3 ms·

And yet, it turns out last 600 years saw many orders of magnitude more innovation than the years prior.

by smabie 3y ago

chongli 3y ago
We’d expect this regardless of intellectual property laws. I think the overall innovation follows a logistic function. Early in history most people were primarily engaged in subsistence (hunting or agriculture). It took a really long time to develop the basic tools and infrastructure to get to the point where people could start to specialize in jobs not immediately related to food production, storage, or defence. None of that stuff is strictly dependent on IP laws, they just happened to be the obvious solution to the problem “how do researchers and artists protect their investments from folks that steal/copy their ideas and beat them to market?”
- wongarsu 3y ago
  Even ignoring education, the compounding effect of innovation and how most people didn't have the preconditions for innovating at all, you would expect us to have vastly more innovation right now just by virtue of having more people. We now have 20 times as many people on earth as in 1400, 40 times as many as in the year 1, and 200 times as many as in the year -4000.
worksonmine 3y ago
Correlation ≠ causation. The printing press came around the same time and probably contributed to this development, not patents. If he was greedy maybe he would've patented the technology and normal people wouldn't learn to read.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  Also, much more importantly, the invention of the scientific method and science as a philosophy of epistemology. Common knowledge of physics for a thousand years was that heavier things fall faster, so spoke Aristotle. Nobody actually "fact checked" that because "duh, of course heavier things fall faster, this feather falls so slowly, everyone knows that" and so knowledge could not advance.

3 ms·

And yet, it turns out last 600 years saw many orders of magnitude more innovation than the years prior.

by smabie 3y ago

And yet, it turns out last 600 years saw many orders of magnitude more innovation than the years prior.

chongli 3y ago
We’d expect this regardless of intellectual property laws. I think the overall innovation follows a logistic function. Early in history most people were primarily engaged in subsistence (hunting or agriculture). It took a really long time to develop the basic tools and infrastructure to get to the point where people could start to specialize in jobs not immediately related to food production, storage, or defence. None of that stuff is strictly dependent on IP laws, they just happened to be the obvious solution to the problem “how do researchers and artists protect their investments from folks that steal/copy their ideas and beat them to market?”
- wongarsu 3y ago
  Even ignoring education, the compounding effect of innovation and how most people didn't have the preconditions for innovating at all, you would expect us to have vastly more innovation right now just by virtue of having more people. We now have 20 times as many people on earth as in 1400, 40 times as many as in the year 1, and 200 times as many as in the year -4000.
worksonmine 3y ago
Correlation ≠ causation. The printing press came around the same time and probably contributed to this development, not patents. If he was greedy maybe he would've patented the technology and normal people wouldn't learn to read.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  Also, much more importantly, the invention of the scientific method and science as a philosophy of epistemology. Common knowledge of physics for a thousand years was that heavier things fall faster, so spoke Aristotle. Nobody actually "fact checked" that because "duh, of course heavier things fall faster, this feather falls so slowly, everyone knows that" and so knowledge could not advance.