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Almost every technology was adopted at a rate commensurate with its cost/benefit. The car was widely adopted virtually overnight once it became cheap enough (~1
by pron 7y ago
Almost every technology was adopted at a rate commensurate with its cost/benefit. The car was widely adopted virtually overnight once it became cheap enough (~1914). The airplane was in common military use less than a decade after it was able to carry the first passenger. Useful technology is rarely delayed by adoption; rather, adoption is often delayed by a technology's maturity and cost. In fact, technology is so usually adopted so quickly, that if your technology isn't, it is almost always a sure sign that either it isn't as helpful as you think or its cost is too high. The statement, "It usually takes more time to convince people that your technology has changed the world than it does to invent a world-changing technology" is just not true. What is true is that it sometimes takes a while to make your technology cheap/safe/easy enough for it to actually be worth it.
- bjornsing 7y agoThere’s a lot of room for survivorship bias in this rosy picture... A classic counter example is how long it took for hand hygiene to be accepted as an important aspect of medical practice. The cost was just about zero. The benefit: thousands of human lives saved. Still took a hell of a long time.
- nkoren 7y agoSurvivorship bias is absolutely right. Technology adoption really doesn't work that way. Another example: scurvy. Known to be cured by lemons since 1601; took 200 years and the better part of two million lives for this news to be properly disseminated.[1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy
- cdirkx 7y agoBut that article mentions that lemons can only be stored a limited amount of time, thus requiring restocking during long voyages. However the infrastructure for that wasnt there yet, only those 200 years later it is mentioned that "Spain's large empire and many ports of call made it easier to acquire fresh fruit" and enabling the first long distance expedition without scurvy. Still looks partially like a cost/benefit thing (even though there were indeed many doctors not believing lemons were the cure and instead prescribing "fizzy drinks" with sulpheric acid).
- pron 7y agoThat's a good example, but I'd say that it's a relatively unusual case. There, the technology's customers were other scientists (more precisely, people-of-science), and so what was required to convince them was empirical evidence. But even though empirical evidence was exactly what Semmelweis had, they still wouldn't believe him. Another example would be anti-vaxxers today. Here too, though, we have a special case. The technology was so successful that people forgot how bad of a problem it solved. Interestingly, in these cases my statement about lack of success implying lack of benefit is wrong, but these are the very cases where the benefit is easily proven empirically.
- dkarl 7y agoI think the article's own examples bear this out. Airplanes, cars, computers, and the internet were all adopted about as fast as they could be made available and usable. Early adopters invested time and/or money that could only be justified by the pleasure and satisfaction they got out of the process. The author points to instances of the nostalgia and generational anxiety that often accompany change, but he implies that they act as a brake on technology adoption without providing any evidence.