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Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

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Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#81
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you solve for 'work for 5 years on open source project, get it to some degree of popularity, watch AWS making a service out of your code without paying you a dime'?

A new licensing model where it's prohibitive to make a profit off of this work.

The more restrictive the license, the more it drives potential users and collaborators away.

That being said, do you have a concrete licensing model in mind?

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#82
I wonder if this is partially a function of decreased attention spans. It takes more discipline than ever to turn off distractions and focus on innovative solutions to hard problems.

EDIT: This quote seems relevant[1]:

> It is fair to say that, in general, no problems have been exhausted; instead, men have been exhausted by the problems.

[1] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-most-important-scient...

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#83
Ideas are easy to find, it's just that the bounds that we have been limited to work within, both economically and societally, have become tighter and tighter. Today, the leadership of the vast majority of private institutions have only the goal of increasing their own economic power, and similarly there is constant media production reminding people how important the almighty economy is, causing people to focus on any potential fear of economic pain. Regret being one of the most powerful emotional responses that we have.

We don't have to look far in any direction for solutions that improve our education systems, our research output, and the general welfare of humanity. Unfortunately, the forces of corruption will always be strong, and it will take a more creative and imaginative people to implement them.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#84
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…

How do you teach creativity? What does such a class look like? I'm curious what a syllabus for your class looks like.

Author of "Borrowing Brilliance" (Borrowing Brilliance: The Six Steps to Business Innovation by Building on the Ideas of Others) proposes some thoughts about creativity - like, it's a combination of ideas from another area.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#85
post #77

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…

Few ideas: Many personal robots and services - we'll do almost nothing. So we'll have more time for hobbies, which will need more tools etc . Building a green economy. Higher quality food more often. More healthcare, with aging etc. And maybe more emphasis on selling care. The real problem is this: why hire humans do all those jobs, when machines could do(or create substitutes) for most of those new jobs ?

Good machines compress time for tasks. Dishwashers still need human stackers despite reducing an all day job down by the river to 3mins of stacking/unstacking dishes.

Compressing design work from hours or weeks of thinking about different forms down to a few minutes of machine learning pattern recognition cpu cycles, means we have to move our knowledge work from massaging clay into new Porsche designs to higher level abstractions about what function in society cars can fulfill. The abstractions get higher, we can fit more into our time on this planet and the detailed oriented will be required to keep all of this from breaking down and succumbing to entropy.

Humans at the bottom of the chain will have nothing to do except hold the world together, people falling out of work, machines breaking and money and time being wasted away on excessive drug use and manufacturing for pleasure instead of progress too much can grind this potential for new life to a halt.

Agriculture is direly needed in the dirty thirties if we are to avoid repeating the hunger caused by the dust bowls in the 30s. A green base is fundamental to surviving the crash of the roaring twenties. Automating farming and increasing food production to multiple times of what the US can demand is a life saving purpose. God only hopes you have ‘nothing’ to do when it comes to crass commercial works. Building self sustainable farming for homes so that families can survive on and off grid is also has a potential for great application.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#87
The funny thing about inventions is that nobody needs them until they have it. So throwing more and more researchers at one topic won't change anything as long as there won't be adaptation of this research. In my opinion there are too many inventions and not much products around them that people want to use. Adaptation is often correlated with business need. So adaptation is the biggest problem right now cause as soon as people start using invention they will tell if this is improving their lives or it's stupid idea. We don't need more researchers we need more testers and producers and here comes availability. When researcher put patent on his research availability is near zero so invention is stopped in time. Also don't forget about : Great Inventions Are Often Overlooked.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#88
I'm reminded of the discovery of the 'modern' variation on the Fisher-Yates shuffle algorithm. Both the original algorithm, and the improvement made in the variation, are so simple that it can be trivially understood, and makes one think Oh yeah. Neat. And kinda obvious. (I'd forgotten the particulars so I had to look it up on Wikipedia. Took me very little time to piece it back together.)

Clearly it's not totally obvious, or it would have made its way into the original paper. Still, the barrier to a Wikipedia-worthy computer science discovery, has risen somewhat since then.

Edit Come to think of it, this is a good example for explaining what we mean by 'improved algorithm' to non-software folks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%E2%80%93Yates_shuffle#F...

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#89
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.

"do X using AI/ML", "do X using robotics" seem to be a pretty effective template.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#90
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...

As one of the Hackaday comments mentioned, the original Walkman must have used samarium cobalt magnets rather than neodymium magnets. SmCo magnets were known since the early 1960s but neodymium magnets were discovered in 1984, 5 years after the Walkman launched:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samarium%E2%80%93cobalt_magnet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neodymium_magnet#History

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