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Simplicity does surely survives better.

But you clearly do have a biased picture on your head. That claim that current people value it less than ancient people is not only baseless, but quickly dismissable just by reading those genius you quote.

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Consider this argument: what % of people are in "academia" these days vs the previous centuries out of their own volition? Right now, there is an incentive to go into college, and it so happens that all sorts of people participate in the knowledge-creation process. And a bulk of the people participating in academia - are they really there for the sake of curiosity, to the pursuit of truth, etc? I'd bet that an individual in the past had less societal incentives to come into intellectual/theoretical areas and hash needless theories. So my argument is definitely not baseless (although - it is debatable)

I don't think that argument survives scrutiny. If you pick an arbitrary activity, the % of people these days that are doing that activity is gonig to be very different from previous centuries. That's just because the structure of society is very different from previous centuries. I don't think it's valid to try to draw any other inferences from there.

You are not even engaging with my argument, let alone "scrutinize" it :)

To meaningfully engage, you must study the history of education systems, how it evolved, what was the situation of scholars in the past and now. If you study those things a bit more, then my argument may make more sense to you.

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