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This is just recency bias. We remember those that did great things and we forget those that did not. In 100 years, folks will look back on our time and remember

This is just recency bias. We remember those that did great things and we forget those that did not. In 100 years, folks will look back on our time and remember Elon Musk, Bezos, Jobs, Gates, etc... and will wonder why we were blessed with such great visionaries and will complain about how their generation is nothing but bean counters and bureaucrats.

beaconstudios 6y ago
Musk stands out in that crowd for being an actual old-school innovator. Bezos, Jobs and Gates have made huge impacts, but those impacts are evolutionary rather than revolutionary. That's the difference; the rate of actual invention, or as Thiel puts it, going from 0 to 1, has dropped off a cliff.
- qqqwerty 6y ago
  No it hasn't. CRISPR was a very recent invention and has the potential to radically change biotech. mRNA was just used to roll out a novel vaccine in a record amount of time. Solid state batteries will be a game changer in the EV space. You are just cherry-picking your facts to fit a narrative that you have built. It is easy to glorify the past when you did not live through it. For every Wright Brother, there were hundreds if not thousands of hucksters and shysters. If anything, a close reading of history will illuminate how little has changed regarding the human condition in the last 200 years.
  - beaconstudios 6y ago
    > No it hasn't. CRISPR was a very recent invention and has the potential to radically change biotech. > You are just cherry-picking your facts to fit a narrative that you have built. lol less innovation != no innovation. the human condition may not change, but culture does. Just look to the economy and how many companies are primarily focused on rent extraction or incremental improvements to existing concepts as opposed to inventing new things. How many new inventions did we get in the 50s-60s alone?
    - qqqwerty 6y ago
      lol, do you seriously think no one was focused on rent extraction in the 50 and 60s? As if that was a recent invention? I agree, the culture has changed. Right now, I can now apply to 100's of startup incubators to get funding for my idea or invention. Back in the day, you needed to be either very well connected or from a wealthy family. Today, I have a 3d printer sitting on my desk, and I can hack together a little self driving robot in a weekend. Back then, making prototypes involved an entire machine shop and a ton of capital. If anything there are too many people trying to innovate. I work in the energy sector, and literally every idea with a shred of plausibility has multiple startups working in the space.
      - beaconstudios 6y ago
        > lol, do you seriously think no one was focused on rent extraction in the 50 and 60s? As if that was a recent invention? No, obviously I don't believe that. You seem to keep going back to black and white arguments, which I didn't make. > Right now, I can now apply to 100's of startup incubators to get funding for my idea or invention The biggest, most successful startup examples are incremental. Uber, stripe, Airbnb. Google I would probably argue was a serious innovation over the status quo, but still on an incremental subject. > Back then, making prototypes involved an entire machine shop and a ton of capital. I do agree that consumer access to capital, both financial and manufacturing has improved. But my point in general is that ambition has shrunk and there's less of what Thiel calls 0 to 1 innovation and more energy is going into incremental improvement and rent extraction.
      - evgen 6y ago
        You are wasting your time. It seems quite apparent the person you are arguing with has a rather poor grasp of the history of science and technology and has also bought in big-time to the 'great man' theory of history. Reality is much messier. It is going 1000 different directions all at once, mostly composed of regular people each working on a small thing and most of those small things are useless, and no one knows 99.9999% of what happened or is actually happening now. In the same way that 5 years from now is going to mostly be like today and 25 years from now will be almost unrecognizable for most people, if people cherry pick bits of the past they can imagine almost no progress with current practices but they also imagine themselves to be in the 0.1% in the past who might have had access to this proto-technology but today it costs less than a days labour.
- qqqwerty 6y ago
  lol, and just to nit pick. Musk is probably the least innovative on this list. He did not found Tesla, he took it over. And SpaceX is using designs that had existed for decades. His main "innovation" was betting large sums of money on existing technologies on the hopes that the market was finally ready for them. I will give him credit for starlink and autopilot, but it is too early to judge the impact of either of those yet. Bezos on the other hand radically transformed the entire retail sector. The logistics required to operate at that scale required healthy amounts of innovation. And AWS is a relatively original and transformative product. And whatever you think about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, they were both instrumental in defining the shift to personal computing, among many other impacts. Billions of people have been impacted by their work.
  - beaconstudios 6y ago
    > Musk is probably the least innovative on this list. > Bezos on the other hand radically transformed the entire retail sector Who cares whether you're doing innovation if your goals are lame? I'd much rather we had more people trying to colonise the stars than people trying to make high availability shopping websites. That's exactly what I've been trying to say this whole time. I suppose ambition is a better word for it than innovation.
    - qqqwerty 6y ago
      Fair enough. I still think there are no shortage of folks with ambition in this generation compared to previous ones. But the one thing that I do think missing is a "new frontier". Previous generations had oceans to sail, mountains to climb, etc... If definitely feels like there are fewer frontiers to explore in this era. But that is largely due to how much ground was already covered by previous generations and not really the fault of the current one. The stars are basically the last frontier, but unfortunately, exploring those requires budgets that only big governments can afford. Well out of the realm of your garage-scale inventor.
      - beaconstudios 6y ago
        I think there are more frontiers than we are generally aware of but for sure the lowest hanging fruit are already picked. Frontiers generally have to be invented by people willing to go out into the unknown, and I guess the willingness to try completely new things with no obvious benefit is what is missing. Startups are everywhere for those whose ambition is primarily "become wealthy", but most are funded and investors want a credible route to market. The clearest image that portrays this for me is the 60s scifi images where people were imagining robot butlers, flying cars and cities on the moon and under the sea, all by the year 2000. It really captures what's missing nowadays, and what Elon represents to a lot of people.
s1artibartfast 6y ago
I don’t think that’s correct. PEW data shows that there is a huge increase in skepticism and pessimism characterized by contemporary America

beaconstudios 6y ago

Musk stands out in that crowd for being an actual old-school innovator. Bezos, Jobs and Gates have made huge impacts, but those impacts are evolutionary rather than revolutionary. That's the difference; the rate of actual invention, or as Thiel puts it, going from 0 to 1, has dropped off a cliff.

