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I seriously hate people who keep saying we need to chase 'big ideas'. Why? Because big things have small beginnings c.f. the universe, earth agglomeration, th

I seriously hate people who keep saying we need to chase 'big ideas'. Why? Because big things have small beginnings c.f. the universe, earth agglomeration, the sun, galaxies, life, humans, civilisations, businesses, technologies and AI. Everything snowballs - nothing just magically appears from nowhere - it's all just a combination of incremental past states. People who don't understand how things are made feel as though all we need is more "eureka moments", geniuses, "innovation plans" and "big all encompassing goals" when this is not how innovation works at all. Innovation is directed evolution of the adjacent possible via the convergence of many secondary composable technologies and ideas and hence is messy, arduous, long and always incremental. Chasing big ideas is like building extremely complex software using the Waterfall method - it just doesn't work too well. What people should be saying is that we should "reduce the cost of failure", "speed up the iteration cycle" so that a bunch of small trivial composable ideas can quickly be assembled into something extraordinary - like the repurposed cells that create a human, or the combination of engines and wheels that make our cars. People who chase 'big ideas' miss the DNA for the forests. You have to work on making DNA before you can build the trees.

marshallp 14y ago
But there's also a place for big science. Manhattan project, Apollo program, Soviet industrialization.
- confluence 14y ago
  No doubt. But looking at light through slits, firing atoms through foil, falling apples and making tiny sparks using dynamos made those all possible. You'll also notice those were all government funded defense programs - and are hence a special case with the final one not being effective.
  - netcan 14y ago
    I wouldn't dismiss the final one so off-handedly. The Soviet economy may have been pretty unimpressive by the 70-80s, but earlier on it was making fast progress, not completely unlike the progress of the Chinese economy of the past 20 years. Russia started from a pretty low starting point when Lenin took over.
    - confluence 14y ago
      > Russia started from a pretty low starting point when Lenin took over. That's why they were making fast progress - any idiot who doesn't work will increase performance 100% by getting a job. Just because you take hundreds of millions of people that aren't working and starving to death to working and still starving to death - doesn't mean you did anything particularly useful. It just means you really fucked things up. China's real growth began with capitalist reform. So did Russias.
      - marshallp 14y ago
        Your argument doesn't really make sense though. Nonworking -> working can describe early soviet industrialization, but it was far more impressive than you're making out - they were first in space for everything up till 69. Also, going from the everyday puddling to big science projects can also be described as nonworking->working. If government taxes landowners more thoroughly and invests in big science instead, you can consider that as nw->w.
ippisl 14y ago
I think you're diminishing the role of a big "good" vision in the process of innovation. What's the guiding vision of the internet community ? as far as i can tell is mostly there's no valuable guiding vision. It's all about rapid trial and error to appeal to as many people as possible with whatever idea that will work. So we end with most of the web development community working on creating junk-food sites, optimizing ads and new ways to sell stuff. This way you get McDonalds and TV advertising invented. Big inventions indeed , mostly with negative value. Of course there are some clusters of the web with a big guiding vision: collaborative consumption, using the power of the web to reduce prices, better ways to share important knowledge, new labor marketplaces, democratizing innovation. And you see a qualitative difference between both sorts of companies.
- netcan 14y ago
  I don't think the difference is as qualitative as you might think. "using the power of the web to reduce prices" -- If any company had 1/10 that influence here that Wal Mart has had, they would be doing well.
- confluence 14y ago
  Get off your high horse - the market dictates usefulness within the bounds of negative externality regulation and human rights. The internet has produced more value over the preceding 10 years than essentially any other industry. "Purists" irritate me for the very reason that they don't work in the real messy world. People like McDonalds. People like watching TV. Just because you don't like it doesn't matter. Crass consumerism is the saving grace of the United States - it's what allows companies to thrive and grow and build wealth. "Important" things are overrated by those who don't do. Google's Ads and YouTube's cat videos have done more for the web than Wikipedia.
  - nickpinkston 14y ago
    The issue here is all wrapped up in "bounds of negative externality regulation". I'd hate to 4Step my way into being Zygna - I don't think it's useful for the end users and is nearly 100% parasitic. The market isn't perfect due to there being no "digital-heroin regulations" to prevent this drag on human progress. I think we can say with confidence that we're in a local optimum in current market conditions, and some us - myself included - wish to select ourselves out of doing such companies. "Wealth creation" is a byword for justifying rent seeking as if that was an end in itself - "job creators" at least has some positive end in sight. The argument you make "cat videos, etc." being beneficial is a valid one. The 90% of shit is why we have much of our infrastructure from AWS to FedEx. However, it's dangerous to assume that this is the only, or best, path to increasing our standard of living, and moreover to not see why we shouldn't try, in our own activities, to try to rise above it. Any concerted effort on solving a problem produces the effects you speak of - it's not just crap. Pure end-user numbers, vis-a-vis "crass consumerism", are not what dictate these positive externalities (AWS, etc.) that we experience. It's likely the challenge of the problem with respect to having a product-market fit. In other words - a hard problem solved for a small market is likely to produce outsized spillover effects - like why Rails powers productivity software and now tons of things. There is a middle ground between the dreamers and the rent seekers where the biggest impact to society can be gained. Rent seeking hoping for spillover is not the optimum path. Instead, if you really do want to make an impact first, find a real problem that benefits humanity and solve it - don't dream about it, and don't whitewash what's black.

