Nothing In A Vacuum

2025-11-01

There is a phrase that I heard which I am going to paraphrase. To keep someone ignorant you can give them the mushroom diet, ‘Keep them in the dark and feed them shit’. It is kind of a funny phrase, I guess the best way to grow mushrooms is a dark room with poop.

But the thing about science and technology is that you kind of need the opposite environment. One thing about science, and even some systems of laws, is that it evolves over time and builds on top of old stuff. Like there are some basic physics, and Newtonian physics is built on top of that, and Einsteinian physics built on top of that. I assume that same is kind of true with laws. Old Rome had a set of laws, and then old England and France had some old system of laws, when the US was formed they took some of the laws and made a new set, and I am sure that many new countries takes bits and pieces from the US law and add their own flair. That doesn’t always mean new is better, especially with law, but it can be helpful to learn from the past.

Because I know more about computers, I think that software are especially like this. Software is small bits of code that run on computers and it is trial to reuse which is great. So this website runs on top of all kinds of open source code, it runs on Unix / Linux, it uses Elixir, Nginx, Systemctl, Postgres, HTML, CSS, etc. These are all just bits of software, interfaces, languages, and other stuff, that was built by people much much smarter than me. And I really appreciate being able to use them pretty freely. I feel like standing on the shoulders of giants for sure.

But this allows me to circle back to the minor point, that if someone, anyone, grew up without any teachers, books, or interactions then they wouldn’t be able to advance science or technology very much. No matter how smart they were, without learning the basics of a field they would be stuck trying to discover the basics. You could take the smartest most successful person today, restart their life, and surround them with nothing of substance and they wouldn’t advance at all, they couldn’t advance at all. I assume you could take a genius, put them on a deserted island as a child and they wouldn’t even learn how to read or write. Maybe they would invent some language, they are a genius after all, but they would be able to read any of the great books.

And so I feel that environment matters a lot, especially as a child. I was my kids to succeed and so my hope is to expose them to a bunch of different things, put them in a bunch of different situations, and let them learn from those. Also hopefully I will read to them many books and encourage them to read and write themselves. This will be a good foundation for what ever they want to do.

-Gary