[HN Gopher] Book Review: Double Fold
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Book Review: Double Fold
Author : mhb
Score : 112 points
Date : 2021-05-29 13:33 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (astralcodexten.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (astralcodexten.substack.com)
| HenryKissinger wrote:
| We as a society need to become more comfortable with the
| destruction of information. Not every piece of past data is
| valuable. The hypothetical future value of most past data is less
| than the cost of preserving it.
| Inhibit wrote:
| If there's someone very interested in archiving a given set of
| information I'm all for it.
|
| Where I think we collectively have an issue is when we're super
| into _someone else_ archiving it. And that they then need to
| figure out a way to finance it all.
| Zababa wrote:
| One advantage of keeping everything is that it's a "neutral"
| approach. Especially with our history as a species, it's easy
| to think that we should preserve everything to protect us
| against certain groups of people or way of thinking that would
| erase some part of history.
| ghaff wrote:
| It can be hard to know what should be kept and be tossed. And
| reasonable people can disagree about which applies. But it's
| certainly a fair point that we probably don't want to preserve
| every byte of ephemera forever.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It's mildly amusing to glance at a copy of my high school
| newspaper from eons ago. But I still can't see any value in
| it.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| A ton of modern historical research comes from trawling
| through very boring old records. Import/export financial
| records, church tithe ledgers, birth lists, etc.
|
| You might be surprised what a researcher in 2060 will get
| out of your high school newspaper (especially as the
| ability to computationally aggregate old digitized primary
| records continues to advance).
| Zababa wrote:
| The argument that I hear often is that people in 200/300
| years would precisely love that kind of thing. My history
| book in high school was filled with things like that.
| Articles from journals, letters from soldiers sent to their
| families. I think we don't need to keep every single high
| school newspaper, but I wouldn't know where to start if I
| had to choose which ones to keep.
| ghaff wrote:
| I love this quote from here:
| https://www.salon.com/2002/01/08/saving_usenet/
|
| "We started dumping stuff that we thought was obviously
| of no future use, groups that specialized in a lot of
| talk and no substance, so to speak. For example, fairly
| early on there was a newsgroup about abortion which
| specialized in violent arguments."
|
| That's why not only the very earliest Usenet posts,
| before Spencer started archiving in 1981 (Usenet began in
| 1979) but even some of the posts in the 1980s are still
| lost. It's too bad; today, wouldn't more of us rather see
| what was being said about abortion in 1984 than sift
| through the arcana of bug fixes in systems that have
| probably been long since retired? "It was perfectly
| reasonable from the viewpoint of stuff that we might want
| to use again, but a little sad from today's viewpoint,"
| Spencer admits.
|
| --------
|
| One of the challenges is that, even if storage comes
| close to free, the management of "everything" isn't. I've
| been going through this with cleaning up my photo
| library. It's not that a TB or so of storage matters much
| one way or the other but getting rid of dupes and near-
| dupes, adding better metadata, and so forth is a lot of
| work.
| Zababa wrote:
| I agree, it will take a lot of time and energy to sift
| through this data to find things of value. But on the
| other hand, it's not even a fraction of what would be
| necessary if the data was lost.
| ghaff wrote:
| But whose time and energy? I'm not personally going to
| spend hundreds of hours scanning and organizing stuff
| because someone someday might get some value out of it.
| Maybe a few things I find especially noteworthy or that I
| myself might want a digital copy of. But not in general.
| Zababa wrote:
| Researchers mostly. They are the one currently going
| through stuff from the Roman Empire through the 80's to
| try to understand history better. You can see a thread on
| HN that is about what people ate in the Roman Empire
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27310179. I also
| remember a youtube channel called "Depression Cooking"
| where an old lady explained what they ate and how they
| lived during the great depression. You can argue about
| the value of knowing what romans or people during the
| great depression ate, but our society seems to value
| knowing the past.
