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I have the same perspective, and have had the exact same experience with supervisors "forgetting where they get ideas from" (not just me but also others working

I have the same perspective, and have had the exact same experience with supervisors "forgetting where they get ideas from" (not just me but also others working with them). One related thing that's been on my mind a lot lately is people or projects who are/were ahead of their time, and as a result didn't really maybe get enough credit as they should have. Sometimes being "ahead of one's time" suggests someone or something eventually getting a lot of attention for seeing things before everyone else. But sometimes I think people and projects ahead of their time just get forgotten and/or lost because they were never really supported enough to begin with. I guess in general I often feel as if credit is as much about the audience as it is the creator. If someone has an innovation but no one else understands it, it's falling on deaf ears and often is lost.

cjbgkagh 4y ago
I do think there is an insane amount of talent that is squandard due to inefficiencies in social organization. I don't know the solution and worry that it'll actually get worse instead of better.
saltcured 4y ago
I've been through enough cycles to develop an even more detached/depersonalized view of it... As you say, the credit is an observer's construct, but I think sometimes the innovators are also just the audience of an emergent concept. Put another way, I think the whole narrative of ideas "coming from" an individual is often a self-indulgent fiction. I've seen too many R&D topics where the supposedly novel ideas seem to be inevitable memes. The self-styled sole inventors are often one of many seeing the same insights at the same time, because they are all hosting the same prerequisite background knowledge. There are also often lots of these ideas floating around simultaneously. A significant meta (or negative?) thought process is to defer or suppress most of the ideas and focus on a few. Sometimes, we might think to credit the boss with the wisdom of deciding _when_ an idea deserves attention. That business decision is often more impactful than the juniors' many heartfelt flashes of insight. But this meta-analysis can go further. Often there are different labs all in slightly different phases and some are "before their time" and some, perhaps, "too late". Was the boss at the goldilocks lab really more innovative? Or are all the players merely parts of a broader monte carlo search method...?
- cjbgkagh 4y ago
  I go to a lot of effort to find others with the same ideas as me and I found that I am unusually unique. Having a unique idea makes me feel insane and my compulsion to test the idea comes from a need of validation. I would be much happier if someone else did it because there are more profitable things I could be working on. I don't think inventiveness is evenly distributed among the population. I think it can be both true that such talent is rare and that it needs the additionally rare appropriate time and place for it to flourish.
  - saltcured 4y ago
    I think we might be on the same page here. Among billions, we are not as unique as we might intuit from our much smaller social circles. Aside from most of us probably having physical doppelgangers out there somewhere by mere chance, I suspect there are also psychological doppelgangers with many of our same traits and disposition, and these thought doppelgangers who were also fed enough of the same material to be thinking similar things. Sometimes we encounter one of these and have to decide whether they are fast friend, competitor, nemesis, or soul mate!

cjbgkagh 4y ago

I do think there is an insane amount of talent that is squandard due to inefficiencies in social organization. I don't know the solution and worry that it'll actually get worse instead of better.

saltcured 4y ago

I've been through enough cycles to develop an even more detached/depersonalized view of it... As you say, the credit is an observer's construct, but I think sometimes the innovators are also just the audience of an emergent concept. Put another way, I think the whole narrative of ideas "coming from" an individual is often a self-indulgent fiction. I've seen too many R&D topics where the supposedly novel ideas seem to be inevitable memes. The self-styled sole inventors are often one of many seeing the same insights at the same time, because they are all hosting the same prerequisite background knowledge. There are also often lots of these ideas floating around simultaneously. A significant meta (or negative?) thought process is to defer or suppress most of the ideas and focus on a few. Sometimes, we might think to credit the boss with the wisdom of deciding _when_ an idea deserves attention. That business decision is often more impactful than the juniors' many heartfelt flashes of insight. But this meta-analysis can go further. Often there are different labs all in slightly different phases and some are "before their time" and some, perhaps, "too late". Was the boss at the goldilocks lab really more innovative? Or are all the players merely parts of a broader monte carlo search method...?

cjbgkagh 4y ago
I go to a lot of effort to find others with the same ideas as me and I found that I am unusually unique. Having a unique idea makes me feel insane and my compulsion to test the idea comes from a need of validation. I would be much happier if someone else did it because there are more profitable things I could be working on. I don't think inventiveness is evenly distributed among the population. I think it can be both true that such talent is rare and that it needs the additionally rare appropriate time and place for it to flourish.
- saltcured 4y ago
  I think we might be on the same page here. Among billions, we are not as unique as we might intuit from our much smaller social circles. Aside from most of us probably having physical doppelgangers out there somewhere by mere chance, I suspect there are also psychological doppelgangers with many of our same traits and disposition, and these thought doppelgangers who were also fed enough of the same material to be thinking similar things. Sometimes we encounter one of these and have to decide whether they are fast friend, competitor, nemesis, or soul mate!