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That's a very big claim, perhaps true only if human endeavor only ever builds linearly. But I dont think that is true. Certainly not in the arts or music, e.g.

That's a very big claim, perhaps true only if human endeavor only ever builds linearly. But I dont think that is true. Certainly not in the arts or music, e.g. the Beatles did not need to ingest the entire corpus of Mozart or even Scott Joplin to be highly productive. Although, it certainly helped that they were extremely open minded to all types of music. A second example is that of recent advances in virtualization, where the last decade of advances in things like cgroups, namespaces and containers were all done by people who I assert had no training in IBM MVS/zOS and therefore weren't building on what went before (imho, to their detriment).

npunt 4y ago
The Beatles themselves didn't need to ingest the entire corpus of past musicians to be productive & inventive, but they did stand on the shoulders of giants musically (vs being born in some prior century), and they were in the right time & place to be part of a growing scene whose smarts exceeded that of any of it's individual participants. This is the nature of 'scenius' and of golden ages - a lot of ideas are already teed up in the collective consciousness.
FabHK 4y ago
> only if human endeavor only ever builds linearly. A lot of mathematics is cumulative, though. And even if you can go further by going thinner (specialising more), maybe breakthroughs require lateral thinking and connections that are predicated on not being too specialised, but having breadth also. If that is the case, sooner or later we might be in trouble.