Ideas are easy to find, it's just that the bounds that we have been limited to work within, both economically and societally, have become tighter and tighter. Today, the leadership of the vast majority of private institutions have only the goal of increasing their own economic power, and similarly there is constant media production reminding people how important the almighty economy is, causing people to focus on any potential fear of economic pain. Regret being one of the most powerful emotional responses that we have.
We don't have to look far in any direction for solutions that improve our education systems, our research output, and the general welfare of humanity. Unfortunately, the forces of corruption will always be strong, and it will take a more creative and imaginative people to implement them.
> Ideas are easy to find, it's just that the bounds that we have been limited to work within, both economically and societally, have become tighter and tighter.
An idea I've been having lately, and one that might be unpopular on this site, is that we've found all the low-hanging in electronics, networking, and software. So the main reason why it seems like there are no new ideas is because we're only looking at places where there are few new ideas to be found.
If we stop equating "tech" with computers, and instead search the vast parameter space of new technologies, we'll quickly find lots of interesting new ideas. Unfortunately, that also means we've more or less reach the end of the growth era of Silicon Valley, and from here on out SV just becomes another old fashion industry with minimal avenues for new growth.
I think we're still really far from using the potential of software. Just look how terribly inefficient and error-prone most processes in, for example, hospitals or government agencies still are. There might be no more quicksorts to discover, but there is still plenty of work to do, most of it fairly trivial.
There are still millions of ideas. You just need to look around a little more and massive problems (opportunities) are everywhere. In my job (tech leadership consulting, dev, etc) we deep dive on a new company/industry every few weeks when kicking off new projects and it seems like every niche industry or business has like 50 grotesque inefficiencies and incumbent crappy solutions providers just waiting for someone with the right design and software skills to come by, make the investment, and grab the business.
If you are lacking in inspiration, go work for a consulting company for a year and your idea bucket will be full to overflowing.
I believe the next advancements not to be technological. A combination of neuroscience and cognitive psychology can alter the human fabric of society in various directions. For an example of this, we can look at media produced in the United States and look at it as a cognitive psychology experiment that attempts to foment rage, which short circuits not just logical thought, but also the ability to feel compassion for others (emotions are powerful and deep in our psychology - compassion and empathy is a highly advanced mental activity, involving complicated parts of the prefrontal cortex).
This is one of the reasons that I think advertising and news media that takes advantage of high arousal emotions should be immediately outlawed as psychological experimentation, and that education should teach people how emotions can be used against them, and how to manage them effectively.
The first lesson of this teaching would be that all decisions, even economic ones (and ESPECIALLY economic ones) are made emotionally.
Any unprofitable problem can be redefined from "How to Solve Unprofitable Problem X for Me or Friends, Etc." to "How to Solve Problem X Profitably".
Even small problems may be hidden economic launch pads, given that the ingenuity to make their solutions profitable is likely to provide surprising insights.
Generic approaches to making an unprofitable niche more profitable to serve:
- Generalize the problem in some novel but useful way, so the solution has increased market size
- Generalize to a user customizable solution, to offload costs of complete specialization
- Reduce the costs of creating the solution in some way, such as new specialized tooling
- Divide up the problem/solution into subproblems/solutions whose potential value as a flexible toolkit is greater than a monolithic solution.
- Identify a small market that having adopted a small unprofitable solution will now be easy customers for related products, i.e. amortizing the initial cost across the long term value of customer contacts
Thinking deeply about the specifics of a problem once may result in more novel specific approaches.
Is there reason to think that people in the past were more selfless and less economically motivated?
I'd wager that throughout history, most great ideas and optimizations came from people who were either seeking profit or other kinds of status (eg recognition from peers).
> Is there reason to think that people in the past were more selfless and less economically motivated?
Not sure if more selfless but the common ownership of agricultural/pastoral land was a thing in the rural parts of my country (Romania) until relatively recently.
The community-owned rural pastures (called "islaz") are the last to go right at this moment, it's like seeing the English enclosures play out with 200 years difference right in front of one's eyes (the "islaz" from my parents' village has been sold out to a private entity only 4 or 5 years ago). We also used to have common ownership and common use of the agricultural land in the Middle Ages, with some remnants of that system still extant in some mountainous communities until the late 1700s - early 1800s. They were called "obști" [1]
> The obște (pl. obști) was an autonomous agricultural community of the Romanians/Vlachs during the Middle Ages. Mixing private and common ownership, the communities generally employed an open field system. The obști were usually based on one or more extended families. This system of organization was similar throughout the Vlach-inhabited areas and it generally receded as overlords assumed more power over the rural communities and as the peasants lost their freedom by becoming serfs.
