[namaria]

Time is a great filter. That's why it's commonplace to complain about 'art these days' and to be nostalgic about past books and music.

Some of the greatest, most interesting books I've ever read are thousands of years old.

[rixed]

You can't know wether time is a good filter without assessing the value of what's been lost forever, can you?

[namaria]

I can't know precisely how good of a filter it is but I'm not interested in finding out a definite figure.

I have read enough great stuff from picking up a book from 300 BCE or so and I've seen enough BS ghost written flavor of the month non-fiction to know it's good enough heuristics to suggest it in this forum.

[samatman]

A filter can be good in a couple of ways: it can filter out ~all of what you don't want, and/or ~none of what you do want.

Time is a good filter in the first way, which makes it a good filter. Because a filter which doesn't substantially do the first of these things isn't actually filtering: the null filter filters none of what you do want, by failing to reduce the data stream in any way.

[hierophantic]

Time works wonderfully for books. It is a different problem with music though because I want to find newer stuff than Debussy and Miles Davis.