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Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?
- cocktailpeanuts 6y agoi have a feeling there may be some interesting ideas hiding in the paper somewhere, can someone who happens to read the paper share a TLDR?
- adamnemecek 6y agoI'm pretty sure that Ancient Greeks thought that everything has already been discovered.
- arjunbazinga 6y agoMaybe, it's getting hard to find ideas due to all these paywalls.
- moab 6y agoYes, but sites like: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://sci-hub.tw/ https://sci-hub.tw/ exist and make it trivial to get around draconian publishing practices. I'm not advocating not paying for journalism---it's just that not everyone realistically can, and paywalling them seems like a bad solution. A more plausible reason, at least to me, is the increasing specialization of fields and lack of cross-field communication. Also, ideas seem to be flowing plentifully at least in math and TCS, where old and hard conjectures are still being proved with astonishing regularity.
- canadianwriter 6y agoYou're being clever.... except this shows you didn't both to even read the abstract.
- Gollapalli 6y agoIt may just be a change in the way that we work. This paper may just as well be titled "Are institutions getting less effective?" or "Are research institutions getting less effective?". Hell, it might even be that our smartest people aren't researching and the amount of brainpower we throw at research problems has actually decreased even though the effort/money we throw at research problems has increased.
- stcredzero 6y agoIt may just be a change in the way that we work. This paper may just as well be titled "Are institutions getting less effective?" or "Are research institutions getting less effective?". Lots of progress might be stymied by entrenched interests using laws, regulations, or some form of corporate bureaucracy/cronyism as a "moat" to ward off competition. The short shrift paid to EVs by auto makers and car dealers before Tesla came along is one example. (Yes, I know that batteries also had to improve.) Intel's practices before AMD stepped up its game recently can be seen as another example. Then there's SpaceX. Hell, it might even be that our smartest people aren't researching and the amount of brainpower we throw at research problems has actually decreased Is research now a "2nd tier" career? Are you thinking this is based on economic competition from industry?
- say_it_as_it_is 6y agoResearch is a privilege
- epicureanideal 6y agoWhat do you mean? I don't understand what you're trying to say about the parent comment.
- neerajsi 6y agoMy read of his comment is that fruitful research was historically done by people within the aristocracy after their fundamental needs for comfort were met.
- jiveturkey 6y agoNB: the title is misleading. this is not about pure ideas, this is about economic growth, which to be measurable (significant) needs to be exponential. no doubt, there are more ideas now than ever. technology is a great enabler. but finding economically impactful ideas ... that does seem to be getting harder, from my armchair view.
- m463 6y agoI read a book recently that said with computers and search something has changed in the recent few years. Answers used to be expensive, but now it is pretty much free to get answers. It may be that questions will become more valuable than answers.
- haihaibye 6y agoQ. Where can I get a Covid-19 vaccine?
- md_ 6y agoThat's an interesting point. Yes, for economic growth to be measurable, the nominal gains (i.e. dollar-value gains) have to be exponential--but there are a few reasons to think that as the economy grows, innovations that lead to productivity improvements should become cheaper. First, the productivity gain should scale with economic growth. A technology that leads to a 5% improvement in productivity of a farmer leads to 5% improvement in productivity of 1000 farmers. Second, the fixed costs of innovation--capital costs and research costs--should in many cases increase sublinearly relative to the above (linearly increasing) returns on investment. Thus relative to available capital (which increases as the economy grows) these innovations should become cheaper. Finally, some per-unit production costs may also decline as scale increases. As a simple example, if a farmer makes $100/year using a donkey and $200/year using a tractor, a tractor costs $10, and a tractor factory costs $10000...well, you get the idea. So I don't think this is explicable by economic growth, unless there's a facet of growth that hinders innovation (or its application).
- Nevermark 6y ago
- xiphias2 6y agoGood ideas are easy to find in any niche, but the low central bank interest rates make price discovery extremely hard, so most of the time it's just not worth to implement those ideas, as people are not compensated well enough for executing on those ideas. I believe that right now any project that gets people closer to hard money is a good direction.
