The Clock Of The Long Now
What if you thought of right Now as extending 10000 years in the past, the dawn of agriculture, to 10000 years in the future?
How does taking such a long-term view change what you choose to work on, how you take responsibility, how you relate to what’s around you?
I enjoyed this work quite a lot. It directly inspired multiple questions for me, like How can I produce Long Content? and What are examples of Slow Science?. In my personal journal, I have made a list of things in my life that will survive for decades and that I can take more responsibility for over the long-term. I am brainstorming Long Art ideas and how I might work with the CPV gardener to understand & improve the ecology of the garden. I have added many of the books mentioned in the text & from the Recommended Bibliography to my reading list.
I suspect the Long Now will be an extremely valuable ongoing lens for me.
Most interesting ideas from the book:
- Six pace layers of civilization, from fastest to slowest
- Fashion, Commerce, Infrastructure, Governance, Culture, Nature
- The longer a view you take, the more selfishness and altruism merge
- The Big Here, the Long Now
- Slow Science (What are examples of Slow Science?)
- Applied History
- Permanence is constant renewal (Ise Shrine)
- Physically written down words often have more permanence than digital artifacts
- Is this still true given LLMs? Probably
- It’s very difficult to know what future generations will value from today’s civilization
- Unanticipated effect of the space program, which almost all environmentalists fought against (arguing we need to solve Earth’s problems before exploring space): pictures of Earth from space kicked off the environmental movement
- You can always improve things as long as you’re prepared to wait
- Parallel: biology often has systems that combine multiple timescales to have both stable identity and fast responsiveness (eg in epigenetics, histone modifications & DNA methylation); multiple timescales and multi-level organization are how any complex system works
Provenance: decided to read this book after reading https://gwern.net/about#long-content