Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What an inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen, as long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curse; for every author degenerates as soon as he begins to put pen to paper in any way for the sake of gain. The best works of the greatest men all come from the time when they had to write for nothing or for very little. And here, too, that Spanish proverb holds good, which declares that honor and money are not to be found in the same purse—honora y provecho no caben en un saco.
For professionals in technical fields where skills-assessment itself is expensive and uncertain, a book serves at a minimum as a signifier of one's own skill and ability. In exceptional circumstances, a book can lead to the author becoming part of both the skill-generating and certifying mechanism. Writing "the book" on a topic, and the teaching, lecturing, training, or technical leadership roles availed ... may ... prove worthwhile. Others then display their copies or familiarity of the book as evidence of their own ability. (Knuth, Gang of Four, Kernighan & Ritchie, etc.)
It's critical to realise that this signalling capability, as with attention, is a fundamentally rivalrous and finite space (perhaps not fully zero-sum), such that there can only be one truly leading authority or reference at a time. Though if like Martin Kleppmann you hit that spot, it can prove rewarding.
Specialties are fractal. It’s much easier to be the expert on something that 1,000 people do than something 1,000,000 people do. However, by making expert knowledge accessible it’s likely that far more people discover they really should be doing whatever it is you’re an expert at.
But the skill remains in competition with all other skills --- some specialisation or specialisations must shrink for another to grow.
With a century of universal compulsory education, US adult literacy rates have difficulty cracking 91%.[1] That's about 10 million people with no effective English literacy. (Some are literate in other languages.) Some other industrialised countries see similar results, though most fall at 98% or higher by UNESCO rankings.[2] And even basic literacy expresses a minimal language and cognitive capability.
Skill itself is finite. Over half the population, and over 2/3 in most surveyed industrialised countries, have poor, "below poor", or no computer skills at all, by an OECD survey.
The population with the demonstrated capacity to aquire any advanced computer skills seems to be about 5--10%, and this competes with all other high-skill, technical, or professional occupations. Increasingly it's a prerequisite for them, possibly shrinking that pool.
Again, the larger point is that attention, a key component of skills acquisition, is rivalrous, in both individuals and populations
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Notes:
1. NCES reports 4% "could not participate", 4.1% "below level 1', and 12.9% "level 1", or 21% "low English literacy" ages 16--65, in 2012 and 2014, a level insufficient "to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences".
> With a century of universal compulsory education, US adult literacy rates have difficulty cracking 91%.[1] That's about 10 million people with no effective English literacy. (Some are literate in other languages.) Some other industrialised countries see similar results, though most fall at 98% or higher by UNESCO rankings.[2]
I drilled into the literacy reports cited by [1], eventually landing at [3]. From those results, the US is not especially anomalous compared to other countries, although breaking down by nativity does suggest that the US has an anomalously large gap between native-born adults and immigrant adults.
The UNESCO rankings and the PIAAC rankings give substantially different results by observing scores. There's a few countries in both: Chile, Cyprus, Estonia, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Turkey. Most of those countries are given >99% literacy rates by UNESCO, but have a few percent classified as "Below Level 1" by PIAAC, indicating that UNESCO has a much looser definition than PIAAC.
I can't tell you which ranking is better correlated to what a naïve observer would think of as "literate," but the two rankings are definitely measuring different things.
Just to note, I realised much of this when composing and citing my reply above. US NCES and UNESCO literacy metrics and criteria do seem to differ pretty materially.
There are other evidences of persistent barriers to skills and rationality attainment though, with fairly strong evidence.
US high school graduation rates reached a pretty firm plateau in about 1950, having risen from six percent in 1900. Much of the ballyhoo over secondary education (test scores vs. graduation rates) has involved trading one against the other, though improvements in fundamental living standards for the poorest (well mother/baby care, nutrition, housing, environmental contaminants most especially heavy metals, reduced general precarity) have also contributed greatly, as has equality of access. All of these being before pedagogical factors are considered --- raiseing the floor is the most cost-effective way of raising numerous population averages.
Hiher-education attainment similarly shows some resistance to expansion, as well as questions regarding comparability over time. Bachellors, Masters, and PhD inflation seem likely. There are also cases where standards seem to have tightened somewhat: there was a biography of a 19th century American who was admitted to the bar in a Southern state on the basis of a brief interview, but who declined the practived on account of the obviously lax standards evidenced. (Ran across recently via Wikipedia, though the details escape me.)
Back to literacy, the US seems to struggle to achieve ~95% at a minimum, the number I'd initially written above, though by its own measure (assuming all those unable to participate in the assessment are illiterate) as low as 91%.
The UNESCO values strike me as somewhat suspiciously high. I'm not sure that's warranted suspicion, but it suggests investigating methods more deeply.
The shift in skills tends to be advantageous to the new experts not the old ones. The great books on using slide rules have already been written, but their unlikely to find a new following.
Java applet‘s and a host of other tech is simply not coming back. Which is why experts often become advocates, they want their skills to remain relevant.
If one presumes a culture with an increasing overall complexity level, then the circumstance is not one of simply obsoleting technologies and skillsets being replaced, but of competition among multiple essential skillsets.
Complexity expands to meet all constraint boundaries.
Society is still largely bound by the human intellect. So, I don’t think overall complexity is actually increasing significantly. It’s more a question of how obvious the complexity is.
20, 50, and 100 years too seem like a reasonable point of comparison.
One simple approach is hand people old objective tests for subjects like math under the original rules. If people where simply becoming more competent in all areas then average scores should be higher today, but that’s not what happens.
Measuring complexity more specifically is probably easiest done by using equivalent jobs and compare how long each take to achieve competence. McDonald’s cooks take less time to train now vs the 1970’s, but I am not sure how that compares across industries.
Math is pardon the pun, fractal in nature. Geometry skills may be reasonably common, but topology and group theory for example are rarely taught in high school or their not even part of most collages general education requirements.
Go back 50 years and people may have been studying geometry but they covered significantly different areas.
Is it more or less complex than 20, 50, and 100 years ago?
How many subspecialisations have groups 9f 50, or 10, or5, or 1, who actually understand them?
At what scale of living practice does knowledge fail to be cultural and become merely transient, lodged for a few years in a few minds, perhaps mouldering for a few decades in a fiche copy of a once-read dissertation?
In terms of actually useful mathematics, not much. But, that’s missing the point. 100 years ago people studied chess as hard as they could, without machine assistance they didn’t become as skilled but that doesn’t mean chess somehow became more or less complex. Lawyers are dealing with roughly equivalent legal systems, and so it goes.
Mathematicians may have discovered say more digits of pi through useful tools, but at the core mathematicians are about as intelligent and still working just as hard. We have more mathematicians today in large part because global population has increased 4x in the last hundred years. However, go back 100 years and most people didn’t understand what hyper specialized work was being done.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Authorship"
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Authorship
For professionals in technical fields where skills-assessment itself is expensive and uncertain, a book serves at a minimum as a signifier of one's own skill and ability. In exceptional circumstances, a book can lead to the author becoming part of both the skill-generating and certifying mechanism. Writing "the book" on a topic, and the teaching, lecturing, training, or technical leadership roles availed ... may ... prove worthwhile. Others then display their copies or familiarity of the book as evidence of their own ability. (Knuth, Gang of Four, Kernighan & Ritchie, etc.)
It's critical to realise that this signalling capability, as with attention, is a fundamentally rivalrous and finite space (perhaps not fully zero-sum), such that there can only be one truly leading authority or reference at a time. Though if like Martin Kleppmann you hit that spot, it can prove rewarding.