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Why things might have taken so long

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Re: Why things might have taken so long

#161

Post by janus »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #72
bambax wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. La Bruyère in 1690 wrote a very famous phrase "Tout est dit, et l'on vient trop tard depuis plus de sept mille ans qu'il y a des hommes et qui pensent." ( Everything has been said, and we're too late after 7000 years of human existence and thought. ) I can't find the quote right now but Aristotle complained once that the level of comfort attained in his era and city was so high nobody would ever conceivably w…

Human-powered flight does exist, it's just not very good because people are weak and heavy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-powered_aircraft

Well, leaving aside the problem of taking off (which today is improving thanks to electric motors), I guess one could say that gliders[1] are the closest we can have to human-powered flight and it's highly efficient in terms of energy consumption

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_(sailplane)

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#162

Post by Gibbon1 »

GistNoesis wrote: post #81

I like to think that inventions/concepts/idea have a life of their own. They interact, reproduce, mutate. They grow around themselves bubbles of compatible ideas. Sometimes they compete to kill other ideas. When viewed this way as a complex system, it become more easy to understand their behavior as emergent properties of the system. Systems can come to equilibrium, then won't move anymore. They can also take some ti…

There is a chapter on acetylene lamps I read. There was maybe 50-75 years of development by different companies and inventors trying to solve a bunch of issues with a frankly simple device. Easy enough to build a lamp the slowly drips water on to calcium carbide and burns the acetylene, that works on the bench.

Now build one that will work reliably when the miner dropped it, cleaned and refiled with water from murky puddle, in the dark 500 feet below ground.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#163

Post by ci5er »

narag wrote: post #56
quadrangle wrote: post #17

About not having invented anything: it's harder to invent something novel today simply because so much has already been invented and knowledge of it is available. Centuries ago, it was easier to think of things to invent (we should be able to fly, to stay under water longer, to copy books faster, to notate music… ). It still took a lot of work to actually realize the invention (which only could be done by people weal…

Today, we've run low on the scope of reasonably easy to invent things that are actually valuable. All the obvious "wish we could X" things have been done or are nigh impossible for any one person or small team to figure out I disagree. There are a lot of small inventions that are happening every day. I've had independently ideas that are now massive sites or products. If you want to know why things have taken so long…

> There are many in which half of usually smart people can't simply understand what's the others' position about.

> The pattern is that one side considers current practice tedious, steep learning curve for professionals only, while the other side finds it "good enough". If it's good enough for you, you'll never invent something easier and faster to understand.

This is a bit baffling to me -- the phenomena to which you refer. And it seems to be more general than the pattern you outline.

It appears to have something to do with both pre-suppositions and different orderings of personal values [0]. But I'm not sure.

Do you think it is possible to generalize the structure of the process via which reasonably educated and smart people can be presented with the same facts and come to different conclusions -- that they will defend against each other in pretty feisty debates?

[0] By this I mean, for example, that some people might put individual freedom higher than equality across large populations and vice-versa.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#164

Post by ci5er »

danieltillett wrote: post #12

Nothing much (in percentage terms) got invented until the industrial revolution. The question is why the industrial revolution took so long. If you are interested in this topic I highly recommend A Farewell to Alms [0] - warning controversial hypothesis, but it raises lots of interesting topics to think about. 0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Farewell_to_Alms

That's certainly depressing. I'm going to have to go w/ McCloskey and push some pencil on some of that.

I would have put it on the plague, the protestant revolution, the magna carta and the printing press. All pre-dated the industrial revolution - but that itself had to be enabled by something (otherwise - the Romans would have done it, right?)