Probably hard to quantify economic motivation over long periods of time with very different cultural environments. Economic motivation seems a strange label for what would have been basic survival for early agricultural societies. I think what feels strange now is that we've had these massive increases in productivity over 150 years, but it hasn't translated to more leisure or less stress.
I also think there's a difference between an inventor coming up with an idea in hopes of selling it, versus the modern VC-funded apparatus of blitzing social media, adtech, and blackhat SEO to generate. In the past there were gate-keepers to distribution which have in many cases been disintermediated, and for a while there was a golden age where small independent producers could get internet distribution because the old giants (Apple, Microsoft) were too big and slow to capture it. But once Google and Facebook came of age, and VCs figured out the playbook, independents are once again at a disadvantage.
> Is there reason to think that people in the past were more selfless and less economically motivated?
Perhaps, but perhaps not. The point isn't about some innate feature of humans that has only increased recently, but rather that throughout history humans (and the great classes therein) have faced material (not only economic) hardships. It is material conditions which drive history.
I think there is a huge dividing line between inventing to seek profit and seeking "other kinds of status". The only thing in common these motivations have is that they arise due to our relations with other humans. Likewise, many motivations, depending on the predominant point of view (which certainly does change with time and place) can be viewed either altruistically or selfishly. I'd wager that a cynical society, or one dominated by the totalizing logic of capital ("accumulate!") would have a tendency to see previous motivations as selfish, because it's very hard to empathize with people through history. In other words, we view things in a certain way because it is unimaginable to us to see it any other way, since we have no experience with those times and places and the motivations therein.
The ancient world is filled with proverbs and sayings and stories of heroism for some kind of greater good, certainly without looking for some kind of profit, and more often than not, without looking for some kind of recognition. As to whether these are just stories we tell or whether there is some truth to them is an important question. It's probably worth asking anthropology, or at the very least sociology. The latter has discovered huge changes in public consciousness since the industrial revolution.
> Is there reason to think that people in the past were more selfless and less economically motivated?
They were certainly less consumerist and didn't have the constant onslaught of advertising telling them to buy shiny new things. They were far more self reliant and able to repair things for themselves, which tends to constantly breeds it's own innovations. Lots of little tricks and custom devices tend to crop up (over engineering isn't just for programmers) yet very few will get commercialize, at best they'll be passed along to future generations but many will get lost.
> 'd wager that throughout history, most great ideas and optimizations came from people who were either seeking profit or other kinds of status
I'd wager most were out of necessity and/or laziness and most died out or were replaced by newer technology. Swords, scythes and shoes didn't have single inventors, they had generations of hackers tweaking them.
In some ways this reminds me of Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies. It's been a while since I've read it, but I recall he correlated increasing social complexity with a decrease in innovation. Although, I think he measured "innovation" as patents, copyrights, and other intellectual property which I think is a poor measure of ingenuity or innovation. Still, interesting hypothesis...
"The span of my existence in the valley is going to collapse to about a third, maybe less in your lifetime and the challenges that you are going to have in the office and the opportunities is going to be very very significant but it's going to require a lot of you much more than of me or of anybody in the past because the technology moved actually fairly slowly"
Agreed. In the world of business, there has been a glut of leaders who arrive at positions of leadership without any formal training in leadership, and so they rule with "instincts" which are sometimes no more than primitive impulses or ego. This limits how far any project can go.
Just for a moment, assume there is an abundance of people with interesting ideas that deserve to be pursued, but for some reason these people are being stifled. Why are they being stifled, and are there ways we can better support them, so they can move forward?
On this theme, and speaking of a specific startup where I worked, where some of us were deeply excited about the project, I was recently writing a response to some criticism I received in response to "How To Destroy A Startup In Three Easy Steps":
Leimgruber phrased it best, in his review on Amazon, so I quote him here, to answer everyone:
Personally, I find the book most interesting not for the absurdly lousy management characters, but for giving a glimpse into the mind of a person that accepts this kind of treatment as okay, shoulders unreasonable burdens, and seems repeatably drawn into difficult situations with the corresponding drama that inevitably ensues.