marshallp 14y ago

But there's also a place for big science. Manhattan project, Apollo program, Soviet industrialization.

confluence 14y ago
No doubt. But looking at light through slits, firing atoms through foil, falling apples and making tiny sparks using dynamos made those all possible. You'll also notice those were all government funded defense programs - and are hence a special case with the final one not being effective.
- netcan 14y ago
  I wouldn't dismiss the final one so off-handedly. The Soviet economy may have been pretty unimpressive by the 70-80s, but earlier on it was making fast progress, not completely unlike the progress of the Chinese economy of the past 20 years. Russia started from a pretty low starting point when Lenin took over.
  - confluence 14y ago
    > Russia started from a pretty low starting point when Lenin took over. That's why they were making fast progress - any idiot who doesn't work will increase performance 100% by getting a job. Just because you take hundreds of millions of people that aren't working and starving to death to working and still starving to death - doesn't mean you did anything particularly useful. It just means you really fucked things up. China's real growth began with capitalist reform. So did Russias.
    - marshallp 14y ago
      Your argument doesn't really make sense though. Nonworking -> working can describe early soviet industrialization, but it was far more impressive than you're making out - they were first in space for everything up till 69. Also, going from the everyday puddling to big science projects can also be described as nonworking->working. If government taxes landowners more thoroughly and invests in big science instead, you can consider that as nw->w.

ippisl 14y ago

I think you're diminishing the role of a big "good" vision in the process of innovation. What's the guiding vision of the internet community ? as far as i can tell is mostly there's no valuable guiding vision. It's all about rapid trial and error to appeal to as many people as possible with whatever idea that will work. So we end with most of the web development community working on creating junk-food sites, optimizing ads and new ways to sell stuff. This way you get McDonalds and TV advertising invented. Big inventions indeed , mostly with negative value. Of course there are some clusters of the web with a big guiding vision: collaborative consumption, using the power of the web to reduce prices, better ways to share important knowledge, new labor marketplaces, democratizing innovation. And you see a qualitative difference between both sorts of companies.

netcan 14y ago
I don't think the difference is as qualitative as you might think. "using the power of the web to reduce prices" -- If any company had 1/10 that influence here that Wal Mart has had, they would be doing well.
confluence 14y ago
Get off your high horse - the market dictates usefulness within the bounds of negative externality regulation and human rights. The internet has produced more value over the preceding 10 years than essentially any other industry. "Purists" irritate me for the very reason that they don't work in the real messy world. People like McDonalds. People like watching TV. Just because you don't like it doesn't matter. Crass consumerism is the saving grace of the United States - it's what allows companies to thrive and grow and build wealth. "Important" things are overrated by those who don't do. Google's Ads and YouTube's cat videos have done more for the web than Wikipedia.
- nickpinkston 14y ago
  The issue here is all wrapped up in "bounds of negative externality regulation". I'd hate to 4Step my way into being Zygna - I don't think it's useful for the end users and is nearly 100% parasitic. The market isn't perfect due to there being no "digital-heroin regulations" to prevent this drag on human progress. I think we can say with confidence that we're in a local optimum in current market conditions, and some us - myself included - wish to select ourselves out of doing such companies. "Wealth creation" is a byword for justifying rent seeking as if that was an end in itself - "job creators" at least has some positive end in sight. The argument you make "cat videos, etc." being beneficial is a valid one. The 90% of shit is why we have much of our infrastructure from AWS to FedEx. However, it's dangerous to assume that this is the only, or best, path to increasing our standard of living, and moreover to not see why we shouldn't try, in our own activities, to try to rise above it. Any concerted effort on solving a problem produces the effects you speak of - it's not just crap. Pure end-user numbers, vis-a-vis "crass consumerism", are not what dictate these positive externalities (AWS, etc.) that we experience. It's likely the challenge of the problem with respect to having a product-market fit. In other words - a hard problem solved for a small market is likely to produce outsized spillover effects - like why Rails powers productivity software and now tons of things. There is a middle ground between the dreamers and the rent seekers where the biggest impact to society can be gained. Rent seeking hoping for spillover is not the optimum path. Instead, if you really do want to make an impact first, find a real problem that benefits humanity and solve it - don't dream about it, and don't whitewash what's black.