Why do some forms of technology change so little? Is it because they have already reached an ideal form?

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Prerequisites: None.

Originally Written: September 2017.

Confidence Level: I got into an argument with someone while driving across the country in the middle of the night. This kept him awake.

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The best violins were made between 1656 and 1737 in Cremona, Italy by Antonio Stradivari.^[1]The 12 Most Expensive Violins Of All Time. All but one of them are Stradivaris or Guarneris and were made in seventeenth or eighteenth century.

That’s funny …

We believe in technological progress. We have ample evidence to support this belief. Teslas are objectively better than Model Ts – or stagecoaches. Backhoes are objectively better than wheelbarrows. Barbed wire fences are objectively better than split rail fences. Almost all manufactured things are better today than they were hundreds of years ago.

Except violins.

Why hasn’t the design of violins improved in hundreds of years?

Several objections could be made:

• Violins are not the most popular instruments, so there is less incentive to improve them than there is to improve guitars. But violins were the most popular instruments until the twentieth century and they hadn’t improved by then. Our belief in technological progress also usually extends to niche products, so they should continue to get better as long as there is a market for them.
• There has been a recent significant technological advance: electric violins. But calling an electric violin a violin is like strapping a jet engine to a bicycle and calling it a motorcycle. The differences are so great that it makes more sense to consider the electric violin a new instrument than an improvement on violin design.
• The tools used to make violins have improved. This might be true, but improvements in the manufacturing process do not have to correspond to improvements in the manufactured product itself.
• Violins improve as they age. If you took the best violins made today and aged them for 300 years, they might be as good as Stradivarius violins are today. Some modern violins even perform well in blind tests against Stradivarius violins.^[2]Here is a blind test from 2014. Perhaps part of the value of old violins comes from their reputation and we don’t give modern violins enough credit. Even if this were true, making something as good as it was made in the 1600’s isn’t a sign of technological progress.

There have been other instances where technological progress stalled. Perhaps by considering these, we can shed some light on the violin puzzle.

The fall of the Western Roman Empire led to a period of technological regression. The ability to make certain materials, such as concrete, was lost entirely. Metallurgy regressed significantly. This isn’t to say that the Early Middle Ages were completely devoid of technological progress. Wheelbarrows and stirrups became widespread in Europe during this time. But still, much was lost during this civilizational collapse. Even more dramatic civilizational collapses have occurred in the pre-Columbian Americas, including the Maya of the Yucatan and Cahokia near St. Louis.

This is not a plausible model for the stagnation of violin making because there hasn’t been a civilizational collapse in the West since the eighteenth century. We still have access to Stradivari’s notes on how to make violins. There are violin makers today who can trace the lineages of their apprenticeships back to Stradivari. The knowledge of violin making has not been lost.

Since writing this, I have encountered an even more ridiculous example: sheep shears:

The availability of iron for tools represented a fairly major change. Iron, unlike bronze or copper, is springy which makes the standard design of sheep shears (two blades, connected by a u-shaped or w-shaped metal span called a ‘bow’ (see the image)) and the spring action (the bending and springing back into place of the metal span) possible. The basic design of these blade shears has remained almost entirely unchanged since at least the 8th century BC, with the only major difference I’ve seen being that modern blade shears tend to favor a ‘w-shape’ to the hinge, while ancient shears are made with a simpler u-shape. Ancient iron shears generally varied between 10 to 15cm in length (generally closer to 15 than to 10) and modern shears…generally vary between 10cm and 18.5cm in length; roughly the same size. Sometimes – more often than you might think – the ideal form of an unpowered tool was developed fairly early and then subsequently changed very little.

– ACOUP

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Another field which has not seen any advances in hundreds of years is arithmetic: the procedures by which people manipulate numbers by hand. Long division, the most difficult part of arithmetic, became well known in Europe by around 1600,^[3]by Henry Briggs but the procedure had been introduced for polynomials by Ibn Yahya al-Maghribi Al-Samawal in the 1100s.^[4]one of the great medieval Muslim mathematicians Children today still use the same procedure to divide large numbers that people centuries ago used. Although there have been many developments in math since then, arithmetic has remained stagnant. Why?

It appears as though there is a best way to do arithmetic. Once we’ve discovered that best technique, no more improvements can be made.

This is a Platonic idea of arithmetic. Plato believed that the world consists of perfect and unchanging ideas or “forms” and that all physical objects or observed phenomena are mere shadows of them.^[5]As discussed in the Allegory of the Cave. We should be trying to understand the true idea behind each feature of our world rather than focusing on the experiences and objects themselves.

Platonism is no longer widely believed. We tend to think that things are more real than the ideas we use to describe them. The only place that Platonism is still common is for math. Regardless of what sort of physical objects exist in the world, their behavior can never contradict the laws of mathematics. The number “4” exists prior to any objects. Any physical thing or collection of things is at most a representation of “4”. The theorems of mathematics and logic seem to be built into the structure of reality.

This is why arithmetic has not been improved for hundreds of years. Once we discovered the best way of doing arithmetic, there can be no further improvements.

Is this also true for violins? Have no improvements been made because we’ve already discovered the ideal structure for the instrument? Does the structure of reality contain a Platonic form for the violin? Or sheep shears?