The Human Advantage – Generational Teaching and Archiving

Reading time: 3.5 min

Teaching and archiving

Humans have the special ability of teaching and archiving knowledge with extremely high accuracy and precision. We accomplish this via verbal or non-verbal communication, writing, drawing, and recording, among others.

This allows us to pass on knowledge, skills, experience, and wisdom across many generations. This is arguably a unique advantage humans have over other highly intelligent organisms such as certain birds, dolphins, and certain primates (excluding ourselves).

When we consume such archived forms of knowledge, we are reaching across time and space, accessing the knowledge of those in the past and across the entire planet. This grants us the ability to stand on the shoulders of giants.

Libraries and in the modern day, the internet, is this advantage taken to the extreme. What other organism can, at will, draw upon the knowledge and resources created by other individuals at any point in time, to this scale?

Those who have the opportunity to access this vast net of knowledge should take advantage of it. Learning new things became drastically easier with the widespread adoption of the internet. The teachings of those in the