- md_ 6y agoForgive me, but I don't understand your point. Is it that it's so easy to borrow money that there's no need to sift good ideas from bad? And if so, that seems like it would result in more bad ideas being funded, not fewer good ideas. Yet the paper claims to present evidence to the contrary (sort of; they're talking about innovation gains, not "ideas")--that the cost of gains is increasing. I don't see how that would arise from low interest rates?
- xiphias2 6y agoMoney (in the form of buying power) can't be created from nothing, so whenever a bad idea/execution is funded, it takes away buying power from companies that have better execution, but less access to cheap loans. As an example I personally know a CEO who had a great idea, great exececution, but a new competitor startup was funded with millions of dollars of cash that threatened to sue him in the US. He didn't have money for lawyers, so he became in a bad position very fast, even if he was quite certain that the competitor didn't have any case against him. Another example is cheap loans driving up ad prices and rent in SF, which I have seen often talked about here.
- appleshore 6y agoInteresting concept. Perhaps we can name this the Swordfish Law: cheap money drives out good ideas.
- mikhailfranco 6y agoThis is well known in the Austrian School. It's not that cheap money drives out good ideas, but it dilutes them, because cheap money allows bad ideas to persist - there is no Schumpeterian creative destruction. The corollary is that average productivity declines, because inefficient zombie companies are still encouraged to walk the earth, which is exactly what we have seen since the GFC triggered money printing and artificially low interest rates. Of course, non-Austrian economists are perplexed, and create many spurious explanations, which is an ironic example of the ineffectiveness of (economic) research. [The US legal system is a separate issue of rent seeking by an entrenched lobby, which creates and preserves laws and legal frameworks that reward litigation. US healthcare is another anomalous parasitic example. Other countries do not have these problems to the same extent, but they often have other types of rent seeking, bureaucracy, inefficiency and corruption to compensate.]
- symplee 6y agoThe pigeonhole principle [0] is also becoming more of a factor due to the sheer volume of production. Especially in domains with a limited branching factor. For example, in music, if you only have 12 tones in an octave to play with, along with variable length and spacing, you start to run out of "good" melodies under 20 notes after 400 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeonhole_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeonhole_principle
- throwaway1777 6y agoSure, but that’s not accounting for rhythm, different instruments, etc.
- symplee 6y agoIsn't this just increasing the branching factor? How hard will it be to find new melodies a million years from now? Easier than today, the same, or harder?
- mettamage 6y agoIt is, but it is increasing the branching factor by much more than finding all the "good" melodies in 400 years. Here's a good example of music that stands on it own right despite using the melody of despacito: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydqReeTV_vk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydqReeTV_vk - I'm pretty sure that most people at HN will appreciate this one whether they like despacito or not :)
- cjohnson318 6y agoI think the relevant thing about the pigeon hole principle is that it deals with fundamentally discrete things. Sure, there is a finite number of scores using twelve notes in a finite period of time, but that's just not how we judge or compare music. I would say that there's so many branching factors in music that quantifying one piece is akin to measuring a coastline; the smaller your scale, the longer the coastline. Beyond timbre, there's other cultural factors like, who wrote the music. In a million years we might have umpteen songs with the same score, but they'll still occupy different pigeon holes in the collective consciousness.
- alexgvozden 6y agooptions for us as humans are growing, today you can travel by plane, travel to space, buy something around the world, learn whatever you want online... hyperproductivity is here, but both market and options are increasing too so not sure what math could be used realistically but for sure we can't foresee in near future death of ideas
- CoderMoose 6y agoBetteridge's Law of Headlines: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
- dang 6y agoMr. Betteridge retired many years ago. Not literally! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10393248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10393248
- GuB-42 6y agoJust look what it takes to have a good idea now. A good example is astrophysics. There are so many nice theories around, but they are all wrong. If you want to theorycraft the universe now, you need to deal with an incredible amount of very precise data, advanced maths and billion dollar machines. If you don't, the best you get is to have you theory proven wrong by an actual specialist, most of the times it is "not even wrong". Researchers are now working on a subdomain of a subdomain, and they spend decades studying just to reach the level where they can start having good ideas. Most of the easy good ideas are already taken. What remain are the hard ones, and those that require a lot of luck and/or hard work to materialize.
