"historically illiterate" are pretty strong words. Actually everyone is historically illiterate by these standards because the ideas that any one person is fam

"historically illiterate" are pretty strong words. Actually everyone is historically illiterate by these standards because the ideas that any one person is familiar with is a vanishingly small percentage of all the ideas the human race has ever had. Furthermore, the origins of ideas are impossible to trace with any great precision. Is the most famous person the person with the best ideas? Was the person with access to the printing press the person with the best ideas? Frankly it strikes me as a form of intellectual hipsterism to be bothered so much by this. Rich Hickey gained fame for this because he stated an idea very clearly and compellingly, this is non-trivial and should not be so flippantly dismissed as just recyling old ideas—all your ideas are recycled too. https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/