90% of the time, it's just some bully wanting you to acknowledge Their Thing™ as a precedent no matter how obvious it is ("There is a lot of published literature on 2+2=4, you can't just do the sum yourself, you should cite the original")
I've decided the opposite.
Wanting credit for original ideas is childish and painful.
Better to give credit to someone else who can use it to pump their status boner.
"If you want to be free, avoid the credit"
--Naval
That's a different issue. Truman: "anything is possible if you don't care who gets the credit"
I'm talking about cognitive benefits/burdens, not status
Agreed. The centrality of indexing (structures & scales) is your idea. Right?
Indexing the history of ideas is a massive time saver, slacker hack. ie.:
Centrality of "belief" is a Protestant idea
Marxism is Anti-Semitism on steroids
All Apocalypes are the same
etc...