This is an excerpt from the draft of my upcoming book on great founder theory. It was originally published on SamoBurja.com. You can access the original here. Let’s say you are designing a research program, and you’re realizing that the topic you’re hoping to understand is too big to cover in your lifetime. How do you make sure that people continue your work after you’re gone? Or say you are trying to understand what Aristotle would think about artificial intelligence. Should you spend time reading and trying to understand Aristotle’s works, or can you talk to modern Aristotelian scholars and defer to their opinion? How can you make this decision? Both of these goals require an understanding of traditions of knowledge — in particular, an understanding of whether a tradition of knowledge has been successfully or unsuccessfully transmitted. But first: what is a tradition of knowledge? A tradition of knowledge is a body of knowledge that has been consecutively and successfully worked on by multiple generations of scholars or practitioners. In talking about a tradition of knowledge, we may be talking about a philosophical school of thought, or perhaps a tradition of intricate rituals in a religion, or even something as humble as the knowledge of how to fashion the best wooden toy horse, passed down from one craftsman to another. In the contemporary world, it may include something like the tacit knowledge of how a codebase really works, which senior engineers teach to junior engineers. It is useful to classify traditions of knowledge into three types: living, dead, and lost traditions. A living tradition of knowledge is a tradition whose body of knowledge has been successfully transferred, i.e., passed on to people who comprehend it (e.g., cryptography). The content of the tradition’s body of knowledge does not have to be strictly or fully accurate for the tradition to be living; it merely needs to be passed on. A dead tradition of knowledge is a tradition whose bo