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Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

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Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#41

Post by cjohnson318 »

symplee wrote: post #18
throwaway1777 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but that’s not accounting for rhythm, different instruments, etc.

Isn't this just increasing the branching factor? How hard will it be to find new melodies a million years from now? Easier than today, the same, or harder?

I think the relevant thing about the pigeon hole principle is that it deals with fundamentally discrete things. Sure, there is a finite number of scores using twelve notes in a finite period of time, but that's just not how we judge or compare music. I would say that there's so many branching factors in music that quantifying one piece is akin to measuring a coastline; the smaller your scale, the longer the coastline. Beyond timbre, there's other cultural factors like, who wrote the music. In a million years we might have umpteen songs with the same score, but they'll still occupy different pigeon holes in the collective consciousness.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#42

Post by dredmorbius »

Some time in (I think) the past few months, someone posted a link to an AT&T or Bell Labs executive talking to a team of his engineers about the state of innovation at the phone company. The context was the 1970s, and a number of innovations -- direct dialing and touch-tone dialing were I believe two of them. It transpired that these had been. developed decades before deployment -- direct dialing being a 19th century invention, touch tone from the 1920s or 30s, as I recall.

The upshot being that innovation had already slowed tremendously.

The video begins, approximately, with the speaker relating a story of how an earlier executive had announced to a previous group, "Gentlemen, this company was destroyed last night".

If this rings any. bells, Ma or otherwise, I'd appreciate the link or reference.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#43

Post by chrisco255 »

mrfox321 wrote: post #32
xiphias2 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money (in the form of buying power) can't be created from nothing, so whenever a bad idea/execution is funded, it takes away buying power from companies that have better execution, but less access to cheap loans. As an example I personally know a CEO who had a great idea, great exececution, but a new competitor startup was funded with millions of dollars of cash that threatened to sue him in the US. He didn't have mo…

Money can be created from nothing. https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...

Yes, but there are consequences if it is overdone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#44

Post by eeZah7Ux »

Gollapalli wrote: post #6

It may just be a change in the way that we work. This paper may just as well be titled "Are institutions getting less effective?" or "Are research institutions getting less effective?". Hell, it might even be that our smartest people aren't researching and the amount of brainpower we throw at research problems has actually decreased even though the effort/money we throw at research problems has increased.

Rather "why are research institutions not being funded anymore?".

Public funded research gave us GPS, GSM, satellites, semiconductors, the Internet, fiber optics, LCDs, touchscreens...

Today "research" is done with VC money and focuses on ideas like "uber for dog sitters"

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#45

Post by chrisco255 »

dumbfoundded wrote: post #22
md_ wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive me, but I don't understand your point. Is it that it's so easy to borrow money that there's no need to sift good ideas from bad? And if so, that seems like it would result in more bad ideas being funded, not fewer good ideas. Yet the paper claims to present evidence to the contrary (sort of; they're talking about innovation gains, not "ideas")--that the cost of gains is increasing. I don't see how that would…

This is a libertarian talking point. The idea is that government control of money leads to less private innovation. We had the industrial revolution in the late 19th century while on the gold standard and now with government-controlled money, most of the long term innovation like renewable energy, nukes, the internet are all funded by the government. It has almost nothing to do with this article.

We were on the gold standard until 1971, so most of the tech you just mentioned were developed while on a gold standard.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#46

Post by friendlybus »

Had a similar discussion yesterday and I am aching for that conceptual freshness.

What are all the non-Elon, non-besos plebs going to do for a day job? Our industries are too mature for easy growth. Cars, computers, space are done for the plebs, we need another industry of easy growth to pull this ship along. If history repeats, manufacturing will become king again.

In the arts with near infinite creative control lately we are seeing many retreads of past ideas, we need some great fresh ideas.

Ai tooling and general purpose automation will kick off a customisable manufacturing system, but it’s not enough. Where are all the brains at.... finance?

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#47

Post by neerajsi »

epicureanideal wrote: post #34
say_it_as_it_is wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Research is a privilege

What do you mean? I don't understand what you're trying to say about the parent comment.

My read of his comment is that fruitful research was historically done by people within the aristocracy after their fundamental needs for comfort were met.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#49

Post by neerajsi »

An alternate way to look at the problem is that perhaps we should be doing a better job of educating our children to absorb the existing state of knowledge. The hope would be that they are prepared to contribute new ideas before their naive optimism is crushed and they head toward seeking rent on old ideas. The underlying theory here is that new ideas are discovered by reinterpretration of the underlying data with a "purer" or partially forgotten version of previous explanations.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#50

Post by tenebrisalietum »

symplee wrote: post #10

The pigeonhole principle [0] is also becoming more of a factor due to the sheer volume of production. Especially in domains with a limited branching factor. For example, in music, if you only have 12 tones in an octave to play with, along with variable length and spacing, you start to run out of "good" melodies under 20 notes after 400 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeonhole_principle

Well there's this genre of music called noise that uses all frequencies in the audio domain. Should be good for a while.
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