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The article says... "that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply". No surprise there. Nowadays, Universities h

• deleted 7y ago
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• kd5bjo 7y 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 7y ago
    They replied to the second person requesting this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22951757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22951757
• mrbgty 7y 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 7y ago
    It 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.
    • TaylorAlexander 7y ago
      I’ve become extremely interested in this notion lately. When I have discussions about intellectual property with random people the dominant idea is that patent promote innovation. People get angry if I suggest that might not be true, as if they think I want all creative people to go bankrupt or something. But its increasingly questionable to me. Open source software has shown the great wealth of innovation that occurs when we collaborate instead of hiding our work. I think we could (probably) sharply increase the rate of innovation if we let go of intellectual property restrictions. I really want economists and other thinkers to take seriously this notion that intellectual property restrictions are deeply harmful to society and study it in detail. Unfortunately entrenched interests benefit from the status quo (naturally) and I feel they would be in opposition here. But we can still work to open source our output. It’s harder when open source competes with closed source, but if we can learn how to use open source to our advantage we might be able to win. In any case I think it is desperately important that we take seriously the idea that IP laws might be doing more harm than good. Most people I speak to take it as a given that we need them, and I think we’re shooting ourselves in the foot.
      • kd5bjo 7y ago
        > I think we could (probably) sharply increase the rate of innovation... As long as we're looking at deeply held assumptions, it's probably also a good idea to figure out what the ideal pace of innovation is. None is certainly bad, but too fast also causes problems for people: technological products are expensive and will be shorter-lived as innovation speeds up. At some point, the cost to society of all that churn probably balances against the benefits.
        • TaylorAlexander 7y ago
          It’s a good point. I would argue however that reducing or eliminating intellectual property restrictions also significantly eases the difficulty in repairing and upgrading old hardware. So obsolete technology is more easily upgraded or repurposed.
      • pacala 7y ago
  • ta1234567890 7y ago
    Or they would become harder to find when there are too many of them. For example, it's probably easier to find one thing among 3 than among 1 million.
  • Daub 7y ago
    Hmmm. Maybe. But also, some ideas get 'ploughed under' by time. Also, many new ideas require re-stating as they get older.
  • friedman23 7y ago
    Yes. How many novels nowadays riff off of history and paint it as fiction?
• techbio 7y ago
  Synthesis! So, take all the ideas, compute their cross-product, sort, and voila! Found all of them, though as it is itself a new technology, recurse... this will take a while...
• TaylorAlexander 7y ago
  I’m seconding the request for any literature on the subject! I’m very interested in the harm intellectual property restrictions might be doing to our rate of innovation.
  • Daub 7y ago
    Tons of books out there, very difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff. The following is what I found useful. Its a mixed bag, academic and coffee table. - Beveridge W. I. B., 1950, The Art of Scientific Investigation, New York. https://archive.org/details/artofscientifici00beve https://archive.org/details/artofscientifici00beve A charming and easy-to-read enquiry into how scientists conduct research. Old but (like all good science) still applicable. Kaufman, J. C., & Sternberg, R. J. (2010). The Cambridge handbook of creativity. Tons of great material. Section 1, chapter 2 gives a literature review of the topic. - Johnson. S., 2010, Where Good Ideas Come From, Penguin UK. Packed with lots of good anecdotes, this is a very accessible book. - Currey, M. 2013, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, Knopf. Blog avaiable here: http://dailyroutines.typepad.com/ http://dailyroutines.typepad.com/. This started off as a blog and developed into a wonderful and useful little book. In my opinion, creative rituals are a very under-estimated component of creativity. - Sternberg, R. J. (2001). What is the common thread of creativity? Its dialectical relation to intelligence and wisdom. American Psychologist. A very readable 3 page essay. - Christensen, C. (2013). The innovator's dilemma: when new technologies cause great firms to fail. Perhaps the most well-known book on this list. It was this book that addressed the idea of 'disruptive innovation'... innovation that completely destroys some businesses, and creates others. He uses the railroad as an example, but clearly the internet falls into this category as well. - Seelig, T. (2012). inGenius: A crash course on creativity. This evolved from the course notes from one of the first university courses on the subject of creativity. A bit annoying to navigate (her chapter headings are 'too creative') but it has good stuff. On top of this, there is almost everything that Edward De Bono wrote (the lateral thinking guru).
    • TaylorAlexander 7y ago
      Wonderful, thank you so much!
• leereeves 7y ago
  > New Ideas also come from new technologies. This may be why it seems like it's harder to find new ideas now. It was relatively easy during the waves of "do X on a computer", "do X on the Web", and "do X on a phone", but now we're waiting on the next transformative idea that will allow everything old to be reinvented again.
  • petra 7y ago
    "do X using AI/ML", "do X using robotics" seem to be a pretty effective template.
