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Ragging on things that failed with the benefit of hindsight is a good way to sound smart. I have never liked that genre much. 5gen failed but Apollo, the Manha

by api 7y ago

Ragging on things that failed with the benefit of hindsight is a good way to sound smart. I have never liked that genre much. 5gen failed but Apollo, the Manhattan Project, DARPANet, the Bell Labs transistor project, and SpaceX reusable boosters (for a contemporary example) succeeded. This piece argues that the ambitious megaproject successes were more decomposable but I find this rationale to be an unconvincing post-hoc just-so story. The conclusion I draw when I look over the history of innovation is that it's like a rare animal that almost never mates in captivity or one of those exotic fungi we can barely culture. We know how to set up conditions where innovation can happen: get smart people, provide capital, give them an ambitious but not impossible goal. Beyond this it's serendipity. Sometimes the muse pays a visit and sometimes it doesn't. The dynamics seem almost identical to what you see in art and music, and I don't think that's coincidence. Science and engineering are perhaps more like the arts than we tend to think. 5gen probably would never have achieved all its goals, but it might have achieved something really notable had the muse chosen to pay a visit.

lioeters 7y ago
This is my favorite comment in this whole thread. Looking back on big failures in history, it's too easy to point out the obvious mistakes or logical reasons why it failed, how unrealistic their dreams were. That narrative doesn't take into account that notable successes in history, major innovations, were born from basically the same ingredients in a shared cultural context. The difference was (at least seemingly) often just a slight chance variation in conditions, being in the right place at the right time, working on an idea that happened to be ready to blossom. I love the parallels you draw with exotic fungi, how sensitive these ambitious ideas are to its environment. There are so many ways it can fail, and the reason for success is often elusive and serendipitous. > Science and engineering are perhaps more like the arts than we tend to think This seems related to how great art and music are often born of a "cultural milieu", like the jazz scene, or Paris cafe culture in the 1920's that fostered poets, painters, musicians. I imagine Xerox PARC was like that, a vibrant intellectual subculture of creative people who worked in the medium of technology. Speaking of the muse, I like the popular expression, "The elves have left Middle Earth." There's a kind of indescribable "magic" that can inhabit a place and time, pulling everyone around under its spell. Then, as mysteriously as it appeared, it's gone - leaving behind relics of wonders, art works or artifacts, that reason alone cannot explain.

by api 7y ago

lioeters 7y ago

This is my favorite comment in this whole thread. Looking back on big failures in history, it's too easy to point out the obvious mistakes or logical reasons why it failed, how unrealistic their dreams were. That narrative doesn't take into account that notable successes in history, major innovations, were born from basically the same ingredients in a shared cultural context. The difference was (at least seemingly) often just a slight chance variation in conditions, being in the right place at the right time, working on an idea that happened to be ready to blossom. I love the parallels you draw with exotic fungi, how sensitive these ambitious ideas are to its environment. There are so many ways it can fail, and the reason for success is often elusive and serendipitous. > Science and engineering are perhaps more like the arts than we tend to think This seems related to how great art and music are often born of a "cultural milieu", like the jazz scene, or Paris cafe culture in the 1920's that fostered poets, painters, musicians. I imagine Xerox PARC was like that, a vibrant intellectual subculture of creative people who worked in the medium of technology. Speaking of the muse, I like the popular expression, "The elves have left Middle Earth." There's a kind of indescribable "magic" that can inhabit a place and time, pulling everyone around under its spell. Then, as mysteriously as it appeared, it's gone - leaving behind relics of wonders, art works or artifacts, that reason alone cannot explain.