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Comment by squidmaster | Hacker News Reader

Humans having understanding of the system went out the window hundreds of years ago at the latest. The "Renaissance man" era is long gone. I know you said "collective understanding", but that's not a real thing. Humans aren't borg. Our entire lives have been spent in systems we can only understand in piecemeal if at all.

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I think in many areas we are going to see a renaissance of the "Renaissance man" since AI makes it possible to do so much more as a single person.

The Renaissance Cyborg.

I wouldn't put it exactly like this, but I agree that many systems chugging along today (such as the COBOL running on IBM metal that powers banks) are not something people try to (or can) comprehend all at once.

Is that really a problem though? We can solve problems empirically even if we don't keep the entire system's workings in our heads.

You can solve problems empirically, but you can never guarantee you've hit all the edge cases the original code did. That's fine for non-mission critical systems, but would you be ok with your passenger jet onboard systems having been rebuilt from empirical observations?

That's a funny example, given that the Wright brothers were overwhelmingly empirical compared to their competitors and succeeded as a result, because the foundation of aerodynamics was fundamentally flawed at the time. In a real sense, those systems were built from empirical observations, and most human systematizing happens post-hoc.

I agree that formalizing observations into a system can lead to additional insights, though it would probably be hubris to assume the formalization is faultless.

Speak for yourself. I have a pretty good understanding how the system works from the transistors up.

Do you good understanding of where your food comes from?

How about the dollar you earned, spent, invested? Do you know how it works?

How about the clothes you wear?

This is just a tiny subset of the enormous complexity we're immersed in, and no individual or collective has a complete understanding of it. If you do, you're truly an outlier and GP's point still stands.

Yes for all the examples you gave. None of those should be beyond the understanding of a curious person living today.

Some individual has an understanding of each of those areas. Why does one individual need to know the entire food chain? The discussion point is about each specific area.

Even for the COBOL based systems someone understands it well enough at the conceptual and business level. And when there's no one to the company migrates and modernizes.

You are conflating the subject matter expert who understands one area well and others not so well with a general newbie who understands nothing well

> The discussion point is about each specific area.

I don't think it is. @squidmaster specifically noted, 'The "Renaissance man" era is long gone.'

What happens to that understanding when you're gone?

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