acquire knowledge.
3. The total amount of knowledge humans can hold and apply.

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So we have built knowledge castles, each on its own mountain, and each of us who earns a living from knowledge lives in one of those castles.

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Our knowledge self-segregation accounts for guilds, apprenticeships, trades, the general skill-orientation of work, and the subject-orientation of education (what has been called “academic stovepipes”).
worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/8518/…

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For most of our history as a species we’ve just tolerated our limitations, but since the industrial revolution we have outgrown our cultural adaptations to the extent that we’re now in real danger.

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Yet the solutions to our biggest, and most lethal, problems are invisible to us because they can only be imagined by using new knowledge gained from building and regularly traveling new highways that unite the castles.

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This failure of imagination is killing us and the rest of the biosphere, and we need to figure out--and apply--alternatives. Soon.

To build--and apply--such alternatives we must build new knowledge structures. Soon.

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But who has the knowledge to do that?

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