It <i>very</i> obviously is the result of many other ideas, and I won&#x27;t deny that. However, I have not seen this particular focus sharpened down to this brevity anywhere else.<p>It came from a slightly different source for me, but a similar one. Imagine you&#x27;re thrust back in time 200-400 years, and let&#x27;s just stick you in England or something where you&#x27;ve got a University and a willing audience to learn. How do you transfer as much knowledge as possible, as quickly as possible? Well, as much as I think the Prime Directive of Star Trek is a bit of a crock as a <i>moral</i> principle [1], as a descriptive principle we can see there&#x27;s some truth to it today, if we look around with open eyes... simply transferring <i>knowledge</i> without transferring the ability to develop it yourself, or, if you prefer, transferring wisdom, is a dangerous thing to do, and tends not to produce lasting results. So I asked myself what my thesis would be, what&#x27;s something short and simple that I would repeatedly hammer on? And that&#x27;s what I came up with.<p>I would also do that thing that some of the best teachers do, where they tell you &quot;I&#x27;m going to deliberately screw up derivations in class, it&#x27;s on you to catch them&quot;, to try to avoid being treated as personally reliable myself. (The &quot;Dark Ages&quot; are widely misunderstood and were not the barren wasteland of knowledge advancement the popular conception has of it, but I do think you could make a good case that they were indeed slowed down by over-privileging Aristotle and the other such classical authors for too long.)<p>[1]: Specifically, it leaves a rich space of options between &quot;completely leaving the society in poverty to their own devices&quot; and &quot;just blunder in and start selling tech with wild abandon&quot; completely unexplored. It&#x27;s a <i>great</i> dramatic device, I really have no problem with it within the show itself, but it doesn&#x27;t travel out of that context well.