- etrautmann 6y agoI think this is slightly specific to astrophysics and cosmology. In Neuroscience, it definitely feels like there is plenty of headway to be made by individuals with good ideas, although I admit that it feels as though ideas are harder to come by as more is published and the bar is continually raised.
- hilbertseries 6y agoThis is certainly also true of mathematics and many other areas that have over a century of modern research work done on them.
- Daub 6y agoThe article says... "that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply". No surprise there. Nowadays, Universities have to become paper mills in order to get funding. Also... Risky research and cross disciplinary research is a sure fire way not to get tenure. As to the question, where new ideas come from... I teach creativity... the literature is in near agreement on this topic. New ideas come mostly from recombining old ideas. Essentially, this is an act of playful association. New Ideas also come from new technologies. For example... the neodymium magnet is the reason we had the Sony Walkman.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kd5bjo 6y ago> I teach creativity... the literature is in near agreement on this topic. Can you point me towards some good papers to start with? I don't really know my way around any of the academic literature outside of engineering.
- richardbrevig 6y agoThey replied to the second person requesting this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22951757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22951757
- mrbgty 6y ago"New ideas come mostly from recombining old ideas." Does this suggest that new ideas would become easier to find over time because there are more combinations of old ideas?
- Tagbert 6y agoIt also means that patents restrict the flow of new ideas by locking up the source material for invention. The idea that invention is a isolated creative force that pops up without dependency on anything else has always been a myth without foundation.
- teunispeters 6y agoWe stand on the shoulders of giants... ... and there are many barriers to access to those giants these days. (paywalls, patent overuse, market exclusion by .1%, ideological blind spots in communities, too many standards, too many standards behind paywalls or other blocking infrastructure) The last is touched on by community in-fighting. People fighting over which standard product to look like. PS: I work in wireless. Some of the barriers are there because people do really insecure new ideas that risk people's security. That's generally a good reason for standards and standard bodies.
- dredmorbius 6y agoSome time in (I think) the past few months, someone posted a link to an AT&T or Bell Labs executive talking to a team of his engineers about the state of innovation at the phone company. The context was the 1970s, and a number of innovations -- direct dialing and touch-tone dialing were I believe two of them. It transpired that these had been. developed decades before deployment -- direct dialing being a 19th century invention, touch tone from the 1920s or 30s, as I recall. The upshot being that innovation had already slowed tremendously. The video begins, approximately, with the speaker relating a story of how an earlier executive had announced to a previous group, "Gentlemen, this company was destroyed last night". If this rings any. bells, Ma or otherwise, I'd appreciate the link or reference.
- crones 6y agoI am pretty sure you are referring to Russ Ackoff's lecture about his time at Bell Labs: https://vimeo.com/148192220 https://vimeo.com/148192220 (If you haven't already read it and are interested in Bell Labs, 'The Idea Factory' by Jon Gertner is worth checking out.)
- dredmorbius 6y agoBingo! That's it, thanks so much!
- friendlybus 6y agoHad a similar discussion yesterday and I am aching for that conceptual freshness. What are all the non-Elon, non-besos plebs going to do for a day job? Our industries are too mature for easy growth. Cars, computers, space are done for the plebs, we need another industry of easy growth to pull this ship along. If history repeats, manufacturing will become king again. In the arts with near infinite creative control lately we are seeing many retreads of past ideas, we need some great fresh ideas. Ai tooling and general purpose automation will kick off a customisable manufacturing system, but it’s not enough. Where are all the brains at.... finance?
- anotheryou 6y agoI haven't read the article yet, but I think it's just harder to reach the border of human knowledge. You have to specialize hard to reach it in a reasonable time. Sadly that makes the smart people not take general, discipline arching careers. Only in young disciplines like machine learning there is still a lot of jumping sparks for other disciplines.
