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Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

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201–210 of 214 posts

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#201
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

50% of revenue might make sense for Unity, where Unity provides clear value. But it absolutely would not make sense for some small library that gets used for a few operations. It also would not make sense for high profit work. Personally I’m seeking an end where everyone shares basically everything they do and no one extracts anything out of the duplication and re use of information.

That end is incredibly sad. We still have to pay our mortgage and our dentists, but can't ask for a fair pay for our highly skilled work. I guess we deserve the ad-based monetization model that has taken over the world. Brave new world, let's shill for megacorps with all the clickbait we can possibly muster.

This is a misunderstanding of my goal. Even if we share everything we can there is always novel work someone needs done, and we can get paid to do it. But also if we share everything we can then most of life will become much cheaper. My end goal is to reduce the marginal cost of living to near zero and then arrange society to provide for everyone. In that case you wouldn’t need to pay the dentist or the mortgage. But IP restrictions add costs everywhere, and those costs must be eliminated. Perhaps we can’t eliminate a mortgage, but we can make your car cheaper to repair and we can make the goods you need much cheaper. Remember my goal is to make life better for all. And I know it is counter intuitive. That’s why I say we need economists to study it. But the goal isn’t sad, the goal is to thrive. The status quo, where a majority of people slave away their entire lives even in the wealthiest nation on earth... that is sad.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#202
post #200
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get paid for your work. You can change company you work for. If you don't want to work for company, you can try running self-sufficient farm - which is how peasant gained food. Except that peasant did not owned the land. Could not make his farm larger nor smaller. If lord decided you will produce more grains instead of vegetables, peasant had to oblige regardless of own preferences. And peasants had to give part…

There is a lot of shallow talking in what you said because things are not black/white. And yes I can change the company I work for also reducing workdays amount but that will directly make my life unsustainable and I dont have an option to buy 50 morgs of field to start a farm (this costs around few million dollars where I live) and thats the area lords were giving to their peasents.. So yea your argument is: - “just…

Resorting to insults when you dont have arguments is kind of weak technique.

The problem with underperforming agriculture and lack of nutrition was persistent in that system. You seem to assume that peasants under serfdom had easy low work access to food and everything. That is not the case. The land does not produce food for whole year without you working it a lot.

Peasants in serfdom had hard time to produce enough food for themselves.

Peasant did not tended to few million dollars worth of land. Lords were not giving land to peasants. Rather, peasants were sold along with land and belonged to the land. That is massive difference - serfdom was one step above slavery.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#203
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting point. Yes, for economic growth to be measurable, the nominal gains (i.e. dollar-value gains) have to be exponential--but there are a few reasons to think that as the economy grows, innovations that lead to productivity improvements should become cheaper . First, the productivity gain should scale with economic growth. A technology that leads to a 5% improvement in productivity of a farmer leads…

Ironically, as technology and business become better and better at monetizing new ideas, this makes things more expensive for individuals to bring ideas to market. First, large competitors (whether businesses or investors) fastest way to wealth is to jump into markets validated by someone small, with overwhelming advantages in terms of customer relationships, being able to fill out solutions spaces, funds for deep op…

Why do youth the variance in returns had increased? Because of the first point?

I don’t think I buy the first point, though. Intellectual property rights are probably at an all time high. Is the point that many types of innovation are outside of copyright able/patentable innovation, that enforcement is imbalanced, or something else? (What about the prototypical awe of the 800lb established competitor who simply buys the startup?)

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#204
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2x the userbase overnight? Is this growth hacking?

Found that hockey stick growth. Time to call up some VCs.

Just tried it. Nice. Couple of "issues" a) Answers are carrying over from one question to the next and not getting cleared automatically b) When I answer a question, the animation disables the controls and I have to click again to enable and move to next question.

Tested on 74.0 (64-bit) on OSX. These might not be "issues" and how you defined the experience for your little one. If so, feel free to ignore.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Clearly there’s at least one major discovery waiting for someone: how to jump those hurdles

Its not a discovery. Its just being highly influential in the organization and actually wanting something to be done when it isn't profitable/would reduce your budget for the future.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

50% of revenue might make sense for Unity, where Unity provides clear value. But it absolutely would not make sense for some small library that gets used for a few operations. It also would not make sense for high profit work. Personally I’m seeking an end where everyone shares basically everything they do and no one extracts anything out of the duplication and re use of information.

