Seeing things as more important because they are recent.
New knowledge is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing when you compare medieval to contemporary findings in medicine, ethics, physics. It is also a curse because it seems our minds are made to select for new information even at a steep cost of its quality.
Examples
- Tyler Cowen calls it recency bias. “In politics and economics, too many predictions give disproportionate weight to the events of the recent past.” Link
- Once my therapist said to me a mental model that is simple and sticked for years. When you are sad it’s often helpful to recall that very very likely this is only a temporary state. Recency bias works If you are sad it may feel a
- I tend to not engage with a carefully created archive of great epiphanies filtered through years of archives
- A belief that I probably remember things better than I really remember (I am in a process of forgetting even though the strongest ideas stick more)
- I can stumble upon something of higher quality right now (the more time passes the less likely it is)