| Not at all. Over the pandemic I got interested in late bronze age history, and I've been finding all sorts of interesting things cross-correlating papers in the past decade or so in different domains with ancient texts, etc. Fascinating stuff, and a lot I think is currently escaping the specialization blindness of modern academia. There's no way I could have done any of that before the current plethora of information. In fact, for one book series I had to contact the publisher to get a PDF version so I could search it for fragmentary names of sea peoples. If anything, what I'm growing more wary of is the increased trend of gating information behind paywalls, and the signal to noise ratio caused by blogspam. It's arguably much easier to find out what a Luwian bilingual inscription about Mopsus from the 8th century BCE says than it is to find out which application tracing provider has the best pricing model for small businesses. I don't think that's a healthy direction for information, and suspect it's about to get MUCH worse as AI generated text becomes an increasingly low barrier to entry and increasingly higher altitude. |