- friendlybus 6y agoComputing had been in the works since Babbage, over hundreds of years. Once the tech was in place there was infinite jobs to be had making sure humanity could democratize and exploit computing to it's highest potential. What's coming down the hundreds-of-years pipe that we can bust open for this half-century? The 40s were famously the fighting forties, if we don't get on it we're going to be forced to take what others have in an attempt to access the infinite or stave off nihilism. Nukes are underutilized but likely to be surpassed by fusion if the recent builds and smaller experiments pay off. With infinite computing power and orders of magnitude cheaper energy we employ everybody to do the same as before but bigger and better. Material science could unlock a bunch of new avenues for improvement. Biomed is kicking off but that's unlikely to employ everybody. I can't see it all, there's gotta be something.
- filoleg 6y agoNot sure how realistically viable it is, but I hope that quantum computing will bring some of that freshness back. But again, it will heavily depend on how much of it is "legit" and how much is just hype.
- neerajsi 6y agoAn alternate way to look at the problem is that perhaps we should be doing a better job of educating our children to absorb the existing state of knowledge. The hope would be that they are prepared to contribute new ideas before their naive optimism is crushed and they head toward seeking rent on old ideas. The underlying theory here is that new ideas are discovered by reinterpretration of the underlying data with a "purer" or partially forgotten version of previous explanations.
- griffzhowl 6y agotl;dr We haven't had any deep conceptual revolutions nor massive new sources of cheap energy for a while Estimating how much innovation to expect depends on how you set the baseline. There are a couple of reasons for considering the first half of the twentieth century to have been the most revolutionary period in history both theoretically and technologically (not unrelated areas) at the same time as harnessing vast reserves of hydrocarbons to give us millions of years of stored sunlight to burn as fast as we can build machines to consume it. Theoretical revolutions involved working out consequences of Electromagnetism, Einstein and Quantum mechanics, and of course computation powering the calculations. Electrification, real-time long-distance communication, cars, trucks and planes... We were riding out the consequences of the easiest applications of these novelties and now it's getting incrementally harder to squeeze out the benefits.
- conorliv1 6y agoI wonder if this is partially a function of decreased attention spans. It takes more discipline than ever to turn off distractions and focus on innovative solutions to hard problems. EDIT: This quote seems relevant[1]: > It is fair to say that, in general, no problems have been exhausted; instead, men have been exhausted by the problems. [1] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-most-important-scientific-problems-have-yet-to-be-solved/ https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-most-important-scient...
- valachio 6y agoI seriously wonder this as well. I managed to build a profitable small business and mostly automate it. But now that I'm back in the search for another more ambitious idea to work on, it is way too easy to be distracted by all the electronics around me than to be able to ponder deeply about ideas. I tried reading a novel the other day, I couldn't make it through 3 pages without reading some random BS on the interwebs. Damn capitalism for incentivizing companies to make everything as addictive as possible...
- Rury 6y agoPerhaps. In my mind, it seems there's no such thing as an "original" idea, given that all ideas are made from or composed of other ideas (as that's how you describe them). Therefore originality, seems to be just a new combination of old ideas you've already been exposed to. As an example, can you ever imagine a color that's not composed of a combination of colors you've already seen before? A truly original color? Otherwise, if you're trying to communicate an idea to another, and cannot describe the idea using existing ideas, it might be considered truly original. But what does one do in this case? You show or demonstrate it to them... As so, ideas seemingly come from observation - or more specifically - our senses, and any subsequent ideas built from thereof. Thus, if there's a limit to we can sense and observe, then ideas would also be limited or "finite", and we would naturally find ideas becoming "harder to find" eventually... I believe Ludwig Wittgenstein mentioned something like this in his work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
- axegon_ 6y agoI see where you are coming from and I get that your argument is that new ideas are (?often) extension of existing ones but I think this is a bit of an oversimplification. It seems like everything can be described as an abstraction of something else on a larger/smaller scale. Which philosophically would mean that the universe as a whole has the same value as any atom or quarks within it. But even if we ignore the philosophical aspect of it, it seems a bit like Duell's "Everything that can be invented has been invented" statement from late 19-th/early 20-th century. A statement which hasn't aged too well for better or worse.
