4 ms·

Guess we should have stopped at the wheel.

• bluGill 7y ago
  We have improved it a lot, but the wheel has been round for a very long time. We laugh at people who reinvent the wheel as opposed to doing incremental improvements on it. We do have ships, rockets, and a few other things that don't need wheels (tough they tend to have wheels of some form inside), but the wheel itself is still just incremental improvements on that first one way back...
  • grp000 7y ago
    NIH and 'reinventing the wheel' are phrases for questioning the need to spend time and money to develop a thing that has the same purpose as an existing thing and doesn't improve on it, which I agree with. But to use ships as an example, at some point people decided it would be useful to cross bodies of water without getting wet so they invented the boat, and as a new invention it improved quality of life immeasurably. It feels like you're saying people should exclusively stop making things which have new and novel purposes and just focus on improving existing things, which is the part I disagree with. Also, I think as an example, gears and wheels which have similar bases of design are two completely different inventions because they have different purposes, this might be where we disagree.