This reminds me of a quote from Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics:
As the fourth-century Chinese philosopher Xiaoguang Li once observed, we tend to think of earlier civilizations as being more venerable, like a wise old ancestor who has seen many things; but in fact later civilizations are older than earlier civilizations, because the future has a longer history than the past. Thus I hope it will increase, rather than decrease, your opinion of his wisdom if I now inform you that actually Xiaoguang “Mike” Li is a friend of mine who observed this in 2002.
I once lent Xiaoguang “Mike” Li my copy of “Probability Theory: The Logic of Science”. Mike Li read some of it, and then came back and said:
“Wow… it’s like Jaynes is a thousand-year-old vampire.”
Then Mike said, “No, wait, let me explain that—” and I said, “No, I know exactly what you mean.” It’s a convention in fantasy literature that the older a vampire gets, the more powerful they become.
This reminds me of a quote from Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics:
This is getting very tangential, but the moment I saw “Xiaoguang Li” I thought of the thousand year old vampire quote: