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Why things might have taken so long

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Re: Why things might have taken so long

#171

Post by anonytrary »

coldtea wrote: post #149
anonytrary wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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? 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 exponential…

Suppose you have a list of N things you know, and we define an invention as being any subset of those things. There would be 2^N possible combinations, or the size of the set of all subsets, or the size of the set of all inventions.

That's my toy-definition of an invention. Not very good, but it's a start. Let's take it further and say that each item in the list of knowledge is actually a basis vector, and that an invention is simply a vector in the space spanned by the basis set.

> We can find new knowledge, insight, and/or tool without increasing the "space of inventions", much less exponentially increasing it.

In my model, I will prove this is impossible. The dimension before finding the new vector is N. Suppose we find a new knowledge vector k'. If it is truly new, then it will be orthogonal to the other knowledge vectors, and the new basis will span N+1 dimensions, meaning the "space of inventions" increased. The only way for the dimension to remain the same is if k' could be written as a linear combination of k_i, which would imply that our assumption that k' is new was false.

ENOUGH METAPHYSICS!

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#172

Post by danieltillett »

ci5er wrote: post #164
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?)

I am not sure why you think it is depressing unless you mean what life was like for the vast majority of people before the industrial revolution.

I would really encourage you to read the book, not so much for the hypothesis Clark proposes, but for all the amazing background and data on this topic he provides in a way that is accessible to the layman.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#173

Post by danieltillett »

oblio wrote: post #95
danieltillett wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hypothesis Clark proposes is the least interesting part of his book - it is all the background and data on the industrial revolution that he provides that make it worth reading. I am on the fence if "the rich outbred the rest" is valid, but I do know from the genetics side that an enormous amount of selection has taken place in the human population over the last few thousand years. We really are very different to…

> We really are very different to the people living 5000 years ago. Do you have more details for this? I was under the impression that biologically we aren't that much more different from Homo sapiens 50k years ago.

Genetically there has been more evolution in the last 10,000 years (most of this in the last 5000 years) than in the preceding 500,000. This is tied to the change in environment (hunter-gather to agriculture) and the expansion in the population size.

An accessible book on this topic is the 10,000 Year Explosion [0]. It is a little dated (it is before all the amazing data that has come from sequencing ancient homo DNA), but what it does have is a very good overview of the topic.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_10,000_Year_Explosion

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#174

Post by verylittlemeat »

zebraflask wrote: post #167

This whole thread is hilarious. Well done.

Holy crap I agree. I mean I know it's not polite to point and laugh but this thread is nuts. How do people write and upvote some of the opinions in this thread? It's like they have zero sense of irony or introspection.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#175

Post by ci5er »

danieltillett wrote: post #172
ci5er wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)

I am not sure why you think it is depressing unless you mean what life was like for the vast majority of people before the industrial revolution. I would really encourage you to read the book, not so much for the hypothesis Clark proposes, but for all the amazing background and data on this topic he provides in a way that is accessible to the layman.

I tend to agree. I've lived in Indonesia - when the Nike plants paying several cents/day and had hunreds of people line up for those horrible jobs that Americans were boycotting Nike for.

I've seen the jockeying at the line any time one of those factory workers committed suicide.

But does not that make us wonder if we could do better? (I'm not an equality warrier - more of a let's do better down here warrior - and I have to say Nike does pretty good in that regard)

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#176

Post by narag »

ci5er wrote: post #163
narag wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

I believe it's called projection: you "project" that other persons' minds work the same as yours. If you've tried to solve some computer problem over the phone, you have experienced it. People thinks that you can magically view their screens.

In this case, very smart people is unable to figure out how does an average user thinks.

I do believe that there's something about mindset. Some people lives under the delusion that things work the way they work because that's the way they should work. Actually there are a lot of randomness in the way things work, specially in areas where new territories are being unconvered all the time.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#177

Post by sametmax »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #142
sametmax wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Really? Try carving a wheel when all you have is rocks and a bunch of trees and no mathematical knowledge. 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 ce…

What you describe is the difficulty to be creative. You need to try a lot of things and it takes time.

It's the same now than it was then.

What's changed is that, with the same creative power, as an individual, you could do more then.

You can carve a wheel alone in the wood. It's hard, but as a single individual with only natural resources, you can.

A kid in china, or a grandpa in west africa can do it.

To code a revolutionary AI today, you need a lot of per-requisites: electricity, computer, internet, access to knowledge, education and a looooooot of time to practice.

Even if you are the most creative person in the world, from all centuries included. You can't do it in the wood. You will not see somebody in Mali do it. A kid is unlikely to be able to do it.

Because being capable of creative the concept in your head is not enough. The stuff you could do with what anybody had at hand is gone.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#178

Post by sametmax »

kalonis wrote: post #44
sametmax wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Good luck with making your own wheel or rope from scratch (i.e. alone and naked in the woods)!

Creating the concept is hard. But not harder or less hard than inventing the press.

However, alone, you CAN make rope. It's painful, but you can.

You can't invent the press alone. You need ink, paper, metal, and people being able to put it in shape for you.

Everybody had access to plants to make rope. Not everybody had access to the money, education, market and knowledge necessary to invest the press.

Now today, it's even worst.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#180

Post by Pica_soO »

mzzter wrote: post #140
anonytrary wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You touch on a very real social dystopia. What's worse is that it's happening quietly, under the scenes. Silicon Valley undervalues the aimless tinkerers and overvalues the incremental bootcamp coders.

The keywords there are “aimless” and “incremental”. I think those properties are correctly valued in any fast-paced workplace. I think one of the things that career inventors need to overcome is selling themselves. Often the fun part is in the work of inventing, but conveying the value of the process is just as important and less straightforward.

Did you even read his post? He explicitly stated that the multi-role problem is what is killing most inventions. If everyone would have to be his own salesman- there wouldnt be any inventors at all- just people trying to sell each other rocks for berries.

What is needed is a inventor currency- that allows for a exchange of services and favours, without it being abused as a source of cheap labour.

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