Plenty of fields (like cognitive science, linguistics, mathematical causality) don’t seem to have had many or most of their seminal works published until after the 1980′s; also the 1980′s marked a huge increase in the availability of computers and networking, which is a huge boon to scientific research.
These are just guesses from the top of my head and glances at wikipedia, but also having born in the 80s I’m probably biased.
“The 1980s” is a somewhat arbitrary line, but looking at the history of linguistics on wikipedia, lots of big changes happened in the 1960s and 1970s, and many important subfields of linguistics have steadily gained ground “From roughly 1980 onwards.”
If someone had interests relevant to mathematics, and they only studied math from before 1900, they would be missing a great number of seminal works, and have very little knowledge of modern mathematics, even if there were tons of amazing and influential mathematicians before that point.
If someone had interests relevant to mathematics, and they only studied math from before 1900, they would be missing a great number of seminal works, and have very little knowledge of modern mathematics, even if there were tons of amazing and influential mathematicians before that point.
But your original claim was not “study the new stuff, it’s better”, you claim was that there were no advances before the new stuff.
That was not what I intended my original claim to be, and I think the spirit of lukeprog’s post was centered on the claim that one should “study the new stuff, it’s better.”
If I didn’t communicate that that was my intention clearly, I’m sorry, I hope we’re on the same page now.
Plenty of fields (like cognitive science, linguistics, mathematical causality) don’t seem to have had many or most of their seminal works published until after the 1980′s; also the 1980′s marked a huge increase in the availability of computers and networking, which is a huge boon to scientific research.
These are just guesses from the top of my head and glances at wikipedia, but also having born in the 80s I’m probably biased.
So much for Grimm, Saussure and Chomsky.
I guess that should be ”...had many seminal...”
“The 1980s” is a somewhat arbitrary line, but looking at the history of linguistics on wikipedia, lots of big changes happened in the 1960s and 1970s, and many important subfields of linguistics have steadily gained ground “From roughly 1980 onwards.”
If someone had interests relevant to mathematics, and they only studied math from before 1900, they would be missing a great number of seminal works, and have very little knowledge of modern mathematics, even if there were tons of amazing and influential mathematicians before that point.
But your original claim was not “study the new stuff, it’s better”, you claim was that there were no advances before the new stuff.
That was not what I intended my original claim to be, and I think the spirit of lukeprog’s post was centered on the claim that one should “study the new stuff, it’s better.”
If I didn’t communicate that that was my intention clearly, I’m sorry, I hope we’re on the same page now.