Papers with Code

I was a young adult when the web become widespread, and the problem I'm talking about was milder: precisely because there was a shortage of documentation, what was available limited the number of topics that you could learn about, and being flooded by different sources was less of a problem.

It was still possible to define a Library Science were books were classified by hand, and not some secret algorithm counting links as votes or learning and regurgitating a corpus of loosely related documents without understanding any of it. I.e., it was possible to make sense of information sources, and whatever you learned of a field came with a single consistent narrative. Nowadays, information gathering has become an exercise in picking and choosing unconnected fragments from which you must infer your own understanding.

In some ways you can still try to emulate the old way, by limiting yourself to a small set of publishers who try to compile and organize a small part of a field of knowledge - yet it is much easier than the teachings of that source will be deeply contradicted by some other seemingly authoritative source, without a clear way to know which one should you rely upon, and with the whole exercise feeling like it provides an incomplete perspective.