141–150 of 194 posts
The post touches on the idea that the number of human beings that exist today far exceeds those in the past. Interesting thought. We are now like a cpu (collectively speaking) with 7 billion cores vs 50,000 years ago would only be about 10-100k in numbers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can image a lot of obvious things that still could be invented like beaming, real hoverboards, holodecks and so on. Trying to invent any of this may seem preposterous to us as they are seemingly impossible. But these are only as impossible to us now as driving without horses or sailing the seas without sails have seem impossible three hundred years ago. And neither cars nor steamboats have been invented by single i…
The point of OP is that as an individual, you can carve a wheel or make a rope alone, with your bare hands. It requires much more resources to invent a revolutionary battery
You need to know how to make sharp edges. Which rocks are suitable? How to keep them sharp?
You need to cut down a suitable tree.
You need to know which tree is even suitable.
You have to figure out that either the chunk of wood should rotate, or the sharp edge rotate around it.
You need to know how to make a center pivot, or spindle to turn the wheel. You need to know that you even need this!
After making the wheel, now you need to make axles and some kind of platform to make it useful.
Before doing all this, you first have to realize that you need a wheel!
There is a long list of basic knowledge needed to invent even the simplest things. Every invention builds on previous knowledge.
With regards to what we consider inventions that move us forward (more advanced or fundamentally more novel solutions) I wonder if the problem isn't just a lack of imagination but imagination and abilities compared to what technology can deliver.
I always think of this as a reminder that perhaps it's possible to imagine things that humans can't imagine.
https://twitter.com/Hello_World/status/861735184990961664
Having said that there is of course a big difference between inventing something fundamentally new (a rope) and improving it (nylon rope).
But more and more I get the feeling that humans aren't really going to invent most of the solutions we can dream up.
> Having external thinking tools is a big deal. Modern > ‘human intelligence’ relies a lot on things like writing > and collected data, that aren’t in anyone’s brain. Here's a way to think about it. Imagine human progress as the amplitude of a wave. That wave oscillates forward through time by being passed on from one person to the next. Each person can add their tiny nudge to the wave when it reaches them, increasin…
There are many ways this can unfold. For example, groups of people with similar values, mindsets, or skills can much more easily manifest significant constructive interference.
As you note, the speed/frequency of the wave seems much faster now with our new communication technologies. These changes, along with the increased scale of human population, introduce new patterns for both constructive and destructive interference that we need to understand and handle.
Of course, if we try to solidify the metaphor further... this wave is likely to have enormous dimensionality and be composed of components that would absurdly difficult to even begin measuring. But it's a great metaphor and certainly got me thinking.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Each step along the way must produce a net benefit or it gets discarded. Maybe so, but the benefit could have just been individual fitness signalling (like a peacock's tail) without providing any advantage to the species as a whole until the big "payday".
A peacock's tail can be seen; how do you propose the other sex fell in love with the brainier homo sapiens? It's a lot more likely that intelligence provided a net benefit.
If with his tongue he cannot win a woman."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A fast search algorithm is to have 1000 threads check all 1000 array elements at the same time. Possibly only one thread will find the value you're looking for, but it's not like the other 999 threads were wasting their time.
Sure, 1000 people working on a difficult problem, and only one person solves it. Good analogy. What problem are we trying to solve? Curing cancer? AI? Compiler research? Most humans are not working on the important stuff. If we could increase that by even a few percentage points, humanity would benefit.
Cheaper clean energy. Cures for diseases. Social stability.
In some cases, we aren't talking about 1000 people. It could be 1000 cities or 1000 countries or 1000 bills of rights.
"Reality has a surprising amount of detail": http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
Bringing home some grains of that wild wheat that grows just a tiny bit larger. Befriending a wolf that is a little less distrustful of you. Picking that apple with the slightly smaller seeds. And so on.
Without those, you really are better off remaining a hunter-gatherer. People became significantly shorter when they first adopted a sedentary lifestyle.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is not the case, the famous (if apocryphal) quote of "everything that can be invented has been invented" made in 1900 by the head of the US patent office was clearly wrong and made either in jest or due to an enormous lack of imagination. The point is that there is always more to invent and the possibilities keep increasing. Just because somebody said something that was wrong 100 years ago, doesn't mean it's a…
The space of inventions increases exponentially with every new piece of knowledge, insight, or tool we produce. Are you asserting that this space becomes so sparse that we will no longer have any useful inventions? If this is the case, why have we seen an explosion in inventions? Is there some critical turning point? When is the critical point? It's a lot of speculation. As depressed and lonely as I am, I live becaus…
I'm saying that the previous assertion is more religious speaking than valid reasoning.
We can find new knowledge, insight, and/or tool without increasing the "space of inventions", much less exponentially increasing it.
Some fundamental types of new knowledge do increase the space of inventions (e.g. the discovery of fire, or the discovery of electricity, or the discovery of dna, etc), but not all.
>The space of inventions increases exponentially with every new piece of knowledge, insight, or tool we produce. Are you asserting that this space becomes so sparse that we will no longer have any useful inventions?
If we are just living because there's stuff to invent, we might as well, as this means inventions are inherently useless (else what we have already invented would be enough to make life worth). Life should be celebrated (or not) for itself, not because we can create new gizmos and find new natural laws.
The article is factually incorrect: Our brains were as modern 50K years ago as they are now. A major reason is, people are not actually as intelligent or creative as one assumes. We are bad at unsupervised learning. A lot of our learning, when you look more closely, is supervised learning.
This is correct; there's been a huge amount of brain evolution in the past 50K years. See for example "The 10,000 Year Explosion" (Cochran).