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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

Good. Every time we forget the old world, we reinvent it better

>Every time we forget the old world, we reinvent it better

Historically that has not been the case for most of human history. As odd as it might seem, in general the rediscovery of the accomplishments ancient world has been a great driver towards progress. The periods when the accomplishments of the past were lost and fully forgotten were the sorts of times people call Dark Ages.

Are we currently in a Digital Dark Age because the pace of content creation has far outstripped our ability to preserve that content for posterity?

Obviously we can’t be sure how the current era will be viewed from the far future, but your comment made me realize that the current situation has similarities to that dark age.

Actually the cities that are the most modern and progress-oriented today are the ones that felt comfortable bulldozing all relics of the past.

(or the ones where the "old city" was destroyed in brutal urban warfare)

Responding to a statement about "for most of human history" with a reference to a very recent event isn't something you should begin with "actually" since it's not a reply to what I was saying, it's just your own tangent. Also, actually, even in the early modern period people were still looking to the past for inspiration even when they were reusing land - there's far more to the past than mere buildings.

You mean the cities that are most expensive and worst to live in, because they didn't have relics of the past putting brakes on the greed of real estate owners and developers?

This is word salad.

Let me simplify then: modern cities suck. They're soul-crushing, sad places to live in. A lot of that has to do with modern construction and economic philosophy which you so praise.

God thanks that not all cities are oriented to be most modern and progress oriented and some just optimize for livability and comfort

Or we think we do, giving ourselves a much needed boost to ego and letting the cycle continue and keep everyone happy. Always assuming that we have made things "simple" because we know our way and not someone else's etc. That being said there's a lot of progress in the end but we take a lot of steps backwards to get there.

Each generation thinks they are so much smarter than the previous.

If this wasn’t true, we couldn’t know it.

"Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it" - George Santayana

Those who remember it keep repeating it alright

It's not reinvented, it's iterated, knowingly or not. And, you can only move towards optimization by knowing your derivative.

Having forgotten the old world, how would we know?

That is so true. Use to be that slaves knew they were slaves. We’re much better at hiding that.

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