This begs the question for me (and likely much of this book's readership):
Why are many talented software developers drawn to solving impossible problems, drinking unhealthy amounts of coffee, neglecting their sleep and personal lives, and constantly trying to fix everthing and everyone around them while ignoring their own psychosocial needs?
To my mind, the interesting question runs in the other direction. Why is bad leadership so common? Why is it so universally accepted? To anyone who suggests that we should quit our jobs after some disagreements with management, I would ask why is it that we need to leave? Why doesn't the leadership leave? Shouldn't management resign, if they are unfit to get the mission done?
Some questions have large implications. Why are so many leaders so completely self-destructive? If Milton had simply been greedy, in a rational way, he would have allowed me to work on the technology that might have eventually generated a lot of money for him. But I find that business leaders are rarely rational. Impulses and ego seem to be the most common forms of decision making. Why is this accepted?
The second comment I'd like to respond to was written by "Antoni" on Goodreads:
I loved the first 80% of it, which is enough to give a positive opinion I guess. What I didn't like really is that the book is written from the perspective of startup employee, not the founder. So there's only part of the story. Only information that the writer assumes. He uses a lot of exaggerations as well that are fun to read and enjoyable but some dialogues are hard to believe to be true.
I would recommend it to people working in tech startups, to feel good about the environment that they work for rather than take some valuable lesson from the book since it's more about management tyranny, mobbing and lack of transparency rather than actual reasons why startup failed from a perspective of a person that had full picture (instead of an employee).
In response, please consider these four ideas:
1.) The failure of any venture is always a complex event, and no one can easily say why it failed. Consider when an airplane crashes, it often takes an army of investigators years to figure out why the accident occurred, even though the investigators are guided by the experience of all previous airplane failures. A startup with an entirely novel idea will be too unique for anyone to easily diagnose its failure. There are too many variables, and too many embedded assumptions.
2.) A good leader over-communicates in a crisis, and every day is a new crisis for a startup. Above all else, the leadership needs to "listen real loud." A startup is either a transparent learning organization or it is dead. Milton's crass hoarding of secrets was a self-inflicted injury. While there might be some other reasons why the startup failed, it is absolutely true that our lack of communication was the starting point of all the other problems that we faced. Since I was central to the technology effort, the startup could only succeed if I was well-informed about our real needs. Keeping me in the dark was a problem for the whole company. I'm confused how anyone could complain that this book is about "lack of transparency rather than the actual reasons why the startup failed." I've tried to be clear about this, but I'll repeat it here again: lack of transparency was one of the reasons why the startup failed. We can debate whether it was the most important factor, but it was obviously a significant factor.
3.) Antoni says they wished the book was told "from the perspective of a person that had the full picture (instead of an employee)." Possibly I failed to emphasize this enough, but no one at Celelot had the full picture. Just like the three blind men in the fable, we were each touching a different part of the elephant, and we were reaching different conclusions about its shape. I was holding onto the technology, so I believed one thing, while Milton was holding onto the sales leads, so he believed something else. This much is completely normal at all businesses, it is a problem with a standard solution: lots of honest communication. Sadly, honesty was lacking. A series of lies were told about the company's finances, so myself and Kwan were constantly guessing at the truth. At some points we felt we were working at a well-capitalized firm, other times we thought the whole place was about to run out of money. But neither Milton nor John knew much about the company, either. At no point did Milton sit down and have a good faith conversation with me about the status of the code at the company. At first I was elated with the level of autonomy I'd been granted, then later I realized that the leadership was operating with assumptions that were out of line with reality. A ship captain who has no idea of their location near the coast is a ship captain who is about to run aground, and likewise, Milton's ignorance of our progress meant the whole company was slipping toward hidden reefs. If Milton were to write a book about Celelot, he could fill in his side of things, but his side of things would not represent the total truth.
