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> We live in a world where an idea that does something that has never been done before can be built at home and shared without cost [...], all without it having
by yiyus 11y ago
> We live in a world where an idea that does something that has never been done before can be built at home and shared without cost [...], all without it having any use or any place in the market. Outside of art, that is something we did not have a few years ago.
I do not agree with this idea. Many inventions have been driven by curiosity. People playing with magnets or 8 bits computers were not trying to solve any market problem. Even physics were developed by simple people sharing curious "unuseful" experiments for centuries.
- weego 11y agoIf anything, individuals seem to have stopped inventing/investigating. It used to be that persons of means would use their means in the pursuit of some expansion of their knowledge. Now it's in pursuit of more means.
- sophacles 11y agoI don't know about this - one of the things I like to do when I travel is visit the local hackerspace. I've been to quite a few of them around the country, and they all seem to be full of wonderful people exploring and inventing for the fun of it.
- knodi123 11y agoThis is a common historical fallacy. Like "It used to be that Greeks would sit around inventing geometry, philosophy, and democracy. Now they just ruin banks." There were always both kinds of people, and the inventors who are driven by the love of science and learning have always been a minority. It's just that the people who only care about personal wealth rarely make it into history books, whereas the iconoclastic scientists frequently do. And the same is true today.
- edanm 11y ago"It's just that the people who only care about personal wealth rarely make it into history books, whereas the iconoclastic scientists frequently do." Arguably even this isn't true - Many people know the name of, say, Archimedes and Newton, but I doubt it's more than the people who know Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan. Might be close though.
- knodi123 11y agoWhat I'm trying to say is, what percentage of people can name a couple of great thinkers from the classical era? Now compare that to the percentage of people who can name a wealthy merchant or banker from the same period.
- Semiapies 11y agoEvery generation thinks it invented sex, rebellion, and curiosity.
- ethbro 11y agoThat's because these things seem to have an inverse relationship with age. (Not a flame! I feel like statistically speaking, probably true for the majority. Thankfully, there's a minority that shines even brighter with age)
- oldmanjay 11y agoYou aren't wrong about the sentiment, but parsimoniously the cause is that youth is callow