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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 a

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.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]

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.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]