[zamfi]

Not just societies frankly -- people individually believe this as well, psychologists call it the "end-of-history illusion". Quoting Wikipedia:

> The end-of-history illusion is a psychological illusion in which individuals of all ages believe that they have experienced significant personal growth and changes in tastes up to the present moment, but will not substantially grow or mature in the future. Despite recognizing that their perceptions have evolved, individuals predict that their perceptions will remain roughly the same in the future.

(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-of-history_illusion)

[tialaramex]

I deliberately re-read what I wrote last week, last month, last year, last decade and a quarter century ago, less frequently with each jump, to be sure I'm conscious to what extent my beliefs about the world have changed, what I was wrong about and why and to re-examine past beliefs in light of present knowledge.

Google and Facebook among others actually provide a means to fetch periodic dumps of my data for this purpose, on sites like HN I use their history mechanism to look back through what I wrote e.g.

> The First Sale doctrine gives people who _buy_ something all rights needed to make use of it.

> It is... disappointing that modern courts have allowed the First Sale doctrine to be watered down so that today there's every chance you will buy something, paying good money, and then be confronted with new "terms" for how you may use the thing you purchased. But it's not in general clear that such an approach is legal.

That's me back in 2017 on a thread about GPL enforcement where people got into software licensing