Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?
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Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?
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Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?
#2i have a feeling there may be some interesting ideas hiding in the paper somewhere, can someone who happens to read the paper share a TLDR?
Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?
#3I'm pretty sure that Ancient Greeks thought that everything has already been discovered.
Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?
#4I'm pretty sure that Ancient Greeks thought that everything has already been discovered.
If the ancient Greeks thought that subsequent discoveries would get harder and harder, they might have been right.
Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?
#5Maybe, it's getting hard to find ideas due to all these paywalls.
Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?
#6It may just be a change in the way that we work. This paper may just as well be titled "Are institutions getting less effective?" or "Are research institutions getting less effective?". Hell, it might even be that our smartest people aren't researching and the amount of brainpower we throw at research problems has actually decreased even though the effort/money we throw at research problems has increased.
Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?
#7NB: the title is misleading. this is not about pure ideas, this is about economic growth, which to be measurable (significant) needs to be exponential.
no doubt, there are more ideas now than ever. technology is a great enabler. but finding economically impactful ideas ... that does seem to be getting harder, from my armchair view.
Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?
#8Good ideas are easy to find in any niche, but the low central bank interest rates make price discovery extremely hard, so most of the time it's just not worth to implement those ideas, as people are not compensated well enough for executing on those ideas.
I believe that right now any project that gets people closer to hard money is a good direction.
Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?
#9Maybe, it's getting hard to find ideas due to all these paywalls.
Yes, but sites like:
https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
https://sci-hub.tw/
exist and make it trivial to get around draconian publishing practices. I'm not advocating not paying for journalism---it's just that not everyone realistically can, and paywalling them seems like a bad solution.
A more plausible reason, at least to me, is the increasing specialization of fields and lack of cross-field communication.
Also, ideas seem to be flowing plentifully at least in math and TCS, where old and hard conjectures are still being proved with astonishing regularity.
Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?
#10The pigeonhole principle [0] is also becoming more of a factor due to the sheer volume of production.
Especially in domains with a limited branching factor. For example, in music, if you only have 12 tones in an octave to play with, along with variable length and spacing, you start to run out of "good" melodies under 20 notes after 400 years.