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I do hope everyone realizes this is silly. Everything in this comparison relies on the quality of data. The "number of innovations" data comes exclusively from
by ignostic 12y ago
I do hope everyone realizes this is silly.
Everything in this comparison relies on the quality of data. The "number of innovations" data comes exclusively from a book by Isaac Asimov with under 1500 entries. To make some sort of grand pronouncement about a date range for the end of humanity based on Asimov's very subjective and unscientific qualification of what makes an innovation is absurd.
It's interesting that we think incremental improvement matters less than a brand new idea. Even steel tools built upon prior knowledge, and took decades to get right. Machines were incremental improvements from manually powered systems, which gradually evolved into the complex machiens we have now.
Some of these changed may feel like evolutionary innovations rather than revolutionary ideas, but that's how technology develops. It's easy to look at past innovations from the Greeks, because we see how the technology went from 0 to amazing. But we do it in retrospect, and speaking in terms of centuries, which makes innovations appear to spring out of nowhere more than they actually did.
- gwern 12y agoIt is a bit silly, but if you use a variety of encyclopedias and source texts with various temporal cutoffs (not just this one, but Simonton's work or Murray's _Human Accomplishment_ where he ignores any item after 1950 while drawing on published books), you do pretty consistently get the late 1800s as the apex for per capita.
- 7777777 12y agoI agree and disagree. :) I think it is silly only if you assume it is incorrect. But, although not from a robust source of data it still could be the correct result. And in that case, I couldn't call it silly. But who knows, the word "innovation" is subjective, so you could probably argue against any dataset, pretty easily. That being said, I agree that identifying something as an innovation is going to be heavily weighted to past accomplishments. At this point, innovations in theoretical physics are so complex that I can hardly begin to really grasp the importance of discoveries beyond my niche and I myself have a Ph.d. in physics.
- homerowilson 12y agoYeah. Got to love that 10th order polynomial fit...