Basia Halliop

William, it sounds like what Don's talking about is sort of like taking photocopies of photocopies, or transmitting a signal across a long distance (in both cases you get gradually fuzzier with time).

I.e., if each generation's understanding of what they are aiming for depends primarily on the accuracy of their copy of the previous generation or two before them (and they are unable to test their copy or generate new first-hand knowledge as Don suggests, as an error correction measure), then it's like a lossy system, or a system with distortion. (Each generation gets just slightly different from the previous one, but without some kind of error-detection the difference will on average be random and on average won't just happen to be an improvement). In such a system the degree of accuracy depends highly on the distance from the source. In such a system you can improve the transmission and make the decay (or distortion) slower, but without some kind of sanity checking along the way it's just slower decay.

Makes sense, actually.