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> I'm beginning to think that the best way to approach a problem is by either not being aware of or disregarding most of the similar efforts that came before. T

• layman51 2y ago
  Right, the other side is when you end up with rediscoveries of the same ideas. The example that comes to my mind is when a medical researcher found the trapezoidal rule for integration again[1]. [1]: https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/ https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...
  • sitkack 2y ago
    I think that shows how great the trapezoidal rule is. I feel like this is brought out too many times, that now it is used to make fun of people. It is 18 years old at this point.
    • FartyMcFarter 2y ago
      I mean, it sort of deserves being made fun of. 18 years ago Google existed, surely you'd search for "area under a curve" before going through all the effort of writing a paper reinventing integrals? Edit: actually the paper was written in 1994, not sure what the "18 years" was referring to. But still, peer review existed and so did maths books... Even if the author can be excused somewhat (and that's already a stretch), peer reviewers should definitely not let this fly.
      • fragmede 2y ago
        I'd argue this is an argument against purely peer review, as her peers also weren't mathematicians. Some of us when learning calculus wonder if we'd been alive before it was invented, if we'd be smart enough to invent it. Dr. Tai provably was. (the trapezoid rule, anyway) So I choose to say xkcd 1053 to her, rather than bullying her for not knowing advanced math.
        • eru 2y ago
          > Dr. Tai provably was. No, we have no proof of that. We just know that she published a paper explaining the trapezoidal rule. (A) That approximation for 'nice' curves was known long before calculus. Calculus is about doing this in the limit (or with infinitesimals or whatever) and also wondering about mathematical niceties, and also some things about integration. (B) I'm fairly certain she would have had a bit of calculus at some point in her education, even if she remembered it badly enough to think she found something new.
          • fragmede 2y ago
            I mean, it's possible she reinvented the wheel because what she really needed in her life is for the math department to laugh at her, but that seems far fetched to me.
      • ashoeafoot 2y ago
        Does it make you less of a peer to others who found it before ? At leas the author showed ability to think creative for himself , not paralyzed by the great stagnation like the rest of us.
        • mpweiher 2y ago
          Herself. Mary Tai. And what makes you less of a peer is not knowing the basics. And being so unaware of apparently not knowing the basics, and/or uninterested, that you don't bother to check something that is highly checkable.
  • gsf_emergency_2 2y ago
    This is the the strongest argument for not shaming reinvention... Unless the victims are world-class..? (Because it's not entirely not self-inflicted) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42981356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42981356 Shades of the strong-link weak-link dilemma too
    • eru 2y ago
      > This is the the strongest argument for not shaming reinvention... Sounds like a pretty weak argument? I'm sure there are some good arguments for re-invention. But this ain't one of them. Basically, re-invention for fun or to help gain understanding is fine. But when you publish a 'new' method, it helps to do a bit of research about prior work. Especially when the method is something you should have heard about during your studies.
  • Shorel 2y ago
    That's not really a problem. In one hand, it shows the idea is really useful on its own. And on the other hand, it shows that currently forgotten ideas have a chance to being rediscovered in the future.
    • blablablerg 2y ago
      It is, because you are wasting time reinventing the wheel. Also if something is already well researched, you might miss intricacies, traps, optimizations etc. previous researchers have stumbled upon.
      • Brian_K_White 2y ago
        This is a good example of how the most obvious intuition can be wrong, or at best incomplete.
      • dwaltrip 2y ago
        It isn’t necessarily “wasted” time. There are more ways to look at it, as well as 2nd order and 3rd order effects (and so on). It’s a powerful skill to be able to try to solve things from first principles. And it’s a muscle you can strengthen. It would be a bit silly to never look anything up, but it isn’t so black and white.
      • Shorel 2y ago
        You need to be able to do both. Only reading the existing literature is not good enough. The capacity to create ideas is also something that needs to be practiced.
    • p00dles 2y ago
      I agree -> even if someone spends their time "rediscovering" an existing solution, I think that the learning experience of coming up with a solution without starting from current best solution is really valuable. Maybe that person doesn't reach the local maximum on that project, but having a really good learning experience maybe enables them to reach a global maximum on one of their next projects. If I want some novel ideas from a group of people, I'm going to give them the framework of the problem, split them into groups so that they don't bias each other, and say: go figure it out.
  • djmips 2y ago
    I find a lot of the time concepts and patterns can be the same in different fields, just hidden by different nomenclature and constructed upon a different pyramid of knowledge. It's nice we have a common language that is mathematics, the science of patterns, to unify such things but it's still going to be a challenge because not everyone is fluent in all the various branches of mathematics. It's even mind-blowing how many ways you can approach the same problem with equivalencies between different types of mathematics itself.
