Just had a thought – written literature might not be able to capture even a large amount of the knowledge and wisdom in the world, because only authors with writing skills and talent are able to put their knowledge into words, with clarity of thought and minimal repetitiveness. That eliminates the many thinkers out there that might have a lot of knowledge and insights to offer, but just happen to lack in writing skills.
To mitigate this bias, we have to actively sort out other media forms – podcasts, interviews, or even seek out these people in person and have conversations with them. Which isn’t possible for the thinkers from a long time ago.
by GigaChan450
3 Comments
On the other hand, those great thinkers could easily seek out people to dictate to and some did.
Another way of looking at it is that when literacy wasn’t universal, only the proven wisdom managed to percolate to the top. That isn’t strictly true, as we have lots of ancient “counterculture,” but you at least had to take the trouble to learn to write if you thought you had something to say.
Today, any idiot with a half-baked idea or overdeveloped sense of his own expertise can publish.
I’m not sure that’s awesome.
There’s no question about it. In America the only authors were white men (who’s lives were free of chores/difficulty due to women/servants/slaves) for a really long time. Anyone not in that category either had to somehow wriggle their way to writing under a pen name and not being found out, or have their work published by a white man who pretended it was theirs, or just write privately where they could. You can’t have all of the knowledge and wisdom in the world if such a small percentage of people were allowed/able to read/write for such large swathes of history. Mass literacy is still pretty new in the big picture of history, and lots of areas in the world today still don’t have it. Not to mention basic problems like authorship not being a reliable way to make money by any means and people living in poverty or simply needing/wanting to make money.