One of my favorite ideas from Nietzsche [1] is that civilizations take millennia to “digest” or integrate concepts. It seems a little obvious, maybe, until you look at the modern world and realize the baseline assumption is something like, “every problem is just a question of resources.”

An example being the common attitude that [advanced tech] is just a math problem to be solved, and not a process that needs to play itself out in the real world, interacting with it and learning, then integrating those lessons over time.

Another way to put this is: experience is undervalued, and knowledge is overvalued. Probably because experience isn’t fungible and therefore cannot be quantified as easily by market systems.

1. Probably not his original idea, and now that I think about it this is kind of more Hegelian. I’m not familiar enough with Hegel to reference him though.

I have no problem with people treating advanced tech like a math problem. I have a big goddamned problem with the tech world seeing things like creativity, expression, exploration, imagination, experience, companionship, empathy, sex, fun, beauty, inspiration, and all of that human-y sort of stuff as a goddamned math problem to be solved. It’s just so sad and most people resent it being shoved down their throats by tech companies abusing their societal leverage.

Knowledge is a distilled experience.