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Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

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Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#141

Post by yalogin »

Its kind of understandable isn't it? The easiest problems get solved first, so people have to "go up the stack" if you will. Unfortunately going up the stack means one needs to get more and more educated or in some cases need to embed themselves in a specific context. But in general though, people are naturally ingenious, they will always come up with new ideas.

In the most recent past, the one "low tech" idea that blew me away is the concept of influencers. People understood Instagram and then understood the general psychology of people and then exploited it to create vast empires. I mean previously clout was something only celebrities had after doing extraordinary things like act in movies or be the best in the world in what they do. But people found a way to commoditize it and democratize it. And they didn't need any formal education for it. All they needed was a phone.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#142

Post by onion2k »

yalogin wrote: post #141

Its kind of understandable isn't it? The easiest problems get solved first, so people have to "go up the stack" if you will. Unfortunately going up the stack means one needs to get more and more educated or in some cases need to embed themselves in a specific context. But in general though, people are naturally ingenious, they will always come up with new ideas. In the most recent past, the one "low tech" idea that b…

The easiest problems get solved first, so people have to "go up the stack" if you will.

The implication of this is that we're running out of problems to solve, and eventually we'll have fixed everything. That ignores the fact that a solution to a problem very often creates new problems, and some of them will be equivalent to the previous easy problems. In some fields you could be solving the "easy" problems forever.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#143

Post by krebs_liebhaber »

jasonv wrote: post #138
eagsalazar2 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are still millions of ideas. You just need to look around a little more and massive problems (opportunities) are everywhere. In my job (tech leadership consulting, dev, etc) we deep dive on a new company/industry every few weeks when kicking off new projects and it seems like every niche industry or business has like 50 grotesque inefficiencies and incumbent crappy solutions providers just waiting for someone w…

I’ve gone to doctors the last couple of years for minor, but not-small maladies and they have no treatments. Even in medicine there are common problems that plague big portions of our populations but no one wants to solve. I’m guessing it might be the same in the industries commonly discussed here. They may not be businesses, but they could certainly be features.

I'm not sure if treating lots of minor maladies is a good idea. I'd think that there's a certain threshold of severity, below which treatment is riskier than just leaving it be, and that a lot of the "unsolved problems" you're talking about are things that don't meet that threshold.

One of the reasons the US spends so much on healthcare is that we have an ideology of "treatment at all costs"[0] when doing nothing is often the right solution.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/america...

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#144

Post by adrianN »

Hypx wrote: post #117
moosey wrote: post #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…

> 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. An idea I've been having lately, and one that might be unpopular on this site, is that we've found all the low-hanging in electronics, networking, and software. So the main reason why it seems like there are no new ideas is because we're only looking at place…

I think we're still really far from using the potential of software. Just look how terribly inefficient and error-prone most processes in, for example, hospitals or government agencies still are. There might be no more quicksorts to discover, but there is still plenty of work to do, most of it fairly trivial.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#145

Post by adrianN »

krebs_liebhaber wrote: post #143
jasonv wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve gone to doctors the last couple of years for minor, but not-small maladies and they have no treatments. Even in medicine there are common problems that plague big portions of our populations but no one wants to solve. I’m guessing it might be the same in the industries commonly discussed here. They may not be businesses, but they could certainly be features.

I'm not sure if treating lots of minor maladies is a good idea. I'd think that there's a certain threshold of severity, below which treatment is riskier than just leaving it be, and that a lot of the "unsolved problems" you're talking about are things that don't meet that threshold. One of the reasons the US spends so much on healthcare is that we have an ideology of "treatment at all costs"[0] when doing nothing is…

I don't know. There are minor maladies that don't need treatment because they get better on their own after some minor suffering, but there are a lot more minor maladies that over time only get worse. For example anything related to bad joints, or arteriosclerosis. Any effect of aging.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#146

Post by TaylorAlexander »

Daub wrote: post #111
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tons of books out there, very difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff. The following is what I found useful. Its a mixed bag, academic and coffee table. - Beveridge W. I. B., 1950, The Art of Scientific Investigation, New York. https://archive.org/details/artofscientifici00beve A charming and easy-to-read enquiry into how scientists conduct research. Old but (like all good science) still applicable. Kaufman, J. C.…

Wonderful, thank you so much!

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#147

Post by Polylactic_acid »

adrianN wrote: post #144
Hypx wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. An idea I've been having lately, and one that might be unpopular on this site, is that we've found all the low-hanging in electronics, networking, and software. So the main reason why it seems like there are no new ideas is because we're only looking at place…

I think we're still really far from using the potential of software. Just look how terribly inefficient and error-prone most processes in, for example, hospitals or government agencies still are. There might be no more quicksorts to discover, but there is still plenty of work to do, most of it fairly trivial.

>most of it fairly trivial

Medical and government are the 2 examples I would think of as the least trivial places to work in. There is nothing to be discovered or invented in these sections. We all know what they need, its just close to impossible to get over the political hurdles to actually do it.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#149

Post by pojzon »

jlawson wrote: post #123
dasil003 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably hard to quantify economic motivation over long periods of time with very different cultural environments. Economic motivation seems a strange label for what would have been basic survival for early agricultural societies. I think what feels strange now is that we've had these massive increases in productivity over 150 years, but it hasn't translated to more leisure or less stress. I also think there's a diff…

The last 150 years have absolutely seen huge increases in leisure time. Notice that in the Bible, there is only one day of Sabbath, the rest of the week is work. A 6.5 day work week was standard for millennia. This idea of a relaxed bucolic existence like a Monet painting was always a myth. "Less stress" isn't defined enough to discuss, but I for one will say I don't stress about finding food over winter. My ancestor…

Thats not exactly true, actually our ancestors rested a lot more than we do now.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#150

Post by paganel »

highfrequency wrote: post #97
moosey wrote: post #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…

Is there reason to think that people in the past were more selfless and less economically motivated? I'd wager that throughout history, most great ideas and optimizations came from people who were either seeking profit or other kinds of status (eg recognition from peers).

> Is there reason to think that people in the past were more selfless and less economically motivated?

Not sure if more selfless but the common ownership of agricultural/pastoral land was a thing in the rural parts of my country (Romania) until relatively recently.

The community-owned rural pastures (called "islaz") are the last to go right at this moment, it's like seeing the English enclosures play out with 200 years difference right in front of one's eyes (the "islaz" from my parents' village has been sold out to a private entity only 4 or 5 years ago). We also used to have common ownership and common use of the agricultural land in the Middle Ages, with some remnants of that system still extant in some mountainous communities until the late 1700s - early 1800s. They were called "obști" [1]

> The obște (pl. obști) was an autonomous agricultural community of the Romanians/Vlachs during the Middle Ages. Mixing private and common ownership, the communities generally employed an open field system. The obști were usually based on one or more extended families. This system of organization was similar throughout the Vlach-inhabited areas and it generally receded as overlords assumed more power over the rural communities and as the peasants lost their freedom by becoming serfs.

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