[ip26]

Is youth constantly reinventing solutions to already solved problems due to amnesia, or are they perhaps creating new ways to reason about already identified problems?

I believe the commonly accepted viewpoint is simply that the established generations have too many accumulated biases or baggage, too much at stake, or dug themselves in too deep of a hole to consider new facts or new approaches to old problems. E.g. the famous quote:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

[panzagl]

The commonly accepted viewpoint of the young, maybe.

But after you've seen the same things re-invented several times only for each effort to run into the same brick wall, at some point you want off the merry-go-round.