Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? • Hacker News Board

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#51

Post by anotheryou » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 7:36 PM UTC

friendlybus wrote: post #46

Had a similar discussion yesterday and I am aching for that conceptual freshness. What are all the non-Elon, non-besos plebs going to do for a day job? Our industries are too mature for easy growth. Cars, computers, space are done for the plebs, we need another industry of easy growth to pull this ship along. If history repeats, manufacturing will become king again. In the arts with near infinite creative control lat…

I haven't read the article yet, but I think it's just harder to reach the border of human knowledge. You have to specialize hard to reach it in a reasonable time.

Sadly that makes the smart people not take general, discipline arching careers. Only in young disciplines like machine learning there is still a lot of jumping sparks for other disciplines.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#52

Post by griffzhowl » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 7:39 PM UTC

tl;dr We haven't had any deep conceptual revolutions nor massive new sources of cheap energy for a while

Estimating how much innovation to expect depends on how you set the baseline. There are a couple of reasons for considering the first half of the twentieth century to have been the most revolutionary period in history both theoretically and technologically (not unrelated areas) at the same time as harnessing vast reserves of hydrocarbons to give us millions of years of stored sunlight to burn as fast as we can build machines to consume it. Theoretical revolutions involved working out consequences of Electromagnetism, Einstein and Quantum mechanics, and of course computation powering the calculations. Electrification, real-time long-distance communication, cars, trucks and planes... We were riding out the consequences of the easiest applications of these novelties and now it's getting incrementally harder to squeeze out the benefits.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#53

Post by kd5bjo » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 7:40 PM UTC

Daub wrote: post #38

The article says... "that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply". No surprise there. Nowadays, Universities have to become paper mills in order to get funding. Also... Risky research and cross disciplinary research is a sure fire way not to get tenure. As to the question, where new ideas come from... I teach creativity... the literature is in near agreement on this t…

> I teach creativity... the literature is in near agreement on this topic.

Can you point me towards some good papers to start with? I don't really know my way around any of the academic literature outside of engineering.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#54

Post by 8note » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 7:52 PM UTC

dumbfoundded wrote: post #22

md_ wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive me, but I don't understand your point. Is it that it's so easy to borrow money that there's no need to sift good ideas from bad? And if so, that seems like it would result in more bad ideas being funded, not fewer good ideas. Yet the paper claims to present evidence to the contrary (sort of; they're talking about innovation gains, not "ideas")--that the cost of gains is increasing. I don't see how that would…

This is a libertarian talking point. The idea is that government control of money leads to less private innovation. We had the industrial revolution in the late 19th century while on the gold standard and now with government-controlled money, most of the long term innovation like renewable energy, nukes, the internet are all funded by the government. It has almost nothing to do with this article.

I'm perfectly ok with private mercenary groups not developing their own nukes.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#55

Post by friendlybus » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 7:56 PM UTC

anotheryou wrote: post #51

friendlybus wrote: post #46

Had a similar discussion yesterday and I am aching for that conceptual freshness. What are all the non-Elon, non-besos plebs going to do for a day job? Our industries are too mature for easy growth. Cars, computers, space are done for the plebs, we need another industry of easy growth to pull this ship along. If history repeats, manufacturing will become king again. In the arts with near infinite creative control lat…

I haven't read the article yet, but I think it's just harder to reach the border of human knowledge. You have to specialize hard to reach it in a reasonable time. Sadly that makes the smart people not take general, discipline arching careers. Only in young disciplines like machine learning there is still a lot of jumping sparks for other disciplines.

Computing had been in the works since Babbage, over hundreds of years. Once the tech was in place there was infinite jobs to be had making sure humanity could democratize and exploit computing to it's highest potential.

What's coming down the hundreds-of-years pipe that we can bust open for this half-century? The 40s were famously the fighting forties, if we don't get on it we're going to be forced to take what others have in an attempt to access the infinite or stave off nihilism.

Nukes are underutilized but likely to be surpassed by fusion if the recent builds and smaller experiments pay off. With infinite computing power and orders of magnitude cheaper energy we employ everybody to do the same as before but bigger and better. Material science could unlock a bunch of new avenues for improvement. Biomed is kicking off but that's unlikely to employ everybody. I can't see it all, there's gotta be something.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#56

Post by TrinaryWorksToo » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 8:07 PM UTC

symplee wrote: post #10

The 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeonhole_principle

Like this lawyer did? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJtm0MoOgiU

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#57

Post by mrbgty » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 8:09 PM UTC

Daub wrote: post #38

The article says... "that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply". No surprise there. Nowadays, Universities have to become paper mills in order to get funding. Also... Risky research and cross disciplinary research is a sure fire way not to get tenure. As to the question, where new ideas come from... I teach creativity... the literature is in near agreement on this t…

"New ideas come mostly from recombining old ideas."

Does this suggest that new ideas would become easier to find over time because there are more combinations of old ideas?

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#58

Post by xiphias2 » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 8:10 PM UTC

mrfox321 wrote: post #32

xiphias2 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money (in the form of buying power) can't be created from nothing, so whenever a bad idea/execution is funded, it takes away buying power from companies that have better execution, but less access to cheap loans. As an example I personally know a CEO who had a great idea, great exececution, but a new competitor startup was funded with millions of dollars of cash that threatened to sue him in the US. He didn't have mo…

Money can be created from nothing. https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...

I was specifically talking about money defined by the Austrian theory of money (buying power / store of value). Just because monetary units (currency) are created, it doesn't increase buying power of the total amount of the total amount of monetary units. For example if people buy houses from additionally created currency (even if it's debt), the buying power of one unit of that currency goes down, which can be seen by the number of required units needed to buy a house going up.

The problem with banks is that they have a good reason to conflate unit of account with store of value: they make lots of profit on people not understanding the difference.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#59

Post by techbio » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 8:12 PM UTC

Daub wrote: post #38

The article says... "that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply". No surprise there. Nowadays, Universities have to become paper mills in order to get funding. Also... Risky research and cross disciplinary research is a sure fire way not to get tenure. As to the question, where new ideas come from... I teach creativity... the literature is in near agreement on this t…

Synthesis!

So, take all the ideas, compute their cross-product, sort, and voila! Found all of them, though as it is itself a new technology, recurse... this will take a while...

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#60

Post by Rury » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 8:12 PM UTC

Perhaps.

In my mind, it seems there's no such thing as an "original" idea, given that all ideas are made from or composed of other ideas (as that's how you describe them). Therefore originality, seems to be just a new combination of old ideas you've already been exposed to.

As an example, can you ever imagine a color that's not composed of a combination of colors you've already seen before? A truly original color?

Otherwise, if you're trying to communicate an idea to another, and cannot describe the idea using existing ideas, it might be considered truly original. But what does one do in this case? You show or demonstrate it to them...

As so, ideas seemingly come from observation - or more specifically - our senses, and any subsequent ideas built from thereof.

Thus, if there's a limit to we can sense and observe, then ideas would also be limited or "finite", and we would naturally find ideas becoming "harder to find" eventually...

I believe Ludwig Wittgenstein mentioned something like this in his work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.