The Original Attention Crisis
Original excerpt
I recently heard from a historian of science at All Souls College, Oxford. He forwarded me an essay he wrote about Nicolaus Steno, a seventeenth-century anatomist and geologist who was later ordained as a Catholic Bishop.
Steno’s training as a scholar unfolded in a period challenged by a novel problem: information overload. Here’s how the essay describes it:
“Books were a leading distraction in the early modern period—and how envious we should be of those times. From the 1500s onward, with the development of the printing press and the humanist revival of ancient philosophies, knowledge became available at a much greater pace than ever before.”
This created pressing questions for aspiring…
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