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I really enjoyed tfurrows' discussion of the explosion of knowledge attendant upon the emergence of printing (and print-capitalism) and the academic focus on original thought[1]. Anthropologists have been documenting and debating occurrences of independent invention (i.e., the invention of the same technology or practice in multiple locations) vs. cultural diffusion (the spread of single inventions amongst and between populations) since at least the 1890s. It's clear that different people do independently invent the same technologies and indepedently arrive at the same conclusions on a regular basis (think of Darwin and Wallace both putting forth the idea of evolution). So why, then, is there such a focus in academia on "who was first"? Here's my attempt to answer that question, for what it's worth. I think the answers lie in the history of Euro-American scholarly traditions, and the fact that those traditions predate the massive expansion in the production of printed matter. Our traditions of evidence-based scholarship and our practices of citation are the products of Enlightenment- influenced scholarship. The scientists and scholars who devised those practices were not working with a sea of knowledge, but rather a trickle. They could expect to "drink it all." A competent scholar in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries might have been expected to gain a mastery of all of the important discoveries in his or her field. And the major objective of those Enlightenment- influenced scholars was to make significant additions to those small bodies of extant knowledge. They were focussed on (and believed in) progress. The systems of citation they devised reflect that. They valued discovery. They acknowledged additions to their collective understanding. They did not want to incentivize the re-publication of existing knowledge, but hoped instead to encourage their peers to move forward and build upon what was already known. Essentially, their position was, "You want credit? Say something new." Hence the similar insistence in those scholarly traditions that every thesis, dissertation, article and book should either address a new, unexplored aspect of the subject matter, or should say something new about an already-studied topic. Are those traditions still relevant today, when we are drowning in an endless sea of knowledge? I still see some value in insisting on the pursuit of new discoveries, so I'm not sure that a change would be good. But I'm also incredibly conservative in some ways. It's the radicals of the world who force the greatest changes and I'm not one of them. I'm interested in the Herbert Simon book. I'll have to scour ABE Books for it. One of my favourite works on the history of science is Thomas Kuhn's _The_Structure_of_Scientific_ Revolutions_, but I haven't read anything in that field for a very long time. [1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~tfurrows/phlog/2019-01-14_endlessRiver.txt