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> The vast majority of people never come up with a truly new idea. those that do are considered exceptional and their names go down in history books. Depends o

> The vast majority of people never come up with a truly new idea. those that do are considered exceptional and their names go down in history books. Depends on your definition of "truly" new since any idea could be argued to be a mix of all past ideas. But I see truly new ideas all the time without going down in the history books because most new ideas are incrementally building on what came before or are extremely niche and only a very few turn out to be a massive turning point which has a broad impact which is also only usually evident in retrospect (e.g. blue LEDs was basically trial and error and almost an approach that was given up on, transistors were believed to be impactful but not a huge revolution for computing like they turned out to be, etc etc).

anon291 2y ago
> Depends on your definition of "truly" new since any idea could be argued to be a mix of all past ideas. My personal feeling when I engage in these conversations is that we humans have a cognitive bias to ascribe a human remixing of an old idea to intelligence, but an AI-model remixing of an old idea as lookup. Indeed, basically every revolutionary idea is a mix of past ideas if you look closely enough. AI is a great example. To the 'lay person' AI is novel! It's new. It can talk to you! It's amazing. But for people who've been in this field for a while, it's an incremental improvement over linear algebra, topology, functional spaces, etc.