No, not stone tablets.
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for
Askleo.com.
One of my more popular YouTube videos is What's the Best Long Term Storage Media?
Tips to avoid losing data in your lifetime.
There'll be a link for it down below.
It's companion article, also what's the best long term storage media is
Askleo.com/5787.
In that article and in that companion
video, I discuss basically approaches to making
sure that the data you have today is something that will still be available
for you if you want it to be in 20 or 50 or 100 years.
It's not as simple as just picking some media.
It's actually a strategy and an approach to dealing with that media over time.
However,
one of the most common comments I get on that YouTube video
boils down to suggesting that stone tablets were pretty cool.
Now, nobody is suggesting that we use stone tablets for data storage today.
But the fact that it comes up so often
as supposedly being this really good long term storage method,
actually indicates that people are missing something very, very important.
And that in turn raises some issues around
how we think about the data that we see every day.
This is an example of how a limited set of informationcauses us to draw conclusions
that that limited set of information doesn't warrant or doesn't support.
Why do I say limited information?
Well, it's this. Consider,
yes, there are thousands and thousands of stone tablets with data,
with information that has been preserved for thousands of years.
That's honestly pretty cool.
And there's a lot of information
that archeologists and historians are pulling from those tablets.
However, those tablets are really only a small
percentage of the number of tablets that were actually created back in those days.
In other words, the vast majority of stone tablets
with information written on them did not survive.
The fact that some did,
while interesting and pretty cool, does not mean they're a great storage
mechanism when so many others didn't make it.
This is an example of something that's called survivorship bias.
By that it means that you take a look
at the data you have, stone tablets survived,
but you're biasing your conclusion based on an insufficient amount of data.
The number that survived does not represent the number that were created,
and it does not take into account the number that failed.
You're only looking at the survivors.
Now, this is an important thing to remember and realize because it
applies to way more than data storage in stone tablets.
Honestly, this is a philosophical issue that really is an issue for our time.
It applies to everything from our
technology to politics, to our philosophical discussions and more.
The bottom line here is that
you're not taking into account data that is really,
really important and would affect your decision on whether or not,
in this case, stone tablets, really make for a good long term storage mechanism.
They don't.
Now, there are a couple of other things that actually have some really interesting
parallels still with respect to technology using stone tablets as an example.
For example, many of the stone tablets that have survived are partial.
In other words, they're incomplete.
A piece of the stone has broken off or they're part of a larger set,
or there's just something about that that says the data is there,
but it's not all of the data that should have been there.
The data is incomplete.
The technological equivalent might be
having a file for which one portion of that file has
become corrupt or missing, or it's on a bad sector that you can't get at anymore.
That small portion of that file has been lost.
Now, that could mean very little.
It could mean that the data that's
remaining is sufficient to make sense of the file.
But it's also the case that it is possible
that the data that was lost was in fact very important, and missing it,
renders the entire file, the entire amount of remaining data, useless.
In reality, we're somewhere in between. And in reality,
when it comes to technology, typically catastrophic failures are
a little bit more than just a bad sector somewhere.
But the majority of these surviving stone tablets are in fact missing pieces.
They are incomplete.
And whether or not that affects their usefulness, their viability, again,
as having retained information over thousands of years is unclear.
But it's pretty clear that they are unreliable.
And finally, this is one that I found very, very fascinating.
One of the comments I get about long term
data storage when it comes to computers and files and so forth is, Okay, great.
We've got this file in a format we can use today.
How do we know that even if we can
preserve that file for 100 years, that 100 years from now,
there will be software that knows how to interpret that?
It's a very valid criticism.
And in fact, one of the reasons we want to focus on file formats that are common,
that are more likely to be preserved over the long term.
For example, I expect Doc X to be around
for a very, very long time, if not in use, at least in ways that can be read.
I actually expect PDF to be significantly
longer lived simply because it's intended as a document exchange format.
It was intended to replace paper.
Well, to replace paper,
that means you need to be able to read it 100 or 200 or 1,000 years from now.
I expect that the technology of the future
will certainly handle those common file formats today.
Where things get weird is when the file
format is less common, less popular, and more obscure.
There are absolutely specialized tools that are no longer in development and are
no longer around that use custom file formats that are no longer readable.
It's certainly possible to create software that could read those file
formats, but the bottom line is that in many cases it's not worth
the effort, or there isn't enough demand, or the effort really is too high.
That same thing applies to our stone tablets.
Many of the stone tablets are written in ancient languages,
some of them that we don't even understand today or understand completely.
So did they survive if we can't understand what's on them?
It's unclear.
There actually is a very interesting
project going on that is in the process of taking cuneform tablets
and applying artificial intelligence to interpret them, to understand them,
and make them readable, so to speak, in our current vernacular.
Finally, one more that I will throw out
just because it's a bias that is semi related to what I've been talking about.
I call it failure bias.
This is the case where someone experiences something that didn't work the way they
expected it to, or that literally did break for them.
They immediately assume that that failure is happening to everyone when in reality
it's happening only to a few or potentially only to that one person.
Failure bias.
Don't assume that what's happening to you is happening to everyone.
So the bottom line here is, well, when it comes to long term dates,
data storage, absolutely keep rolling your data forward.
In other words, every few years, copy it to new and current media that is
going to be supported for, say, another five or 10 years, and you're sure of it.
That way, your information is always on current media,
and you don't really have to worry quite as much about what's going to last
the longest as long as you keep copying it forward.
But as I said, that's not really what this video is about.
This is more about the idea of really understanding the biases and making
decisions or drawing conclusions from the correct set of data.
Survivorship bias is really important
to understand because it really does happen a lot.
It is very common for us to draw
inappropriate conclusions based on a subset of the data that we should
really be looking at to draw a more correct and accurate conclusion.
The Wikipedia article on survivorship bias
has a really good example of this in World War II where
understanding survivorship bias actually ended up saving lives.
For updates, for comments,
for links related to this topic and more, visit
Askleo.Com/161692.
I'm Leo Notenboom and this is Askleo.com.
Thanks for watching.