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#165

Post by Gibbon1 »

racer-v wrote: post #160
felipeerias wrote: post #148

The list is missing what IMHO is the most important reason: it took a really, really long time to transform wild plants and animals into useful domesticated varieties. 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 remaini…

it took a really, really long time to transform wild plants and animals into useful domesticated varieties. Really? The wild plants and animals were already useful. So from day one, the transitional forms to the domestic varieties were useful as well. Without those, you really are better off remaining a hunter-gatherer. There's not a sharp division between hunter-gatherer and agriculturalist. Sedentism preceded agric…

You can consider wheat. Originally the number of seeds produced by a wheat stalk was small. Which meant needing to sow a high proportion of your crop for next year. With domestication the yields slowly increased over several thousand years.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#166

Post by perl4ever »

autokad wrote: post #101
coldtea wrote: post #35

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…

are you calling inventing flight low hanging fruit? I'd bet even after given the answer and reading up on wikipedia, you would struggle building a plain from scratch. its not harder to invent things, you just dont know how to do it. its not a problem on you, I couldnt invent anything myself. if anything, we are in a golden age, much like people ~1900 were when it comes to invention. the scripting languages, algorithm…

I think a lot of people think of inventions but don't have the motivation or resources to execute - and someone else creates the thing, possibly with roots deep in the past. I remember reading a magazine article (maybe in Popular Science) about the Peltier effect when I was in high school and thinking it could/should be used for cooling CPUs. In practically no time, the Power Macintosh 8100/110 came out, using such a cooler. It may not have been the first, but it was the first I was aware of, and it made me irrationally feel like someone stole my idea. A year or two later, my boss at my first job asked me to create, essentially, eBay. I read some academic articles on computerized auctions and gave it up as too complicated.

One thing that made a great impression on me was reading an old Dr. Dobbs journal (I think from the 70s) in which someone was angrily responding to Bill Gates. Gates had said that hobbyists generally steal their software, and of course that pissed people off. The letter writer said if you want to be paid for your software you should bundle it with hardware. So with hindsight, Gates became a billionaire not because he had a unique idea, but because he recognized the value of something lots of people knew and executed it.

Thinking of things is infinitely easier than sifting through all the noise and then committing 100% to making something specific a reality.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#168

Post by jstanley »

razorunreal wrote: post #121
jstanley wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a given adoption has an individual utility of +1, and a collective detriment of -0.01, OK but imagine if everyone in the world did the "bad thing". The world would gain 8 billion utility and lose 800 million, so it's still winning. I think you mean something like an individual utility of +1 and a collective detriment of -1.01?

No, I to think he's saying that -0.01 applies to everyone. Each individual choice is actually causing a loss of 80 million in utility (vs a gain of 1), but that loss is mostly borne by other people, so they are individually better off making that choice.

Got it. -0.01 per person, not -0.01 in total.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#169

Post by dkural »

racer-v wrote: post #150
dkural wrote: post #135

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.

People’s brains were actually biologically less functional fifty thousand years ago. 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).

Cochran's popular science book has no scientific backing or support from working scientists and peer reviewed articles. In particular, human genomics can easily refute the idea of brain functional changes in the last 10K years. Our ancestral populations that colonized EurAsia, Africa, and the Americas diverged before the 10,000 mark, and there are no discernible cognitive differences between any of these groups.

Furthermore, this is why Cochran is considered a racist; correctly so.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#170

Post by johngalt »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #157

Someone smarter than me noted that most science fiction has badly missed the mark of what the present and near future will look like b/c the assumption was that power sources would trend towards zero cost ("too cheap to meter") and that this would enable all sorts of interesting world altering gizmos's like jetpacks, flying cars, physics defying spacecraft etc. What actually happened is that communication density exp…

It's not just power sources vs communications. People always assume that the future will simply be like present only more so.

After two world wars, people assumed the future would be wars of tremendous destruction.

When aviation was growing fast, people assumed the future would be flying everything.

During the space race, people assumed the future would be space everything.

During the growth of nuclear power, people assumed the future would be atomic powered everything.

This fails to match reality, because the future doesn't arrive as if we are barreling down a highway at an ever increasing speed. Advances tend to be a left turn down a road you couldn't reach before. Rather than building ever faster jets, we went to space. Rather than going further into space, we built communication satellites etc...

Our current 'Internet' age will be no different. The 'next big thing' will not be Internet v2, but it will be something that could only exist with the internet as a prerequisite.

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