Warning !! This will make you think!!!, page 8

Originally posted by andy1033
Often burke in that series states the obvious question, why do some steps take so long to get done, and some jumps seem quite obvious.

Burke answers that question at the end of the original series. He says that we ultimately create the future based on our current (mis)understanding which is grounded in our (mis)understandings of the past.

What this means is that discovery is all about point of view. Inventions are created by individuals who have a slightly warped point of view. What seems obvious to us today was not obvious to anyone but the inventor way back in the day.

Burke does expand on this in the very beginning of The Day the Universe Changed, Episode 1:

Let me tell you a joke:
Somebody apparently once went up to the great philosopher Wittgenstein and said, "What a lot of morons people back in the middle ages must have been to have looked, every morning, at the dawn and to have thought that what they were seeing was the sun going around the earth. Well, as every school-kid knows the earth goes around the sun and it doesn't take too many brains to understand that."

To which Wittgenstein replied, “Yeah, but I wonder what it would have looked like if the Sun had been going around the Earth.”

The point being, of course, is that it would have looked exactly the same.

You see what your knowledge tells you you are seeing.

What you think the universe is and how you react to that in everything you do, depends on what you know. And when that knowledge changes, for you, the universe changes. And that is as true for the whole of society as for the individual.

While Burke glosses over the "Chinese paradox" in Connections, the entirety of pre-modern Chinese culture is a perfect example of the power of point-of-view. The Chinese had a point-of-view that the universe was static and couldn't be accurately modeled by humans anyway. Because of this point-of-view, China dutifully invented and then shelved a whole myriad of technologies because they didn't augment or fit-in with the Chinese point-of-view about the universe.

The rise of technology comes about as more and more people began to embrace the idea that we don't really know anything and all we can do is poke and prod and make models to discover what it is we don't know. What changed in recent years to allow the rate-of-change to increase was that more and more people began to adopt a more fluid point-of-view.

Today, we can accept that our understanding of the universe could change completely in our lifetimes. This kind of change would almost be catastrophic in pre-modern times. Yet today, this change is embraced and even sought after because of our "everything changes" point-of-view.

The rate of creation of new technologies is inversely proportional to the amount of institutional ignorance there is. In the middle ages, the primary source of institutional ignorance was the church. Today we see institutionalized ignorance growing in corporations, governments and universities in the West. That is why change has been slowing as of late in the West and speeding up in the East.

Jon