4.) We have suffered a glut of books that aim to build a cult of personality around certain entrepreneurs. This tendency has gone furthest with Steve Jobs. What is remarkable is that this trend should get going at a time when innovation from Silicon Valley is clearly decreasing. In his 2006 book, The HP Way, David Packard talks about the process by which he and Bill Hewlett grew Hewlett–Packard. In their rejection of standard corporate hierarchies and their hunger for input from everyone, they were clearly blazing a radically new path in both management style and technology. It is noteworthy that when they were at their most creative, in the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s, no one set out to create a cult of personality around them. In 1968, when Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore founded Intel, no one thought to write them up as heroic characters, but it was in that era that their technology was creating the most profound shifts in industry. At some point after 2000 the rate of innovation in Silicon Valley began to slow, and yet this was the era when the rhetoric about visionary geniuses and innovation began to take on the tone formerly reserved for artists and military conquerors. Real leadership is rare, so we should celebrate it whenever it appears, but we should remember it comes as often from the lower ranks as the upper ranks, so a series of books that only looks at the upper ranks must automatically leave us with a skewed picture of reality. My point is, we need more honesty about what is actually happening in these companies. We need less books written by or about founders, and more books written by those who are in the trenches, working everyday to build something new. Above all else, we need better documentation of the ways that management often sabotages the worker's efforts to invent the future.
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A final point for Hacker News to consider: some of these distortions that we are seeing, regarding misalignment of leadership styles, and in particular misalignment between short-term goals and what the team is committed to building, is a political question that very much goes back to the question "Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?"
Now as always, there are a lot of people with interesting ideas. Are they getting the support they need to move forward with their ideas? Or are they being stifled?
There's a lot of interesting stuff happening in crypto community that is like what you're talking about, especially DAOs which are being used to democratically power everything from decentralized finance to non-profit fundraising platforms.
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 topic. New ideas come mostly from recombining old ideas. Essentially, this is an act of playful association. New Ideas also come from new technologies. For example... the neodymium magnet is the reason we had the Sony Walkman.
As one of the Hackaday comments mentioned, the original Walkman must have used samarium cobalt magnets rather than neodymium magnets. SmCo magnets were known since the early 1960s but neodymium magnets were discovered in 1984, 5 years after the Walkman launched:
Cross disciplinary conceptual mining is a great way to realize the "low hanging fruit" waiting for disruption in any industry. The silos of knowledge are high and thick, just like the skulls of the industry thought leaders who say things can't be done in some different manner.
I've worked as a developer a number of industries, and as an MBA consultant in 3 times as many more. I'm in a developer job at the moment, but when I was actively consulting I'd just learn how they run operations, and the glaring opportunities for substantial expense eliminating and productivity enhancing changes glow like the sun.
> the literature is in near agreement on this topic. New ideas come mostly from recombining old ideas.
Absolutely. Not just in literature/arts but science as well. The ideas of atoms, physics, etc are a "rehash" of ancient greek ideas. Though obviously not the same, but there is no doubt that the study of pre-socratics influenced science.
> New Ideas also come from new technologies.
Even more true. Everything from the invention of letters, numbers to telescopes and microscopes led to new ideas, new arts and new sciences.
Also, another major component is wealth. Research, new ideas, etc require wealth so that you have the time and resources to pursue and expand on these ideas. Ancient greece was a wealthy slave owning society which allowed them the freedom to pursue noble ideas rather than slaving away to make ends meet. This is where we get the idea of "liberal" education. Liberal here doesn't mean the education is free, but rather education is for those who are free ( aka wealth slave owners ). Wealth frees you from life's mundane tasks. It's also why every major civilization or flourishing of knowledge/ideas always was preceded by immense wealth ( america, ancient greece, mesotopamia, ancient egypt, italian renaissance, the englightment, etc ). People mistakenly assume you get knowledge and then wealth, but historically, it's always been the other way around. You get wealthy first and then you pursue knowledge.
So, take all the ideas, compute their cross-product, sort, and voila! Found all of them, though as it is itself a new technology, recurse... this will take a while...
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)
I’m seconding the request for any literature on the subject! I’m very interested in the harm intellectual property restrictions might be doing to our rate of innovation.
Tons of books out there, very difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff. The following is what I found useful. Its a mixed bag, academic and coffee table.
This started off as a blog and developed into a wonderful and useful little book. In my opinion, creative rituals are a very under-estimated component of creativity.
- Sternberg, R. J. (2001). What is the common thread of creativity? Its dialectical relation to intelligence and wisdom. American Psychologist.
