I've seen some cold nights and bloody days They grabbed me bullets spray, they used me wrong so I sing this song 'til this day. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We can discuss this point from different angles. Experts call one manifestation of such denigration of history historical determinism. In a nutshell we think that we would know when history is made; we believe that people who, say, witnessed the stock market crash of 1929 knew then that they lived an acute historical event and that, should these events repeat themselves, they too would know about such facts. Life for us is made to resemble an adventure movie, as we know ahead of time that something big is about to happen. It is hard to imagine that people who witnessed history did not know at the time how important the moment was. Somehow all respect we may have for history does not translate well into our treatment of the present.

"You can almost always find flaws in a research paper, (partic. social science). So if you only publish papers that are flawed AND politically correct & remove those that are flawed BUT not politically correct, science becomes a political enterprise, that is, propaganda. " -

My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.