O papel do número e da diversidade de contactos

Continuado daqui.

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Voltando ao livro de "The Rational Optimist" de Matt Ridley, é a partir da página 77 que encontro uma ideia verdadeiramente nova para mim:

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"human beings learn skills from each other by copying prestigious individuals, and they innovate by making mistakes that are very occasionally improvements - that is how culture evolves. The bigger the connected population, the more skilled the teacher, and the bigger the probability of a productive mistake. Conversely, the smaller the connected population, the greater the steady deterioration of the skill as it was passed on. Because they depended on wild resources, hunter-gatherers could rarely live in bands larger than a few hundred and could never achieve modern population densities. This had an important consequence. It meant that there was a limit to what they could invent.

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A band of a hundred people cannot sustain more than a certain number of tools, for the simple reason that both the production and the consumption of tools require a minimum size of market.

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People will only learn a limited set of skills and if there are not enough experts to learn one rare skill from, they will lose that skill. A good idea, manifest in bone, stone or string, needs to be kept alive by numbers. Progress can easily falter and turn into regress."

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"There was nothing special about the brains of the moderns; it was their trade networks that made the difference - their collective brains."

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"The lesson is stark. Self-sufficiency was dead tens of thousand years ago. Even the relatively simple lifestyle of a hunter-gatherer cannot exist without a large population exchanging ideas and skills. ... The success of human beings depends crucially, but precariously, on numbers and connections. A few hundred people cannot sustain a sophisticated technology: trade is a vital part of the story.

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Human cultural progress is a collective enterprise and it needs a dense collective brain."

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O papel do número e da diversidade de contactos para o progresso é algo que nunca tinha racionalizado.

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Daí que quando um país se fecha ...

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Daí comparar o que era o mundo há 20 anos e agora... há 20 anos eu recebia um catálogo pelo correio. Escolhia o livro, enviava um fax a pedir uma factura pro-forma. Recebia uma carta dos States com a factura pro-forma, ía ao banco e pedia um cheque. Recebia o cheque e enviava-o pelo correio para os States.... finalmente recebia o livro, ou a revista. Hoje, temos a internet, temos a Amazon, temos a biblioteca científica on-line em qualquer universidade, temos a Gigapedia, temos os blogues, temos o twitter... Lembro-me da surpresa que tive, ao folhear o primeiro número da HBR que subscrevi, em 1990 ou 1991, uma revista em que Peter Drucker respondia a cartas de leitores... Peter Drucker?! Hoje, Tom Peters faz retweets de comentários meus.

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Que aceleração espectacular da quantidade de contactos... e, a fazer fé na forma como Matt Ridley intitula o prólogo do livro, "When ideas have sex", que explosão Câmbrica de conhecimento, tecnologia, ... veremos a sair daqui?

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E isto é só o princípio:

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"I saw a two-year old kid (in diapers, in a stroller), using an iPod Touch today. Not just looking at it, but browsing menus and interacting. This is a revolution, guys."