I really enjoyed tfurrows' discussion of the explosion of
knowledge attendant upon the emergence of printing (and
print-capitalism) and the academic focus on original
thought[1]. Anthropologists have been documenting and
debating occurrences of independent invention (i.e., the
invention of the same technology or practice in multiple
locations) vs. cultural diffusion (the spread of single
inventions amongst and between populations) since at least
the 1890s. It's clear that different people do independently
invent the same technologies and indepedently arrive at the
same conclusions on a regular basis (think of Darwin and
Wallace both putting forth the idea of evolution).

So why, then, is there such a focus in academia on "who was
first"?

Here's my attempt to answer that question, for what it's
worth.

I think the answers lie in the history of Euro-American
scholarly traditions, and the fact that those traditions
predate the massive expansion in the production of printed
matter.

Our traditions of evidence-based scholarship and our
practices of citation are the products of Enlightenment-
influenced scholarship. The scientists and scholars who
devised those practices were not working with a sea of
knowledge, but rather a trickle. They could expect to "drink
it all." A competent scholar in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries might have been expected to gain a
mastery of all of the important discoveries in his or her
field. And the major objective of those Enlightenment-
influenced scholars was to make significant additions to
those small bodies of extant knowledge. They were focussed
on (and believed in) progress. The systems of citation they
devised reflect that. They valued discovery. They
acknowledged additions to their collective understanding.
They did not want to incentivize the re-publication of
existing knowledge, but hoped instead to encourage their
peers to move forward and build upon what was already known.
Essentially, their position was, "You want credit? Say
something new." Hence the similar insistence in those
scholarly traditions that every thesis, dissertation,
article and book should either address a new, unexplored
aspect of the subject matter, or should say something new
about an already-studied topic.

Are those traditions still relevant today, when we are
drowning in an endless sea of knowledge? I still see some
value in insisting on the pursuit of new discoveries, so I'm
not sure that a change would be good. But I'm also
incredibly conservative in some ways. It's the radicals of
the world who force the greatest changes and I'm not one of
them.

I'm interested in the Herbert Simon book. I'll have to scour
ABE Books for it. One of my favourite works on the history
of science is Thomas Kuhn's _The_Structure_of_Scientific_
Revolutions_, but I haven't read anything in that field for
a very long time.

[1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~tfurrows/phlog/2019-01-14_endlessRiver.txt