But with regard to our general failure to want to think historically or to study the past in a meaningful way, we live largely in a world where there’s a crisis of other forms of knowledge. We don’t read poems to know things. I think we should. We think the only way you can know something now is with data, and the bigger the data, the better. The purpose of the computer, working with that kind of data, is to make predictions about the future. Which is to say, all we seem to want to know is about the future and not about the past.
