Write Down the Oral Tradition
The chain of transmission for unwritten science is likely to snap
Much scientific knowledge is never written down. There’s the academic dark matter of laboratory procedures, uncorrected errors in papers, reputations of individual researches, results that were never published, failed replications, etc. But we expect that this is all dwarfed by the dark energy of knowledge produced inside companies, large and small, that lives primarily in internal reports and the minds of individuals with no plans or incentive to publish. We know first hand how hard this stuff is to excavate.
In late 2022 Dan considered starting a desalination and data-center cooling company based in part on technology developed by physicist Ted Taylor in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Dan’s idea was to pump brackish groundwater to the surface in winter, turn it into snow using ski-slope snowmaking machines when temperatures dropped below zero, and then (and this was Taylor’s key invention) allow the preferential melting of the saltiest ice to draw enough salt from the snow pile for the water to be potable. Plans for Taylor’s technology could not be found in the patent or scientific literature. Most of the technical details turned out to be recorded in typewritten reports in the New York State Archives that Dan paid to have digitized. Important context for technical drawings in those reports came from a children’s television program narrated by a young Ben Affleck that happened to film Taylor’s pilot installation. Other information had never been captured at all and was stored in the brain of an energy industry executive, then near retirement, who happened to have once been the 22-year-old mechanical engineer Taylor hired as his assistant. When Dan tracked him down and heard first hand things like “[the saltwater] was corrosive as hell” and that Taylor’s team had made “a big old yucky [biologically] contaminated pile of ice,” he understood the challenges of this work in a way that the sterile (and somewhat optimistic) technical reports could not convey. Ultimately, this interview was a major factor in Dan not starting the company.
Going down this rabbit hole consumed several months of Dan’s life (though he regrets none of it), but is probably representative of the effort required to continue the work from any shuttered startup or internal corporate project. In this case, we think it’s lucky that so much documentation survived at all.
With rapid shifts in the funding and geopolitical landscapes, the chain of transmission for unwritten science is already straining and likely to snap entirely. The scientific community needs to do something, so why isn’t it? We think that taboo and inconvenience both contribute.
The taboos against documenting and disseminating corporate science are strong. What if our competitors steal our work? What if our funders find out how hard this is and pull their support? The taboos against putting the interpersonal context on top of academic research are just as bad. My colleague plays fast and loose with assumptions in his simulations but he’s also on my tenure committee so he’d better not catch me saying that. The procedure in her paper is definitely wrong, but we all cite it because it’s the only source for those results, which are somehow correct.
Even if we can get past the taboos, just collecting this information is a huge pain. The American Institute of Physics maintains a library of oral histories containing interview transcripts with famous physicists that are full of taboo-breaking gems such as:
Heisenberg:
I know that Pauli was very proud of the exclusion principle paper just on account of the fact that he could disprove some of the things which Bohr had claimed.
Unfortunately, the practical difficulties in performing these interviews mean that more than 60 years of work has resulted in about two thousand transcripts. Many disciplines don’t even have an equivalent project.
However, it is now possible to provide an AI interviewer for every scientist and to create a searchable database of not just unwritten but unwriteable information, no-doubt with appropriate time locks and redaction to protect individual reputations and corporate interests. If giving such an interview at key career milestones became a norm, all of science would be much richer. If it had been a norm in 1980, Dan would have several months of his life back.
The Mishnah, completed in the 3rd century CE, is the authoritative book of Jewish laws that were never meant to be written down. The Babylonian Talmud, a scholarly commentary on the Mishnah compiled over the next few centuries, addresses this contradiction directly.
“...in principle, the statements of the Oral Law may not be committed to writing. Rather, since it is not possible to remember the Oral Law without writing it down, it is permitted to violate the [law]”
Babylonian Talmud Gittin 60a
We can imagine ancient rabbis asking: do we break our taboo against writing these laws and take on the onerous (multi-century!) project of writing them down or do we risk their being forgotten entirely? We know what they chose, but now science faces the same dilemma. What will we do?
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