- Rury 6y ago> I think this is a bit of an oversimplification. It seems like everything can be described as an abstraction of something else Correct, any new ideas you abstract are composed of pre-existing ideas you have. Trace any of those ideas to their roots and you'll realize all ideas come from what you originally had to subject your senses to (i.e seeing it, hearing it), otherwise they're some abstracted combination thereof. Although my prior post was an attempt at a logical proof of sorts, the only real caveat I find in it, is this part: if there's a limit to what we can sense and observe. This is not proven as far I can tell (which is why I prefaced it with an 'if'). Again, I think Ludwig Wittgenstein's work may say all of this better, but then again I find it hard to grasp everything it tries to convey. EDIT: As for Duell's statement, perhaps it's taken too literally. I can see they had an equivalent to email (e.g. regular mail), atom bombs (regular bombs) and AI (basic schemes & algorithms) back in those days, just not literal equivalents. But his statement is not the argument I'm making in my prior post. Rather it's more "our ideas are limited by what we sense".
- skybrian 6y agoMaybe we should take an evolutionary perspective on this? Some ideas may be good in any environment and I expect they would be harder to find over time. Other ideas are probably good or bad depending on their environment. If the environment is fairly stable then we would expect good ideas to get harder to find (evolution slows down), but when there is a big change, I expect it would be a lot easier to find new ideas that only made sense recently. Which is to say, I think the answer to this question is probably "no" in the short term, and we should see more ways that creative thinking pays off.
- ineedasername 6y agoThe title is misleading and inflammatory: The article itself is making a much narrower claim about the monetary value (economic growth) derived from equivalent amounts of research effort. In that context, they claim it takes more effort now than years ago to achieve the same level of economic benefit. This is far different than anything having to do with the # of "ideas", which is too abstract of a notion to be meaningful the way they use it. Even if they're correct that it now takes more research to produce equivalent economic benefit, then through one concept of "idea" we actually have more than ever: researchers aren't doing the same bit of research over & over, they're doing new bits. Each bit easily fits into the concept of an "idea", and so in that sense ideas are plentiful, it just takes more of them than before to achieve a given level of economic growth.
- moosey 6y agoIdeas are easy to find, it's just that the bounds that we have been limited to work within, both economically and societally, have become tighter and tighter. Today, the leadership of the vast majority of private institutions have only the goal of increasing their own economic power, and similarly there is constant media production reminding people how important the almighty economy is, causing people to focus on any potential fear of economic pain. Regret being one of the most powerful emotional responses that we have. We don't have to look far in any direction for solutions that improve our education systems, our research output, and the general welfare of humanity. Unfortunately, the forces of corruption will always be strong, and it will take a more creative and imaginative people to implement them.
- highfrequency 6y agoIs there reason to think that people in the past were more selfless and less economically motivated? I'd wager that throughout history, most great ideas and optimizations came from people who were either seeking profit or other kinds of status (eg recognition from peers).
- eli_gottlieb 6y ago> Is there reason to think that people in the past were more selfless and less economically motivated? Einstein certainly was.
- eindiran 6y agoI don't think your parent comment meant "is is not the case that there exists at least one person in the past who was more selfless and less economically motivated".
- claudiawerner 6y ago> Is there reason to think that people in the past were more selfless and less economically motivated? Perhaps, but perhaps not. The point isn't about some innate feature of humans that has only increased recently, but rather that throughout history humans (and the great classes therein) have faced material (not only economic) hardships. It is material conditions which drive history. I think there is a huge dividing line between inventing to seek profit and seeking "other kinds of status". The only thing in common these motivations have is that they arise due to our relations with other humans. Likewise, many motivations, depending on the predominant point of view (which certainly does change with time and place) can be viewed either altruistically or selfishly. I'd wager that a cynical society, or one dominated by the totalizing logic of capital ("accumulate!") would have a tendency to see previous motivations as selfish, because it's very hard to empathize with people through history. In other words, we view things in a certain way because it is unimaginable to us to see it any other way, since we have no experience with those times and places and the motivations therein. The ancient world is filled with proverbs and sayings and stories of heroism for some kind of greater good, certainly without looking for some kind of profit, and more often than not, without looking for some kind of recognition. As to whether these are just stories we tell or whether there is some truth to them is an important question. It's probably worth asking anthropology, or at the very least sociology. The latter has discovered huge changes in public consciousness since the industrial revolution.