    • lifeisstillgood 7y ago
      I will throw out that AI/Ml is less platform-y than 'on a phone', 'on the web'. But I would also suggest the following likely to be platforms Do X on Alexa (sorry voice enabled UI) Do X on Augmented Reality Do X on Unreal Engine (seriously read up on fortnite and the metaverse)
• Wingman4l7 7y ago
  For those curious about the impact of neodymium magnets in the creation of the Walkman, as I was, I found this: https://hackaday.com/2019/07/22/forget-the-walkman-its-the-headphones/ https://hackaday.com/2019/07/22/forget-the-walkman-its-the-h...
  • philipkglass 7y ago
    As one of the Hackaday comments mentioned, the original Walkman must have used samarium cobalt magnets rather than neodymium magnets. SmCo magnets were known since the early 1960s but neodymium magnets were discovered in 1984, 5 years after the Walkman launched: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samarium%E2%80%93cobalt_magnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samarium%E2%80%93cobalt_magnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neodymium_magnet#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neodymium_magnet#History
• akiselev 7y ago
  How do you teach creativity? What does such a class look like? I'm curious what a syllabus for your class looks like.
  • avmich 7y ago
    Author of "Borrowing Brilliance" (Borrowing Brilliance: The Six Steps to Business Innovation by Building on the Ideas of Others) proposes some thoughts about creativity - like, it's a combination of ideas from another area.
  • Daub 7y ago
    Well... I designed the course for the school, but only taught it once. Frankly, it was not a roaring success. One reason was that I was asked to deliver it online. With my recent (obliged) experience in online teaching, I think I could do a better job if I did it again. I incorporated much of the material into other courses, to some success. Here are my course notes, which include assignment descriptions: https://www.dropbox.com/s/m3s83x036makvhu/Creativitity.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/m3s83x036makvhu/Creativitity.pdf?d... To answer your question directly, like all teaching, it requires that the assignments and exercises be appropriately designed. No matter how much I tried to design an assignment that embodied the ideas I was teaching, students would still come up with really un-creative responses. I came to the conclusion that the only way to guarantee success was to mentor them individually. Most creativity courses just deliver the 'received wisdoms' (i.e. they are theory courses). Very few actually try to foster creativity. The book inGenius: A crash course on creativity (Tina Seelig) was written by someone who did. Here is the course description to a creativity course delivered at the University of New South Wales. Its not bad, but for a creativity course, the assignments seems a bit un-imaginative. https://www.dropbox.com/s/mnbw3v4qzrtpx14/D52C5C9E-1043-4261-A98C-D2E5E1C8310F.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/mnbw3v4qzrtpx14/D52C5C9E-1043-4261...
    • Balgair 7y ago
      This is amazing work, thank you!
• bsenftner 7y ago
  Cross disciplinary conceptual mining is a great way to realize the "low hanging fruit" waiting for disruption in any industry. The silos of knowledge are high and thick, just like the skulls of the industry thought leaders who say things can't be done in some different manner. I've worked as a developer a number of industries, and as an MBA consultant in 3 times as many more. I'm in a developer job at the moment, but when I was actively consulting I'd just learn how they run operations, and the glaring opportunities for substantial expense eliminating and productivity enhancing changes glow like the sun.
• dntbnmpls 7y ago
  > the literature is in near agreement on this topic. New ideas come mostly from recombining old ideas. Absolutely. Not just in literature/arts but science as well. The ideas of atoms, physics, etc are a "rehash" of ancient greek ideas. Though obviously not the same, but there is no doubt that the study of pre-socratics influenced science. > New Ideas also come from new technologies. Even more true. Everything from the invention of letters, numbers to telescopes and microscopes led to new ideas, new arts and new sciences. Also, another major component is wealth. Research, new ideas, etc require wealth so that you have the time and resources to pursue and expand on these ideas. Ancient greece was a wealthy slave owning society which allowed them the freedom to pursue noble ideas rather than slaving away to make ends meet. This is where we get the idea of "liberal" education. Liberal here doesn't mean the education is free, but rather education is for those who are free ( aka wealth slave owners ). Wealth frees you from life's mundane tasks. It's also why every major civilization or flourishing of knowledge/ideas always was preceded by immense wealth ( america, ancient greece, mesotopamia, ancient egypt, italian renaissance, the englightment, etc ). People mistakenly assume you get knowledge and then wealth, but historically, it's always been the other way around. You get wealthy first and then you pursue knowledge.
• andrelgomes 7y ago
  Another term for this is the Hegelian dialectic [0]. Very similar to your term playful association but it describes that the "first" old idea, the thesis, allows there to be a counter idea, the antithesis. These two counter ideas morph into one idea, the synthesis. A consequence of this term over playful association is that these New Ideas are more tangible and have less sense of randomness. An example of this playing out - First came Disco, the thesis. People who didn't like Disco came up with Rock, the antithesis. The combining of those two became Pop, the synthesis. And the music timeline continues (don't overthink the music choices I'm completely guessing) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic#Hegelian_dialectic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic#Hegelian_dialectic