| ghaff wrote:
| My point is that future historians and researchers can
| spend however much time and energy they want. But I
| mostly will not go out of my way to assist them. Not out
| of any active desire _not_ to help them but because I 'm
| mostly not willing to put a lot of time/effort into it.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| This is perilously close to the mental illness that
| results in hoarding behavior.
|
| A friend of my mom's saved every bank statement, utility
| bill, and cancelled check (this was when you actually got
| your cancelled checks back from the bank every month).
|
| She thought her kids "might be interested in looking at
| it" some day. Of course they weren't and when she died
| they threw it all in a dumpster.
|
| Newspapers and books are one thing. Every random photo on
| your phone and piece of paper that comes through your
| home is quite another. Nobody is intersted in it. Throw
| it away.
| Zababa wrote:
| I don't understand your comment. We were precisely
| talking about "newspapers and books" which can have an
| historical value, and you present an anecdote about a
| friend of your mom that was a hoarder, while calling data
| preservation "perilously close to the mental illness that
| results in hoarding behavior.". Do you not understand the
| difference between keeping newspaper, books, photos and
| "every random [...] piece of paper that comes through
| your house"?
|
| > Nobody is intersted in it. Throw it away.
|
| How about you focus on how to live your life and I'll
| handle how to live mine?
| WalterBright wrote:
| I.e. "scan it all and let god sort it out" :-)
| ghaff wrote:
| I've actually been doing some scanning because I picked up
| a large format scanner for a non-profit I'm on the board of
| but haven't been able to arrange a handoff.
|
| The problem I find is that I have a ton of stuff that's
| neither "must keep" or "trash can" but, while I don't
| really begrudge it the space in my house, for now, it's
| also not stuff I'm going to spend hours and hours scanning
| against some future want.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > need to become more comfortable with the destruction of
| information.
|
| I've come to observe that we're much too much dominated by a
| clerkish worldview - the imperial chinese civil service exams
| (sold in the West as meritocracy) have mostly taken over the
| world.
|
| And what file clerk does not shudder at the thought of not
| keeping archives?
| caseyross wrote:
| I know we as HN readers have a tendency to look in the comments
| for a TL;DR, but this time, do yourself a favor and read the
| article first. You won't find anything below that wasn't already
| covered, with more nuance and historical context, in the original
| linked piece.
| karaterobot wrote:
| This review implies that the main use case of microfilm transfer
| was to free up shelf space by destroying books and putting them
| on microfilm. To my knowledge, that is not the case: the main use
| case was for periodicals like newspapers, magazines, and
| journals, not books.
|
| And certainly, microfilm was not intended to free up shelf space
| in the library: most items in a library's collection aren't on
| the shelves, they're stored in warehouses and basements.
|
| Paying to store miles of old newspapers was not sustainable for
| most library systems, and despite what this review implies,
| newsprint does _not_ last forever. The alternative to microfilm
| was not that we would have pristine copies of our history easily
| accessible to every library patron, it was that most copies of a
| periodical would simply be destroyed.
|
| The remit of public libraries is not to preserve books, but to
| provide access to information. There's a crucial difference.
| Microfilm was not ideal, but in a pre-digitization world it was
| about the best option available to provide access to those old
| periodicals that would otherwise have been lost, or at least hard
| to access.
| cafard wrote:
| "Guillotining books is unnecessary in order to acquire a good
| image". I don't know. I remember fondly a copier with a rounded
| screen at some university library years ago (University of
| Colorado?) where one could plunk down a bound volume and get a
| good copy without damaging the spine. I did foolishly buy a book
| --specially ordered--which turned out to have been printed from
| page images taken by copying on a flat-platen copier. Better than
| fifty percent of the pages lost anything from a letter to several
| letters in the "gutter".
|
| "based on a pseudoscientific notion that books on wood-pulp paper
| are quickly turning to dust". Some are, some aren't. Some years
| back my parents shipped me the set of Mark Twain I had read as a
| boy. An awful lot of the pages were falling apart. Perhaps our
| family hadn't protected them well enough from light and air--but
| it's hard to see how one can read a book without exposure to
| both.
