Really?
It would be bad even if the premise were true. Then the pure idea of 'yeah, we have to let you all die because otherwise all the shiny new ideas would not prosper' is so much out of proportion. Most people do not even work in idea maintaining, but do pretty mundane jobs, or moonlight as grandparents.
Over time I notice the occasional instance of ageism in young people. It is very easy to ignore collected experiences of others, and in some cases bad. It would be awesome to have people still around that lived through history. Instead each generation to some degree forgets what was before.
It hurts me each time someone (my age or younger) claims how he does not care about history at all, because -
The premise is true and generally accepted as such; a slightly more formal treatment was given by Kuhn, but it amounts roughly to "new scientists produce advancements, old scientists stick to dogma, the status of oldies is so powerful they have to die or retire for advancements to prosper."
Every month on the month, Less Wrong has a thread where we post Deep Wisdom from the Masters. I saw that nobody did this yet for December for some reason, so I figured I could do it myself.
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