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It seems rather naive to think that's the reason why there was so much progress then rather than say due to there being more low hanging fruit.
by Tenoke 3y ago
It seems rather naive to think that's the reason why there was so much progress then rather than say due to there being more low hanging fruit.
- simmerup 3y agoThey stood on the shoulders of giants just like we do. It seems naive to think that getting on those shoulders in this modern age won’t create a brand new batch of low hanging fruit to pick if you’re willing to put the effort in
- yCombLinks 3y agoEventually the tree is picked clean, it doesn't matter how high you go. There's just very little left and all the pickers are trying to get the same fruit.
- simmerup 3y agoPeople thought the same one hundred years ago, and they will likely feel the same in the next hundred years when we all have our own AI assistants and probably stuff like ocular implants to replace monitors and other unfathomable discoveries
- yCombLinks 3y agoEverything we know about modern physics was being discovered at that time. Math formalism was really taking a foothold. Neither field has seen major advancements since roughly the 70s. Computer science is the same. Now we're computer plumbers, not scientists. I'm not suggesting there won't be advancements, but we solved most of the fundamentals in that time period
- n4r9 3y ago> we solved most of the fundamentals in that time period Arguably this is just one interpretation, the other being "we haven't made fundamental progress since that time period". In my limited understanding as a mathematician, there's definitely room for progress: settling the measurement problem, or formulating a theory of quantum gravity, say.
- n4r9 3y agoIt just makes a lot of sense to me that if you give researchers several hours more deep focus time per day, they'll make more progress. I appreciate the low hanging fruit argument, but it depends on an assumption about what's left to solve.