|
| We recycle probably 10" of newspapers--The Washington Post and
| The New York Times--ever week. In the days before the newspapers
| lost all the revenue from classified ads, it would have been
| twice that. So a year of a big metropolitan paper from the 1990s
| could amount to forty feet of newspaper. That's a fair bit to
| make room for. I have some sympathy for the librarians there.
| ghaff wrote:
| My understanding is that there are specialized copy devices
| that can do a decent job of bound volumes. But to the basic
| point...
|
| Paper takes up a lot of space. You can't keep physical copies
| of everything forever. It is unfortunate that it seems as if
| film and poor quality scans replaced physical copies in some
| cases too early. But libraries do run out of space, especially
| well-indexed space.
| lisper wrote:
| > You can't keep physical copies of everything forever
|
| Actually, maybe that would be a good way to sequester carbon.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Not at all.
|
| I suggest you walk past a paper mill sometime to truly
| understand how environmentally horrific they are. The one
| up near me finally paid to put scrubber systems on their
| air exhaust. Before then when the wind was blowing the
| right direction it made all of north portland smell like
| rotting cabbage. Even with the scrubbers you still smell it
| at the airport occasionally.
|
| Another fun detail is the parking lot workers park in has a
| drive through car wash/rinse device. The employees use it
| every shift when they leave... or at least they should if
| they don't want the acid fumes to eat the paint off their
| car.
|
| Paper mills cause far more pollution than any potential
| carbon sequestration benefit, which would be temporary in
| the long term anyhow. Books will rot unless you put them in
| a controlled atmosphere.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| It might be true, but I can tell you I have hiked in a
| lot of completely-natural swamps that also smell like
| rotting cabbage.
| ksdale wrote:
| I don't know nearly enough about the process to challenge
| your point, but I want to point out that just because
| something smells bad or produces acid in huge quantities
| doesn't mean it's permanently bad for the environment
| like unsequestered carbon emissions.
| dmurray wrote:
| It's about a thousand times more expensive per ton to store
| the paper in libraries in archival condition than to bury
| it in a bog, so not really.
| lisper wrote:
| True, but you get value from newspapers that you don't
| get from bogs so it could even out.
| nkrisc wrote:
| An even more efficient way would be to just not cut down
| the trees to make paper in the first place.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| Actually, that's a specific thing that does _not_ work
| (at least long term). Trees die and rot if not cut down,
| and the carbon from that process has to be absorbed by
| the younger trees growing in the same space. So once a
| (mature) forest _exists_ at a given location, it will no
| longer absorb any more carbon unless some of the trees
| are cut down and used for something that doesn 't allow
| their carbon content to return to the atmosphere.
| coliveira wrote:
| The issue is that in America most books are printed on lower
| quality paper to reduce costs. This kind of paper decays much
| faster. To see how better quality books look like, look at high
| end academic publications, which are still produced to be
| stored in libraries for a long time.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| We talk a lot about archiving stuff - great, but I hardly see
| the same emphasis on _finding_ things. Search is equally
| important because thats where the rubber meets the road -
| actual utility of archive is realized and benefits of long term
| archives are reaped. Of course, there are queries such as
| "Find all newspapers for July 26, 1931" if something important
| had happened on that day - this would be an O(1) query for a
| library if they've indexed newspapers by date. Finding all
| mentions of "Bankruptcy of Cooks Mills in Lawson, Texas in
| 1931" is much harder problem if it is a physical storage. I'd
| be ok with converting all newspaper archives in digital format
| that's searchable.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Saving the physical versions is preservation of cultural
| history. The information content should definitely be
| digitized.
| tomrod wrote:
| How much of the physical version should be preserved? For
| how long?
|
| Singletons are probably not enough. But why save the
| physical aspects? Why not simply digitize people discussing
| it, take pictures of the original form, etc.? Why invest
| the time and energy maintaining items of dubious future
| need?
| dEnigma wrote:
| ,he said, ripping the first Gutenberg bible into shreds
| after copying it.
