Scott imagines a future where population growth leads to more historians than historical subjects, resulting in extreme academic specialization and scrutiny of ordinary individuals from our era.
Longer summary
Scott Alexander humorously extrapolates current trends in population growth and academic specialization to imagine a future where there are more classicists than ancient Greeks, and eventually more historians studying each person from our era than we might expect. He starts by calculating the current ratio of classicists to ancient Greeks, then projects this forward, considering factors like space colonization and technological advances. The post ends with a fictional scenario where thousands of future scholars are studying the life and tweets of a single, unremarkable person from our time, ironically analyzing a tweet where this person claimed no one noticed or cared about them.
Shorter summary