- ctoth 6y agoFor a deep dive look at this, I highly recommend https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-singularity-was-cancelled/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-sing... Funny that Scott wrote this exactly one year ago today.
- szczepano 6y agoThe funny thing about inventions is that nobody needs them until they have it. So throwing more and more researchers at one topic won't change anything as long as there won't be adaptation of this research. In my opinion there are too many inventions and not much products around them that people want to use. Adaptation is often correlated with business need. So adaptation is the biggest problem right now cause as soon as people start using invention they will tell if this is improving their lives or it's stupid idea. We don't need more researchers we need more testers and producers and here comes availability. When researcher put patent on his research availability is near zero so invention is stopped in time. Also don't forget about : Great Inventions Are Often Overlooked.
- haihaibye 6y agoCountepoint: Covid-19 vaccine
- szczepano 6y agoWhat's your point because if it will start mutate too fast at this point you need to produce vaccine for every mutation that is deadly. For example flu vaccine is produced twice a year and not for every strain only for those that are most dangerous. Maybe there is need to develop new protection techniques instead of injecting dead virus into human body. Over the years it might become true that only way for human to survive on this planet is gene editing like CRISPR. There are already first trials to edit genes of adult human that you can read about here: https://ir.editasmedicine.com/news-releases/news-release-details/allergan-and-editas-medicine-announce-dosing-first-patient https://ir.editasmedicine.com/news-releases/news-release-det...
- haihaibye 6y agoThe point is, there's a need for the covid-19 vaccine before they invent it
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoI'm reminded of the discovery of the 'modern' variation on the Fisher-Yates shuffle algorithm. Both the original algorithm, and the improvement made in the variation, are so simple that it can be trivially understood, and makes one think Oh yeah. Neat. And kinda obvious. (I'd forgotten the particulars so I had to look it up on Wikipedia. Took me very little time to piece it back together.) Clearly it's not totally obvious, or it would have made its way into the original paper. Still, the barrier to a Wikipedia-worthy computer science discovery, has risen somewhat since then. Edit Come to think of it, this is a good example for explaining what we mean by 'improved algorithm' to non-software folks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%E2%80%93Yates_shuffle#Fisher_and_Yates'_original_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%E2%80%93Yates_shuffle#F...
- carapace 6y agoTwo words: Rex Research In the aftermath of WWII the so-called "Men in Black" were formed, not to police aliens (what a conceit!) but to sequester dangerous technology like free energy and anti-gravity. With great responsibility comes great power. There are all kinds of awesome technologies but each one is as dangerous as it is powerful, and we are fucking nuts, so it's kept a secret. Rex Research is one of the "holes" where the knowledge is allowed to leak out as a kind of pressure-release valve.
- ozten 6y ago> Rex Research Can you back this up with sources? This sounds like paranoid conspiracy theory. Most inventions are "invented" in multiple places at nearly the same time. If free energy is possible, how was each and every discovery nation, by nation, squashed? How do you stop it from spreading once that cat is out of the bag?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- carapace 6y agoSome secrets keep themselves.
- yters 6y agoIntelligent design theory is a giant unexplored pool of ideas. I am currently looking into bioinformatics applications and there are just so many! Ask me questions if interested!
