🔗 The Chronology Problem, Jim Olds

But there’s a subtler cost, too. When we don’t understand how a technology or a scientific field evolved, we become poor navigators. We don’t know which roads were tried and abandoned and why. We don’t know which detours led to unexpected places. We can’t reason well about where to push next, because we don’t have an accurate map of where we’ve already been.

Technological and scientific genealogy isn’t nostalgia. It’s a form of rigor. The rat in the 1975 experiment knew something. So did the Caltech scientist, looking at the brain recordings. Arrhenius knew something in 1896. Bachelier knew something in 1900. Rosenblatt’s perceptron knew something in 1958. We could stand to know it, too.