• Dansvidania 2y ago
  there might be a decent amount of "survivorship bias" too. meaning you only hear of the few events where someone starts from first principles and actually finds, be it luck or smarts, a novel solution which improves on the status quo, but i'd argue there are N other similar situations where you don't end up with a better solution. That being said, I so disagree with just taking the "state of the art" as written in stone, and "we can't possibly do better than library x" etc.
  • smaudet 2y ago
    Plenty of "state of the art", at least a decade ago, that was not very state of anything. I think bias is inherent in our literature and solutions. But also, I agree that the probability of a better solution degrades over time (assuming that the implementations themselves do not degrade - building a faster hash table does not matter if you have made all operations exponentially more expensive for stupid, non-computational, reasons)
  • karparov 2y ago
    [dead]
• mmusson 2y ago
  Or worse, pursuing something already proven not to work.
  • porkbrain 2y ago
    Viewed through the lens of personal development I suppose one could make an argument that there wasn't much difference between rediscovering an existing valid or invalid solution. Both lead to internalisation of a domain's constraints.
  • somenameforme 2y ago
    The problem is that when the proof is wrong, as in this case a related conjecture held up for 40 years, which is not a "proof" per se, but still ostensibly an extremely high reliability indicator of correctness. Another example is when SpaceX was first experimenting with reusable self landing rockets. They were being actively mocked by Tory Bruno, who was the head of ULA (basically an anti-competitive shell-but-not-really-corp merger between Lockheed and Boeing), claiming essentially stuff along the lines of 'We've of course already thoroughly researched and experimented with these ideas years ago. The economics just don't work at all. Have fun learning we already did!' Given that ULA made no efforts to compete with what SpaceX was doing it's likely that they did genuinely believe what they were saying. And that's a company with roots going all the way back to the Apollo program, with billions of dollars in revenue, and a massive number of aerospace engineers working for them. And the guy going against them was 'Silicon Valley guy with no aerospace experience who made some money selling a payment processing tool.' Yet somehow he knew better.
    • necovek 2y ago
      All the cases you bring up are not "proofs": a conjecture is very much not one, it's just that nobody bothered to refute this particular one even if there were results proving it isn't (cited in the paper). Similarly, ULA had no "proof" that this would be economically infeasible: Musk pioneered using agile ship-and-fail-fast for rocket development which mostly contradicted common knowledge that in projects like these your first attempt should be a success. Like with software, this actually sped things up and delivered better, cheaper results.
• lo_zamoyski 2y ago
  Right. FWIW, Feynman predicted that physics would become rather boring in this regard, because physics education had become homogenized. This isn't to propose a relativism, but rather that top-down imposed curricula may do a good deal of damage to the creativity of science. That being said, what we need is more rigorous thinking and more courage pursuing the truth where it leads. While advisors can be useful guides, and consensus can be a useful data point, there can also be an over-reliance on such opinions to guide and decide where to put one's research efforts, what to reevaluate, what to treat as basically certain knowledge, and so on. Frankly, moral virtue and wisdom are the most important. Otherwise, scientific praxis degenerates into popularity contest, fitting in, grants, and other incentives that vulgarize science.
  • MVissers 2y ago
    I think that's why most innovative science today happens at the intersection of two domains– That's where someone from a different field can have unique insights and try something new in an adjacent field. This is often hard to do when you're in the field yourself.
• godelski 2y ago
  I'm not sure this is true, though I think it looks true. I think the issue is that when a lot of people have put work into something you think that the chances of success yourself are low. This is a pretty reasonable belief too. With the current publish or perish paradigm I think this discourages a lot of people from even attempting. You have evidence that the problem is hard and even if solvable, probably is timely, so why risk your entire career? There are other interesting things that are less risky. In fact, I'd argue that this environment in of itself results in far less risk being taken. (There are other issues too and I laid out some in another comment) But I think this would look identical to what we're seeing.
• phyzix5761 2y ago
  But how can you ever discover a novel solution without attempting to resow the ground?
• taylorius 2y ago
  So if there's no solution in a particular area, you won't find it? You may be on to something there! :-)
• croo 2y ago
  In 1973 Clifford Cock solved the problem of public keys first time in history that no one in GCHQ managed to solve in the past 3 years. He jolted down the solution in half hour after hearing about it then wondered why is it such a big thing for everyone else. A fresh view unclouded by prejudice can make all the difference.
• bluedino 2y ago
  Run a mile in 4 minutes. Eat 83 hot dogs in 10 minutes. Everything is impossible until someone comes along that's crazy enough to do it.