Today I attended a technical talk in which it was obvious that the author had no grasp of the history of the topic he was discussing. It was as though somebody started off a talk by saying “I read somewhere about this thing called relativity,” but they had never heard of Albert Einstein.
I am wondering whether this is a generational shift in our culture. As we go from books to the Web to social media feeds, maybe provenance — the true knowledge of where something originated — will gradually fall by the wayside.
Why cite original sources if you can just refer to something that you happened to read somewhere? That strategy may sound convenient in the moment, but the problem is that erasing history incurs a large cost.
More tomorrow.