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Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

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Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#61

Post by skybrian »

Maybe we should take an evolutionary perspective on this? Some ideas may be good in any environment and I expect they would be harder to find over time. Other ideas are probably good or bad depending on their environment.

If the environment is fairly stable then we would expect good ideas to get harder to find (evolution slows down), but when there is a big change, I expect it would be a lot easier to find new ideas that only made sense recently.

Which is to say, I think the answer to this question is probably "no" in the short term, and we should see more ways that creative thinking pays off.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#62

Post by hilbertseries »

etrautmann wrote: post #35
GuB-42 wrote: post #29

Just look what it takes to have a good idea now. A good example is astrophysics. There are so many nice theories around, but they are all wrong. If you want to theorycraft the universe now, you need to deal with an incredible amount of very precise data, advanced maths and billion dollar machines. If you don't, the best you get is to have you theory proven wrong by an actual specialist, most of the times it is "not e…

I think this is slightly specific to astrophysics and cosmology. In Neuroscience, it definitely feels like there is plenty of headway to be made by individuals with good ideas, although I admit that it feels as though ideas are harder to come by as more is published and the bar is continually raised.

This is certainly also true of mathematics and many other areas that have over a century of modern research work done on them.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#63

Post by Tagbert »

mrbgty wrote: post #57
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?

It also means that patents restrict the flow of new ideas by locking up the source material for invention.

The idea that invention is a isolated creative force that pops up without dependency on anything else has always been a myth without foundation.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#64

Post by TaylorAlexander »

Tagbert wrote: post #63
mrbgty wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

It also means that patents restrict the flow of new ideas by locking up the source material for invention. The idea that invention is a isolated creative force that pops up without dependency on anything else has always been a myth without foundation.

I’ve become extremely interested in this notion lately. When I have discussions about intellectual property with random people the dominant idea is that patent promote innovation. People get angry if I suggest that might not be true, as if they think I want all creative people to go bankrupt or something.

But its increasingly questionable to me. Open source software has shown the great wealth of innovation that occurs when we collaborate instead of hiding our work.

I think we could (probably) sharply increase the rate of innovation if we let go of intellectual property restrictions. I really want economists and other thinkers to take seriously this notion that intellectual property restrictions are deeply harmful to society and study it in detail. Unfortunately entrenched interests benefit from the status quo (naturally) and I feel they would be in opposition here. But we can still work to open source our output. It’s harder when open source competes with closed source, but if we can learn how to use open source to our advantage we might be able to win.

In any case I think it is desperately important that we take seriously the idea that IP laws might be doing more harm than good. Most people I speak to take it as a given that we need them, and I think we’re shooting ourselves in the foot.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#65

Post by TaylorAlexander »

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’m seconding the request for any literature on the subject! I’m very interested in the harm intellectual property restrictions might be doing to our rate of innovation.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#66

Post by leereeves »

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 also come from new technologies.

This may be why it seems like it's harder to find new ideas now. It was relatively easy during the waves of "do X on a computer", "do X on the Web", and "do X on a phone", but now we're waiting on the next transformative idea that will allow everything old to be reinvented again.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#67

Post by filoleg »

friendlybus wrote: post #55
anotheryou wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 other…

Not sure how realistically viable it is, but I hope that quantum computing will bring some of that freshness back. But again, it will heavily depend on how much of it is "legit" and how much is just hype.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#68

Post by Wingman4l7 »

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…

For those curious about the impact of neodymium magnets in the creation of the Walkman, as I was, I found this: https://hackaday.com/2019/07/22/forget-the-walkman-its-the-h...

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#69

Post by ineedasername »

The title is misleading and inflammatory: The article itself is making a much narrower claim about the monetary value (economic growth) derived from equivalent amounts of research effort.

In that context, they claim it takes more effort now than years ago to achieve the same level of economic benefit.

This is far different than anything having to do with the # of "ideas", which is too abstract of a notion to be meaningful the way they use it.

Even if they're correct that it now takes more research to produce equivalent economic benefit, then through one concept of "idea" we actually have more than ever: researchers aren't doing the same bit of research over & over, they're doing new bits. Each bit easily fits into the concept of an "idea", and so in that sense ideas are plentiful, it just takes more of them than before to achieve a given level of economic growth.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#70

Post by ressetera »

strken wrote: post #4
adamnemecek wrote: post #3

I'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.

The implementation get trickier. Better solutions to existing problems are usually more complicated.
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