3 ms·

> Another possibility is that we reached a level of development where going forwad is really that hard. Well, harder. See my post at https://news.ycombinator

by graycat 12y ago

> Another possibility is that we reached a level of development where going forwad is really that hard. Well, harder. See my post at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8338417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8338417 in this thread where I try to explain the sense in which harder is, with the traditional management hierarchy, too hard.

marcosdumay 12y ago
That's similar to what I was calling corporate evolution. It's nice to see more people reaching the same conclusion, as that's the second one I'm less confident that is relevant. The one I'm less confident is that development is too hard. And I mean it in the literal sense, in that we need to create entire new thinking paradigms, and invest endless billions on tools so that we can get in another easily explited plateau. I'm not the only one expressing it on the thread, by the way. And now that I've had time to think about it, there's another possibility - that development is too easy... The basic science developed up to the 60's left us in a place where we can create tons of wealth even with no basic improvement, and it's possible that we aren't invest on the basics just because it does not offer the hightest ROI. Once we exploit enough possibilities that further improvement gets hard again, we may revert into investing in basic science and basic development.
- graycat 12y ago
  Again, for the issue of growing the economy and standard of living through more exploitation of what's on the shelves of the research libraries and the well trained workers in that material, I believe that the bottleneck is, really, with the non-technical suits, the guys with, maybe, a Harvard English or history major, maybe a law school degree, maybe an MBA, but with no real technical qualifications. So, these guys won't bet their careers on technical material they don't understand. Before 1940, the suits could understand enough about, say, radio and cars. So, do all the pure/applied research you want, those suits won't let, or at least won't help, the results see the light of day. We did a lot of pure research because (A) that is what the academic world most respects and, thus, for their careers, most researchers wanted to pursue, (B) US research, including workers with pasts in pure research, were a super big help in winning WWII and doing well in the Cold War, (C) the US DoD really liked and respected both pure and applied research, (D) Congress was eager to fund research as part of helping US national security. Part of the rationale for Congress funding pure research was that (A) the leading researchers told Congress that that was the research to fund and (B) the pure researchers were the profs who trained the worker bees for the more applied research -- so Congress was still happy. What we fund now via NSF and NIH is not too shabby. If someone actually has some good work background and a really good proposal, then likely they can get funded. But, with some exceptions, take some research results and a proposal for a product to Silicon Valley or the suits in a large company will, get either silence or laughs. Again, the suits want next to nothing to do with research results. Or, journals will give a serious review of a submitted research paper, but the suits won't get past the title page.

by graycat 12y ago

marcosdumay 12y ago

That's similar to what I was calling corporate evolution. It's nice to see more people reaching the same conclusion, as that's the second one I'm less confident that is relevant. The one I'm less confident is that development is too hard. And I mean it in the literal sense, in that we need to create entire new thinking paradigms, and invest endless billions on tools so that we can get in another easily explited plateau. I'm not the only one expressing it on the thread, by the way. And now that I've had time to think about it, there's another possibility - that development is too easy... The basic science developed up to the 60's left us in a place where we can create tons of wealth even with no basic improvement, and it's possible that we aren't invest on the basics just because it does not offer the hightest ROI. Once we exploit enough possibilities that further improvement gets hard again, we may revert into investing in basic science and basic development.

graycat 12y ago
Again, for the issue of growing the economy and standard of living through more exploitation of what's on the shelves of the research libraries and the well trained workers in that material, I believe that the bottleneck is, really, with the non-technical suits, the guys with, maybe, a Harvard English or history major, maybe a law school degree, maybe an MBA, but with no real technical qualifications. So, these guys won't bet their careers on technical material they don't understand. Before 1940, the suits could understand enough about, say, radio and cars. So, do all the pure/applied research you want, those suits won't let, or at least won't help, the results see the light of day. We did a lot of pure research because (A) that is what the academic world most respects and, thus, for their careers, most researchers wanted to pursue, (B) US research, including workers with pasts in pure research, were a super big help in winning WWII and doing well in the Cold War, (C) the US DoD really liked and respected both pure and applied research, (D) Congress was eager to fund research as part of helping US national security. Part of the rationale for Congress funding pure research was that (A) the leading researchers told Congress that that was the research to fund and (B) the pure researchers were the profs who trained the worker bees for the more applied research -- so Congress was still happy. What we fund now via NSF and NIH is not too shabby. If someone actually has some good work background and a really good proposal, then likely they can get funded. But, with some exceptions, take some research results and a proposal for a product to Silicon Valley or the suits in a large company will, get either silence or laughs. Again, the suits want next to nothing to do with research results. Or, journals will give a serious review of a submitted research paper, but the suits won't get past the title page.