You're looking for the GPL. Richard Stallman shared your end goal. The GPL has been in decline for a long time though; most people concluded it was a bad idea.

The GPL does not solve our cultural problems. We’ve got to be doing advocacy for open collaboration and study its effects on our economic systems. If people do not understand the importance of open source the license won’t do much to help. And you’re right that GPL has its detractors. It’s highly restrictive. I use CC0/BSD licenses now. It’s perhaps overly permissive but it’s good to experiment.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#207
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 generally agree with you. But in the way that our defense budget is a significant portion of our federal budget, leaving many other state and federal needs un-fund-able, I'd suggest that there's a similar ratio of "elephant" medical research areas starving us of solutions to maladies that may be deserving of treatment.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#208
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, as technology and business become better and better at monetizing new ideas, this makes things more expensive for individuals to bring ideas to market. First, large competitors (whether businesses or investors) fastest way to wealth is to jump into markets validated by someone small, with overwhelming advantages in terms of customer relationships, being able to fill out solutions spaces, funds for deep op…

Why do youth the variance in returns had increased? Because of the first point? I don’t think I buy the first point, though. Intellectual property rights are probably at an all time high. Is the point that many types of innovation are outside of copyright able/patentable innovation, that enforcement is imbalanced, or something else? (What about the prototypical awe of the 800lb established competitor who simply buys…

It is tough for any small group to protect itself from a motivated, well funded, and well informed competitor even using copyright, trade marks and patents.

Part of the reason is that it can take vast sums and years to enforce IP rights against deep pockets.

The other reason, is that no matter how much IP you formally protect, most of any business is not its IP, it is the sales and support channels and services, etc. Even a lean software startup’s code is likely mostly the non-IP code that delivers and supports the IP actually solving a problem.

This means well funded and well informed competitors have a good chance of solving the same problem using a slightly different solution. You saved them work by defining the problem, providing an example solution, and validating the market for solutions to that problem.

Probably the best way for a small team to protect any really valuable IP is if they keep it a Trade Secret, while growing the business until it has the depth of resources, customer engagement, market bisinility and organizational depth so that deep pocket copycats might be successful too, but without stopping your momentum.

Obviously, this strategy depends on being able to deliver new IP to market without disclosing it exists. But customers care more about the results you can give them than how you do it. So innovative code buried in an app may not attract much or any scrutiny.

Aiming initially at underserved or previously unserved markets also avoids attracting competitive attention.

Edit: I think variance in returns has gone up because information tech is making it easier and easier for new organizations to serve larger markets, so more small companies will make it big.

And at the same time, competitors are more likely to notice anything significant, and their are many more competitors observing and reacting globally.

And we now have massive global competitors like Google, Facebook and Amazon that are getting harder to avoid as they attempt and often succeed in dominating one market after adjacent market.

So expected (in the statistical sense, I.e. mean) returns have gone up, but the ease that a startup can be crushed is also higher.

There is a kind of conservation of risk and reward in economics, so it isn’t unexpected that bigger opportunity attracts players who in turn create bigger risks for new players.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#209
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Found that hockey stick growth. Time to call up some VCs.

Just tried it. Nice. Couple of "issues" a) Answers are carrying over from one question to the next and not getting cleared automatically b) When I answer a question, the animation disables the controls and I have to click again to enable and move to next question. Tested on 74.0 (64-bit) on OSX. These might not be "issues" and how you defined the experience for your little one. If so, feel free to ignore.

Thanks for checking it out. a) seems like a bug, but I can't recreate. After I click "next" for the next problem, the answer field is empty. Let me test some more b) yes, this is indeed a weird UX and my daughter said it is "annoying". But it exists so that the kid gets a pause to know whether the answer was right or wrong. I should maybe show it for 3 seconds and proceed to next automatically.

Will upload new version of the site tomorrow now that I have a full two users for the app :)

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#210
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…

Another term for this is the Hegelian dialectic [0]. Very similar to your term playful association but it describes that the "first" old idea, the thesis, allows there to be a counter idea, the antithesis. These two counter ideas morph into one idea, the synthesis. A consequence of this term over playful association is that these New Ideas are more tangible and have less sense of randomness.

An example of this playing out - First came Disco, the thesis. People who didn't like Disco came up with Rock, the antithesis. The combining of those two became Pop, the synthesis. And the music timeline continues (don't overthink the music choices I'm completely guessing)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic#Hegelian_dialectic

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