A very readable 3 page essay.
- Christensen, C. (2013). The innovator's dilemma: when new technologies cause great firms to fail.
Perhaps the most well-known book on this list. It was this book that addressed the idea of 'disruptive innovation'... innovation that completely destroys some businesses, and creates others. He uses the railroad as an example, but clearly the internet falls into this category as well.
- Seelig, T. (2012). inGenius: A crash course on creativity.
This evolved from the course notes from one of the first university courses on the subject of creativity. A bit annoying to navigate (her chapter headings are 'too creative') but it has good stuff.
On top of this, there is almost everything that Edward De Bono wrote (the lateral thinking guru).
This may be why it seems like it's harder to find new ideas now. It was relatively easy during the waves of "do X on a computer", "do X on the Web", and "do X on a phone", but now we're waiting on the next transformative idea that will allow everything old to be reinvented again.
Well... I designed the course for the school, but only taught it once. Frankly, it was not a roaring success. One reason was that I was asked to deliver it online. With my recent (obliged) experience in online teaching, I think I could do a better job if I did it again. I incorporated much of the material into other courses, to some success.
To answer your question directly, like all teaching, it requires that the assignments and exercises be appropriately designed. No matter how much I tried to design an assignment that embodied the ideas I was teaching, students would still come up with really un-creative responses. I came to the conclusion that the only way to guarantee success was to mentor them individually.
Most creativity courses just deliver the 'received wisdoms' (i.e. they are theory courses). Very few actually try to foster creativity. The book inGenius: A crash course on creativity (Tina Seelig) was written by someone who did.
Here is the course description to a creativity course delivered at the University of New South Wales. Its not bad, but for a creativity course, the assignments seems a bit un-imaginative.
Author of "Borrowing Brilliance" (Borrowing Brilliance: The Six Steps to Business Innovation by Building on the Ideas of Others) proposes some thoughts about creativity - like, it's a combination of ideas from another area.
The funny thing about inventions is that nobody needs them until they have it.
So throwing more and more researchers at one topic won't change anything as long as there won't be adaptation of this research.
In my opinion there are too many inventions and not much products around them that people want to use.
Adaptation is often correlated with business need. So adaptation is the biggest problem right now cause as soon as people start using invention they will tell if this is improving their lives or it's stupid idea.
We don't need more researchers we need more testers and producers and here comes availability. When researcher put patent on his research availability is near zero so invention is stopped in time.
Also don't forget about : Great Inventions Are Often Overlooked.
What's your point because if it will start mutate too fast at this point you need to produce vaccine for every mutation that is deadly. For example flu vaccine is produced twice a year and not for every strain only for those that are most dangerous. Maybe there is need to develop new protection techniques instead of injecting dead virus into human body. Over the years it might become true that only way for human to survive on this planet is gene editing like CRISPR.
There are already first trials to edit genes of adult human that you can read about here:
https://ir.editasmedicine.com/news-releases/news-release-det...
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.
NB: the title is misleading. this is not about pure ideas, this is about economic growth, which to be measurable (significant) needs to be exponential.
no doubt, there are more ideas now than ever. technology is a great enabler. but finding economically impactful ideas ... that does seem to be getting harder, from my armchair view.
Value of ideas is massively overstated in biz school lit, imo... Ideas are fine, but it takes a lot of work to prove that one actually works, and then a lot more work to bring it to production.
All of the work involved needs financial and material support to happen. It's easy to have an armchair idea, but to put a hundred+ hours into the very first realization is extremely difficult if it's not your day job. (And repeat for the thousands(?) of hours necessary for bringing to market...)
In my most anti-elitist frame of mind, I expect there's a mismatch between who has good ideas and who has time to prove things out... Elite business schools are populated (on average) by walking Dunning-Krueger effects, powered by trust funds and lack of consequences: of course they have a shortage of good ideas... Meanwhile people with the actual experience and expertise to produce good ideas have day jobs to keep them from executing.
This. It's also worth remembering that the cost to bring products to market - particularly in the software/technology industry, continues to rise. As larger players continue to expand their portfolio of offerings with years of engineering effort behind them, it's significantly more difficult for a small startup to produce something compelling enough for customers to use it over the other options on the market.