| Aloha wrote:
| a copy of a daily newspaper from Los Angeles in 1937 is
| not the same as the Gutenberg Bible.
|
| Newspapers were meant to be disposable, then and now, its
| good to store the information, but I'm highly skeptical
| of the need to hold onto the physical copies after
| scanning.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The problem of disintegrating paper is low-quality, acidic,
| "pulp" paper.
|
| Acid-free high-rag (containing actual cotton cloth) paper is
| archival quality and can and does last centuries.
|
| https://psap.library.illinois.edu/collection-id-guide/paper
|
| Pulp paper is largely an artefact of the 19th and 20th
| centuries: cheaper than rag, but also far less durable. It
| remains in use and is suitable for ephemeral content, but
| materials meant for long duration are created with archival-
| quality paper, inks, and other treatments.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Anyone that has taken Edward Tufte's[0] Data Visualization
| course (I don't know if he gives it anymore), has seen his
| favorite props, which are a couple of copies of _Euclid 's
| Geometry_. Supposedly, these are real, 400-year-old books,
| printed by a 17th-century mathematician.
|
| He likes them, because of pop-out examples of geometric
| shapes.
|
| I think they are more modern reproductions, but I could be
| wrong. They are in great shape.
|
| [0] https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/
| WalterBright wrote:
| This explains some of the crummy B+W scans of some old books on
| archive.org - they were scanned from microfilm.
| matheist wrote:
| Note that this is not written by Scott Alexander --- it's part of
| his "your book review" series in which readers submit book
| reviews and he invites his audience to read them and vote on
| them.
| fastball wrote:
| That is explicitly stated in the opening paragraph.
| smoldesu wrote:
| The irony that I'm reading this on Substack is not lost on me.
| jimhefferon wrote:
| I'm not sure why the downvotes. I see at
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot for instance that links
| have a half-life of two years. Of course, links differ from
| content, but the point is that online content is ephemeral (the
| wonderful Wayback machine nonwithstanding).
| tomComb wrote:
| But for some online content - substack, clubhouse, snapchat -
| that is there idea. Just sayin that not all online content
| should be linked in together.
| gwern wrote:
| The irony... that you're reading some brutally simplified,
| crude, static, easily-archived HTML text whose fulltext copy
| has also been mailed out to thousands of readers[1] and
| archived in their personal mail readers and computers? A lot of
| bad things one could, and I have, said about Substack's
| technology, but "it will linkrot and can't be archived" is not
| one of them.
|
| [1] ACX is #2 on the Technology Substack leaderboard so it has
| 'thousands'; since my own newsletter is ~6k and Scott is many
| times more popular than I am in our circles, I'd guess the
| number of email copies of this ACX post is closer to 50k than
| 1k.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I expect a lot is lost because of copyright laws that discourage
| scanning.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| That is not the focus of this book; I don't believe this is a
| problem libraries have had.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yes, in fact, copying for reasons of preservation and
| research is one of the few copyright exceptions that
| libraries actually have as opposed to the far-ranging get out
| of jail free card that many people seem to think they have.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| There are numerous cases of media being perserved strictly
| through _unauthorised_ copying, falling well outside even
| the broadest interpretation of any library exception.
|
| The Google Books project would be a case in point, as well
| as (AFAIU) the early stages of the Internet Archive's book-
| scanning project. Numerous early television programmes were
| only preserved through off-the-air copies by viewers. Up
| through the early 1970s, television news programmes did not
| generally preserve broadcasts, or even have a research
| library (see Epstein's _News from Nowwhere_ , 1973).
|
| I'm not sure where the Vanderbilt Television News Archive
| (dating to August 5, 1968) originated (Wikipedia claims the
| Nashville affiliate provided recordings), though I recall a
| case in which a member of the public, Marion Stokes,
| recorded nightly news broadcasts for decades.
|
| https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanderbilt_Television_News_Ar
| c...
|
| https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/11/14/recorder-the-
| mari...
| [deleted]
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