Dear artists AND scientists: I will throw away your life’s work without regret if you are terrible to other people. I will re-derive it from first principles.

— Emily Lakdawalla (@elakdawalla) March 5, 2019

This way, the abyss. This attitude, as much as I like Emily, is just moronic and counterproductive. It doesn’t make anything or anyone better; it’s just virtue signaling.

The problem is, of course, that moral standards change over time, and sometimes very quickly, and not in ways that are predictable or obvious. The whole idea of jettisoning the past is attractive, especially in the context of the neoliberal mindset, but it is dangerous because in the future all of what we do and are now will be seen as problematic and tossed away just as cavalierly.

This discarding of the past leads to an ahistorical ever-present now where we must “re-derive” everything, which is an enormous waste of time and also impossible, and rather than grapple with moral quandaries or imperfection we instead just plaster over it, pretend it never happened, and invite the same mistakes again and again.

People can usually identify a problem but their solutions are often the worst of any that are available. This is yet another example.