4 ms·
It's only revolutionary if you ignore history. As popularized in film, John Nash did this in the 1960s.
by tantalor 2y ago
It's only revolutionary if you ignore history.
As popularized in film, John Nash did this in the 1960s.
- inglor_cz 2y agoYe olde question: is the crucial aspect of innovation if someone did that first, or if someone was able to break into the mainstream? If the technique wasn't used for 50 years after Nash, wasn't it like the tree that fell in the forest and nobody heard it falling? Imagine finding out that someone observed antibiotic effects of Penicilinum in the 1880s, but patients still dying of banal infections until Fleming; in that case, I would give the "revolutionary" credit to Fleming.
- keybored 2y agoNo, it’s not revolutionary if someone manages to find a counter-example 22 minutes after someone proclaims that it is revolutionary. It clearly hasn’t been relegated to obscurity.
- inglor_cz 2y agoRevolution means pretty literally "turn something around". Which a first actual large-scale deployment of something fulfills, but isolated experiments don't. Was Falcon 9 revolutionary? For me, absolutely, because it was the first widely deployed rocket that made partial reuse economical, and thus enabled projects such as Starlink. We can call the previous small-scale experiments bold or maybe groundbreaking, but there was no revolution achieved.
- keybored 2y agoEDIT: Ahead might be simply nitpicking & splitting hairs. You’re moving the goalpost. First it was a revolutionary idea. Now a revolution is after an idea has been put into practice.[1] Which is it? [1] Even “not everything was thought of yet” but it’s there “for people whose thinking is sufficiently out of the box”. Come on.
- inglor_cz 2y agoYou are onto something. I moved the goalpost. One of the reasons might be that the conversation dragged over hours and I lost the precise context in my head, with tons of distractions coming my way.