It's an interesting premise, but I do wonder how much of it is in us simply being overrun by creative works?
While we all lament the inequality of today's age, standards of living have gone up, allowing many more to set time aside for creative work, and the price of publishing has gone way down and is unhindered by strong editorial policies, that there is such a huge amount of works to sift through.
And to be able to compare and contrast, one would need to be able to go through it all.
But living standards have not gone up that much that we can spend all our awake hours in that :)
Perhaps we should look to establish incentives for academia to do this filtering/grading for us, instead of their current citation chasing/journal pub-count incentive?
And another thing to keep in mind: I've long advocated that most seminal/ground breaking ideas of the past have been breeding for some time, and it's only our tendency to assign them to individuals that has given some people status of an idol.
Perhaps they were instrumental in putting thought and ideas that came before them into self-supporting works, but thought and ideas were not necessarily (all) their own.
And if that is the case, how important is that we lose this easy "referencability"?
While we all lament the inequality of today's age, standards of living have gone up, allowing many more to set time aside for creative work, and the price of publishing has gone way down and is unhindered by strong editorial policies, that there is such a huge amount of works to sift through.
And to be able to compare and contrast, one would need to be able to go through it all.
But living standards have not gone up that much that we can spend all our awake hours in that :)
Perhaps we should look to establish incentives for academia to do this filtering/grading for us, instead of their current citation chasing/journal pub-count incentive?