In other words, the bar for quality and capability in all products we use on a daily basis continues to rise. That has the direct effect of raising the expectations that consumers and businesses have for new products they want to purchase, and thus the cost to build them. That translates to more time needed to deliver something meaningful to market, which is also likely correlated with higher amounts of VC funding concentrated in a smaller number of companies (pre-COVID)
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 to 5% improvement in productivity of 1000 farmers.
Second, the fixed costs of innovation--capital costs and research costs--should in many cases increase sublinearly relative to the above (linearly increasing) returns on investment. Thus relative to available capital (which increases as the economy grows) these innovations should become cheaper.
Finally, some per-unit production costs may also decline as scale increases.
As a simple example, if a farmer makes $100/year using a donkey and $200/year using a tractor, a tractor costs $10, and a tractor factory costs $10000...well, you get the idea.
So I don't think this is explicable by economic growth, unless there's a facet of growth that hinders innovation (or its application).
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 optimization, etc.
Second, even if the small inventors expected mean return has gone up, so has the standard deviation, so risk has gone up.
Anything that discourages or inhibits individuals and small teams from following through on new ideas will have a big impact. Because most good ideas are by individuals and small teams, and few of us have the ear of CEO's or other efficient fund decision makers.
The problem isn't finding ideas, but finding ideas that other people haven't already thought and wrote about, or patented. Indeed, the crawl to the precipice of knowledge in a domain can take years. There are only so many shortcuts, no matter how much pruning of the tree of knowledge you do, the path will only get longer. In fact, a great deal of effort goes into re-inventing the discoveries of others, hidden from them by language, disciplinary perspective.
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.
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?".
Lots of progress might be stymied by entrenched interests using laws, regulations, or some form of corporate bureaucracy/cronyism as a "moat" to ward off competition.
The short shrift paid to EVs by auto makers and car dealers before Tesla came along is one example. (Yes, I know that batteries also had to improve.) Intel's practices before AMD stepped up its game recently can be seen as another example. Then there's SpaceX.
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
Is research now a "2nd tier" career? Are you thinking this is based on economic competition from industry?
Hasn’t the trend always been to favor industrial application rather than fundamental research, in terms of pay at least? Or do you mean second tier in terms of status/prestige?
People get paid based on what they contribute to the economy not what they contribute to science
No, I'm thinking more in the context that research professorships are not what they once were. They have effectively become a kind of sweatshop labor to the academic research institutions for which the reward is a PhD and then the delightful prospect of becoming an adjunct professor.
Such tremendous effort for little reward tends to dissuade many of the brightest minds from research careers and towards other careers like finance or consulting.
In my mind, it seems there's no such thing as an "original" idea, given that all ideas are made from or composed of other ideas (as that's how you describe them). Therefore originality, seems to be just a new combination of old ideas you've already been exposed to.
As an example, can you ever imagine a color that's not composed of a combination of colors you've already seen before? A truly original color?
Otherwise, if you're trying to communicate an idea to another, and cannot describe the idea using existing ideas, it might be considered truly original. But what does one do in this case? You show or demonstrate it to them...
As so, ideas seemingly come from observation - or more specifically - our senses, and any subsequent ideas built from thereof.
Thus, if there's a limit to we can sense and observe, then ideas would also be limited or "finite", and we would naturally find ideas becoming "harder to find" eventually...
I believe Ludwig Wittgenstein mentioned something like this in his work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
I see where you are coming from and I get that your argument is that new ideas are (?often) extension of existing ones but I think this is a bit of an oversimplification. It seems like everything can be described as an abstraction of something else on a larger/smaller scale. Which philosophically would mean that the universe as a whole has the same value as any atom or quarks within it.
But even if we ignore the philosophical aspect of it, it seems a bit like Duell's "Everything that can be invented has been invented" statement from late 19-th/early 20-th century. A statement which hasn't aged too well for better or worse.
> I think this is a bit of an oversimplification. It seems like everything can be described as an abstraction of something else
Correct, any new ideas you abstract are composed of pre-existing ideas you have. Trace any of those ideas to their roots and you'll realize all ideas come from what you originally had to subject your senses to (i.e seeing it, hearing it), otherwise they're some abstracted combination thereof.