- 11thEarlOfMar 6y agoDon't ideas naturally breed more ideas? Perhaps it takes a certain type of mind, but from my perspective, ideas are synthesized from life experience. That life experience could be prehistoric or modern, but the flow of information in life is going to generate ideas. Ideas are needed to solve problems, solving problems ensures survival, so we naturally think in terms of ideas much of the time. Illustration: A prehistoric person invents the basket: They gather apples from a tree that is a mile from their cave, but can only carry 6 apples and must make several trips. On one trip, they pass a tree with a nest, the nest has eggs and the idea happens: eggs:apples, nest:[basket]. They fabricate a basket out of a hide, and can then get all the apples they need in one trip. In Moore's law, I'd argue that keeping apace in fact requires many more ideas to get to the next node than it took to get to the current node. The fabrication complexity is exponentially greater, not linearly greater, and more ideas are required to get there. Getting to node x+1 indicates much greater progress than was seen getting to node x, because exponentially more ideas were required to succeed. Moreover, you had to have all the ideas of x to build on in order to get to x+1. I argue that we are not generating fewer ideas as 'harder to find' would imply. But rather, exponentially more, and, the resulting achievements are all the more spectacular.
- jonnycomputer 6y agoThe problem isn't finding ideas, but finding ideas that other people haven't already thought and wrote about, or patented. Indeed, the crawl to the precipice of knowledge in a domain can take years. There are only so many shortcuts, no matter how much pruning of the tree of knowledge you do, the path will only get longer. In fact, a great deal of effort goes into re-inventing the discoveries of others, hidden from them by language, disciplinary perspective.
- hyperpallium 6y agoThere's certainly phases of progress in particular fields. e.g. in physics, we had relativity and quantum mechanics... and no further revolutions for quite a while. If Einstein's genius made some of it possible... he also didn't make further progress. He was older yes, but also perhaps there was less to find? Other people were smart enough to find what he found, but weren't bold enough. Looking at the bigger picture, Einstein had unexplained empirical evidence (speed of light constant in all directions, inconsistent with waves in an ether). So that was a driver. Looking bigger again, even with better equipment, that senses further, we can only discover new things if they can be sensed with that equipment. (Without evidence) my opinion is we will have periods of slow progress and periods of rapid progress. We are currently in a period of stagnation. We need empirical data, intelligent analysis, and boldness.
- vinceguidry 6y agoNote that the article is talking about research ideas for researchers to research. Not for business ideas for entrepreneurs to develop. I clicked expecting the latter. It doesn't surprise me that academic research fields dry up over time.
- fsfguy 6y agoI was going to make a pithy comment here, but everything had been said.
- yalogin 6y agoIts kind of understandable isn't it? The easiest problems get solved first, so people have to "go up the stack" if you will. Unfortunately going up the stack means one needs to get more and more educated or in some cases need to embed themselves in a specific context. But in general though, people are naturally ingenious, they will always come up with new ideas. In the most recent past, the one "low tech" idea that blew me away is the concept of influencers. People understood Instagram and then understood the general psychology of people and then exploited it to create vast empires. I mean previously clout was something only celebrities had after doing extraordinary things like act in movies or be the best in the world in what they do. But people found a way to commoditize it and democratize it. And they didn't need any formal education for it. All they needed was a phone.
- onion2k 6y agoThe easiest problems get solved first, so people have to "go up the stack" if you will. The implication of this is that we're running out of problems to solve, and eventually we'll have fixed everything. That ignores the fact that a solution to a problem very often creates new problems, and some of them will be equivalent to the previous easy problems. In some fields you could be solving the "easy" problems forever.
- nikofeyn 6y agono. i think it's ideas are harder to get funding for. everyone wants results and wants them now. this short term pressure creates noise, and noise is expensive.
- hajderr 6y agoGood ideas that are beneficial, yes. However, there are a lot of less optimal solutions for the human race out there, some are even in production, e.g. tracking people, social media
- candiodari 6y ago0[poiw
- taphangum 6y agoI actually wrote a post about coming up with ideas, and the difficulty of doing so before: https://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/how-to-consistently-come-up-with-great-ideas.html https://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/how-to-consis... There are two things you need for ideas: 1. The raw material from which to generate them: Other older ideas. 2. A mind that is able to synthesize ideas appropriately. Ideas becoming 'harder' to 'find', is simply a function of one of these two things not being fully optimized. I personally don't think that we have less of either of the two. So no, I don't think Ideas are getting harder to find.