Talk:Chronological snobbery

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Name for the opposite fallacy?

What do you call it when someone assumes that older things are better? Does that fallacy have a name of its own? I ask only because it seems to be more common than the subject of this article but that is just a guess on my part. Boris B 07:07, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Maybe "appeal to tradition"? David Bergan 04:50, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

What if it isn't things that are done now, but in some forgotten Golden Age? Like the way in fantasy books, all the best weapons and armor were forged in the distant past, when everyone was good and noble and the world should try and get back to that... Thanos6 06:48, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

That would be Romanticism. (I'd know, since I am one.) :) Jrbaker (talk) 21:35, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

This fallacy falls in the category argumentum ad novitatem, appeal to novelty, so the opposite would indeed be argumentum ad antiquitatem, appeal to tradition. 108.171.135.185 (talk) 12:36, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia-worthy?

Does this page even belong on Wikipedia? The only person cited in the article who uses the term is C.S. Lewis, both times from the same book, so it doesn't strike me as having particular scholarly or cultural currency. The other quotation does not use the term, is not even strictly the same idea, and links to two articles which do not exist. Can anyone find more sources for this topic? If not, this strikes me more as C.S. Lewis fandom that doesn't belong on Wikipedia. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.234.65.164 (talk) 05:05, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Apparently anonymous didn't notice the references to Owen Barfield and G. B. Tennyson in the article...

The Tennyson reference is the one to which I am referring as the "other quotation." See the above criticism. I also question whether the mention of Barfield is enough to satisfy notability requirements, as the reference is only in collaboration with Lewis, according to the article; Barfield was also apparently a friend of Lewis, which I think disqualifies him as satisfying the "significant coverage" aspect of notability. My criticisms still stand, I believe. Regardless, this article would definitely benefit from more diverse and numerous sources. Without them, its notability is certainly questionable. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.234.65.164 (talk) 17:01, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

So... we should just make a hodge-podge list of every time the term Chronological Snobbery was mentioned in a book or webpage? Here's what I could find in 1 minute with Google:

• http://www.chronologicalsnobbery.com/
• http://www.americanvision.org/articlearchive/10-11-04.asp - In regards to Christopher Columbus
• http://members.aol.com/BaxterInstitute/Snobbery.html - "Reverse Chronological Snobbery"
• http://basketbawful.blogspot.com/2006/07/word-of-day-chronological-snobbery.html - used in reference to the NBA
• http://schlafly.blogspot.com/2006/09/chronological-snobbery.html
• http://www.questioningchristian.com/2005/02/chronological_s.html - vs Ancestor Worship
• http://www.tektonics.org/guest/chronsnob.html
• http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2006/01/bultmanns-blatant-chronological_30.html - Applied to Rudolf Bultmann

I'm pretty busy today, so I'll let you incorporate these into the article in an encyclopedic manner. But this quick list should make it sufficiently clear that the term Chronological Snobbery has seeped into our culture and is applied in many different contexts (even though it may not yet be mainstream... but wikipedia is certainly not constrained to only mainstream ideas). David Bergan (talk) 17:42, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

I've by run this term many times in my reading, but the ones in the article are notable because they show its genesis. David Bergan (talk) 18:51, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Why does "recency bias" redirect here?

Why does recency bias redirect to this article? Recency bias is very different from the description of chronological snobbery given in this article. Recency bias is a cognitive bias in which people tend to overweight the importance of recent events. Here is a much better description of recency bias than what is contained in this article. --JHP (talk) 23:46, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Wow, this was asked three years ago? I was wondering the same thing. I just came looking for "recency bias" and landed on this article. Interesting article, but completely different topic. Unfortunately, the web page pointed to by the above poster no longer contains the content, it appears to have been hacked.  :-( "Recency bias" is the unconscious assignment of greater significance to recent events, in contrast to events further in the past.

Interestingly, the first hit when "recency bias" is googled is another Wikipedia article, Serial_position_effect, which refers to the "recency effect", but this is yet again something different! (Items later in a sequence are easier to remember than items earlier in the sequence.)

Here is a web page from 2006 suggesting that there used to be a Wikipedia article on this topic, and it quotes that article. The page refers incorrectly to "recency effect", however the definition they quote from Wikipedia is the correct definition for "recency bias". (Perhaps that suggests the earlier Wikipedia articles conflated the two, explaining why the article was removed?) Whatever the reason, an important concept has been lost. Googling "recency bias" brings up many more references, mostly in the context of investing, but it has more general applicability.

Finally... List_of_cognitive_biases lists "recency effect" and points to the Wikipedia article about that, but it defines recency effect as "the tendency to weigh recent events more than earlier events", which is not the recency effect, it's recency bias! I have done my best to correct this listing by creating two separate entries. 75.61.76.145 (talk) 22:23, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

I came here to say this. Recency bias is an important concept in organizational behavior and human resources. The search term "recency bias" needs to redirect to "recency effect" - the redirect to "chronological snobbery" is entirely inappropriate. 10 April 2012 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.62.69.111 (talk) 16:22, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

I agree, recency bias should not redirect to "chronological snobbery"; the term "recency bias" should be redirected to "recency effect". (talk) 18:50, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

I also agree with Ijon Tichy x2. But changing to recency effect would cause a double redirect. So I made the change where Recency bias now redirects to Serial position effect#Recency effect. Senator2029 leave me a message 05:12, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Your Ancestors Were Dummies

I've seen this idea referred to as the "Your Ancestors Were Dummies" theory, usually in essays debunking crackpot archaeology. Perhaps the two concepts could be included in the one article? Rhialto (talk) 12:34, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

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Presentism and pessimism about the future

I wonder if pervasive pessimism about the future should also be analysed as a bias in the vein of chronological snobbery and presentism. Literally speaking, after all, presentism is a bias towards the present, and that can include the belief that the present is not only better than the past, but also better than the future, and that the people of the present are superior to either. Idiocracy-style cultural pessimism that warns that in the future people will inevitably turn more and more stupid (which is often combined with some nasty ageist, classist, racist, ableist and eugenic thought) is typical of this tendency. This means that presentism can cover not only Whig history, but also "decadence"/"decay"-style narratives where everything is getting worse and past progress is being squandered ("young people these days, I fear for the future"). Literally speaking, in presentism the "Golden Age" must be the present, but more usually it is the period when one has grown up (childhood/youth; i. e., temporal nostalgia, and often refusal to acknowledge that things change and it's not all negative). This is evidently different from decadence narratives that place the Golden Age in some distant or vaguely circumscribed past that the subject never personally experienced. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 16:41, 6 January 2017 (UTC)