> Another interesting thing is that we do not know how they made them so fine. The technique was never recorded or documented in detail, as it was passed down from parent to child. So the knowledge is actually lost forever.

This is a rather extreme failure on their part. There’s nothing admirable about hoarding knowledge and forcing it to only be passed down in person.

I don’t see this as the Luddites being right at all because they were clearly incredibly wrong about their chosen method of knowledge storage. This was a highly predictable and preventable outcome. If we were talking about a company today that forgot how to manage their servers because they refused to document anything and only passed it down from person to person we wouldn’t be speaking in awe and wonder, we’d be rightly criticizing their terrible decision making.

That aside, every time I hear that knowledge has been lost forever it turns out to be an exaggeration from those trying to amplify the mystique of the past. If we wanted to make ultra-thin scarves we could do it. We could study those ultra thin museum pieces with our endless array of modern tools and then use our vast quantities of modern wool to experiment until we got something similar.

But you missed the reason why we wouldn’t want to: An ultra-thin scarf isn’t going to work as well as a thicker one for keeping someone warm. It will be less durable. It would be a fundamentally inferior product. It’s interesting to see as a museum antique that has to be treated with utmost delicacy, but not so much as a practical garment.

If you buy real handcrafted scarves they are both thinner and warmer than anything factory made bcz of their choice of pashmina wool.