The Signal and the Noise

In Nate Silver’s recent best selling book, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don’t, the Great Predictor begins with a history lesson.He begins with a brief history of what he considers the information age. The lesson does not begin with the personal computer or the internet, but with perhaps the first info-tech invention:

The pursuit of knowledge seemed inherently futile, if not altogether vain. If today we feel a sense of impermanence because things are changing so rapidly, impermanence was a far more literal for the generations before us. There was “nothing new under the sun,” as the beautiful Bible verses in Ecclesiastes put it — not so much because everything had been discovered but because everything would be forgotten.

The printing press changed that, and did so permanently and profoundly. Almost overnight, the cost of producing a book decreased by about three hundred times, so a book that might have cost $20,000 in today’s dollars instead cost $70… The number of books being produced grew exponentially, increasing by about thirty times in the first century after the printing press was invented.

In the recent MFA residency period, a good portion of breath went to the discussing of and pondering about publishing and its future. Some of the guest lecturers of previous residency periods suggested the publishing industry is dying, that Amazon, with its selling books at a loss and pricing out all local book sellers, was mere years away from soldering shut the vault of diversity that had been the publishing industry. Others bemoaned the written word would become purely digital, that no physical scrap would survive.

Allow me to posit an alternative. Allow me to suggest we learn from the ebbing past, we ask History what becomes of outdated technology. Because History says progress does not mean deletion.