I have already complained obliquely about Scott Adams' propensity to observe a social phenomenon and point it out as news, ignoring 'non-science', 'non-engineering' sources - in the example, Freud, which have been earnestly discussed by serious people for a hundred years, which discussion he apparently cannot lift a finger to catch up with.
Now widely published author Sam Harris has discovered what Hegel calls 'sense certainty', the apparent irreducibility of consciousness. Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind begins with sense certainty as something that was a pretty routine observation among learned folk when he wrote it, in 1807. It had been given the clearest expression in Descartes in 1641. Kant had set it on its feet in relation to perception of the world and the viability of science. If you wanted to say something interesting in 1807, you had to go beyond both. And Hegel proceeds to. These things were not done under a bushel, and bore fruit in lots of subsequent thinking which anyone can obtain without trouble. I am the laziest scholar on earth, and I know it.
(I note from Sam's followup post that this is news, even shocking unbelievable news, to many of his readership, so perhaps he is doing the world a favour.)
But really.
Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another? Are we for ever to be twisting and untwisting the same rope?
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