qqqwerty 6y ago
No it hasn't. CRISPR was a very recent invention and has the potential to radically change biotech. mRNA was just used to roll out a novel vaccine in a record amount of time. Solid state batteries will be a game changer in the EV space. You are just cherry-picking your facts to fit a narrative that you have built. It is easy to glorify the past when you did not live through it. For every Wright Brother, there were hundreds if not thousands of hucksters and shysters. If anything, a close reading of history will illuminate how little has changed regarding the human condition in the last 200 years.
- beaconstudios 6y ago
  > No it hasn't. CRISPR was a very recent invention and has the potential to radically change biotech. > You are just cherry-picking your facts to fit a narrative that you have built. lol less innovation != no innovation. the human condition may not change, but culture does. Just look to the economy and how many companies are primarily focused on rent extraction or incremental improvements to existing concepts as opposed to inventing new things. How many new inventions did we get in the 50s-60s alone?
  - qqqwerty 6y ago
    lol, do you seriously think no one was focused on rent extraction in the 50 and 60s? As if that was a recent invention? I agree, the culture has changed. Right now, I can now apply to 100's of startup incubators to get funding for my idea or invention. Back in the day, you needed to be either very well connected or from a wealthy family. Today, I have a 3d printer sitting on my desk, and I can hack together a little self driving robot in a weekend. Back then, making prototypes involved an entire machine shop and a ton of capital. If anything there are too many people trying to innovate. I work in the energy sector, and literally every idea with a shred of plausibility has multiple startups working in the space.
    - beaconstudios 6y ago
      > lol, do you seriously think no one was focused on rent extraction in the 50 and 60s? As if that was a recent invention? No, obviously I don't believe that. You seem to keep going back to black and white arguments, which I didn't make. > Right now, I can now apply to 100's of startup incubators to get funding for my idea or invention The biggest, most successful startup examples are incremental. Uber, stripe, Airbnb. Google I would probably argue was a serious innovation over the status quo, but still on an incremental subject. > Back then, making prototypes involved an entire machine shop and a ton of capital. I do agree that consumer access to capital, both financial and manufacturing has improved. But my point in general is that ambition has shrunk and there's less of what Thiel calls 0 to 1 innovation and more energy is going into incremental improvement and rent extraction.
    - evgen 6y ago
      You are wasting your time. It seems quite apparent the person you are arguing with has a rather poor grasp of the history of science and technology and has also bought in big-time to the 'great man' theory of history. Reality is much messier. It is going 1000 different directions all at once, mostly composed of regular people each working on a small thing and most of those small things are useless, and no one knows 99.9999% of what happened or is actually happening now. In the same way that 5 years from now is going to mostly be like today and 25 years from now will be almost unrecognizable for most people, if people cherry pick bits of the past they can imagine almost no progress with current practices but they also imagine themselves to be in the 0.1% in the past who might have had access to this proto-technology but today it costs less than a days labour.
qqqwerty 6y ago
lol, and just to nit pick. Musk is probably the least innovative on this list. He did not found Tesla, he took it over. And SpaceX is using designs that had existed for decades. His main "innovation" was betting large sums of money on existing technologies on the hopes that the market was finally ready for them. I will give him credit for starlink and autopilot, but it is too early to judge the impact of either of those yet. Bezos on the other hand radically transformed the entire retail sector. The logistics required to operate at that scale required healthy amounts of innovation. And AWS is a relatively original and transformative product. And whatever you think about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, they were both instrumental in defining the shift to personal computing, among many other impacts. Billions of people have been impacted by their work.
- beaconstudios 6y ago
  > Musk is probably the least innovative on this list. > Bezos on the other hand radically transformed the entire retail sector Who cares whether you're doing innovation if your goals are lame? I'd much rather we had more people trying to colonise the stars than people trying to make high availability shopping websites. That's exactly what I've been trying to say this whole time. I suppose ambition is a better word for it than innovation.
  - qqqwerty 6y ago
    Fair enough. I still think there are no shortage of folks with ambition in this generation compared to previous ones. But the one thing that I do think missing is a "new frontier". Previous generations had oceans to sail, mountains to climb, etc... If definitely feels like there are fewer frontiers to explore in this era. But that is largely due to how much ground was already covered by previous generations and not really the fault of the current one. The stars are basically the last frontier, but unfortunately, exploring those requires budgets that only big governments can afford. Well out of the realm of your garage-scale inventor.
    - beaconstudios 6y ago
      I think there are more frontiers than we are generally aware of but for sure the lowest hanging fruit are already picked. Frontiers generally have to be invented by people willing to go out into the unknown, and I guess the willingness to try completely new things with no obvious benefit is what is missing. Startups are everywhere for those whose ambition is primarily "become wealthy", but most are funded and investors want a credible route to market. The clearest image that portrays this for me is the 60s scifi images where people were imagining robot butlers, flying cars and cities on the moon and under the sea, all by the year 2000. It really captures what's missing nowadays, and what Elon represents to a lot of people.

s1artibartfast 6y ago

I don’t think that’s correct. PEW data shows that there is a huge increase in skepticism and pessimism characterized by contemporary America