Although my prior post was an attempt at a logical proof of sorts, the only real caveat I find in it, is this part: if there's a limit to what we can sense and observe. This is not proven as far I can tell (which is why I prefaced it with an 'if').
Again, I think Ludwig Wittgenstein's work may say all of this better, but then again I find it hard to grasp everything it tries to convey.
EDIT: As for Duell's statement, perhaps it's taken too literally. I can see they had an equivalent to email (e.g. regular mail), atom bombs (regular bombs) and AI (basic schemes & algorithms) back in those days, just not literal equivalents. But his statement is not the argument I'm making in my prior post. Rather it's more "our ideas are limited by what we sense".
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We don't have to look far in any direction for solutions that improve our education systems, our research output, and the general welfare of humanity. Unfortunately, the forces of corruption will always be strong, and it will take a more creative and imaginative people to implement them.
An idea I've been having lately, and one that might be unpopular on this site, is that we've found all the low-hanging in electronics, networking, and software. So the main reason why it seems like there are no new ideas is because we're only looking at places where there are few new ideas to be found.
If we stop equating "tech" with computers, and instead search the vast parameter space of new technologies, we'll quickly find lots of interesting new ideas. Unfortunately, that also means we've more or less reach the end of the growth era of Silicon Valley, and from here on out SV just becomes another old fashion industry with minimal avenues for new growth.
If you are lacking in inspiration, go work for a consulting company for a year and your idea bucket will be full to overflowing.
This is one of the reasons that I think advertising and news media that takes advantage of high arousal emotions should be immediately outlawed as psychological experimentation, and that education should teach people how emotions can be used against them, and how to manage them effectively.
The first lesson of this teaching would be that all decisions, even economic ones (and ESPECIALLY economic ones) are made emotionally.
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https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
We can build software that can't scale and won't sell, solely for the enjoyment of those we love.
We're not running out of ideas. We're just limiting ourselves to the small subset of problems that are worth solving for money.
Even small problems may be hidden economic launch pads, given that the ingenuity to make their solutions profitable is likely to provide surprising insights.
Generic approaches to making an unprofitable niche more profitable to serve:
- Generalize the problem in some novel but useful way, so the solution has increased market size
- Generalize to a user customizable solution, to offload costs of complete specialization
- Reduce the costs of creating the solution in some way, such as new specialized tooling
- Divide up the problem/solution into subproblems/solutions whose potential value as a flexible toolkit is greater than a monolithic solution.
- Identify a small market that having adopted a small unprofitable solution will now be easy customers for related products, i.e. amortizing the initial cost across the long term value of customer contacts
Thinking deeply about the specifics of a problem once may result in more novel specific approaches.
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I'd wager that throughout history, most great ideas and optimizations came from people who were either seeking profit or other kinds of status (eg recognition from peers).
Not sure if more selfless but the common ownership of agricultural/pastoral land was a thing in the rural parts of my country (Romania) until relatively recently.
The community-owned rural pastures (called "islaz") are the last to go right at this moment, it's like seeing the English enclosures play out with 200 years difference right in front of one's eyes (the "islaz" from my parents' village has been sold out to a private entity only 4 or 5 years ago). We also used to have common ownership and common use of the agricultural land in the Middle Ages, with some remnants of that system still extant in some mountainous communities until the late 1700s - early 1800s. They were called "obști" [1]
> The obște (pl. obști) was an autonomous agricultural community of the Romanians/Vlachs during the Middle Ages. Mixing private and common ownership, the communities generally employed an open field system. The obști were usually based on one or more extended families. This system of organization was similar throughout the Vlach-inhabited areas and it generally receded as overlords assumed more power over the rural communities and as the peasants lost their freedom by becoming serfs.
I also think there's a difference between an inventor coming up with an idea in hopes of selling it, versus the modern VC-funded apparatus of blitzing social media, adtech, and blackhat SEO to generate. In the past there were gate-keepers to distribution which have in many cases been disintermediated, and for a while there was a golden age where small independent producers could get internet distribution because the old giants (Apple, Microsoft) were too big and slow to capture it. But once Google and Facebook came of age, and VCs figured out the playbook, independents are once again at a disadvantage.
Perhaps, but perhaps not. The point isn't about some innate feature of humans that has only increased recently, but rather that throughout history humans (and the great classes therein) have faced material (not only economic) hardships. It is material conditions which drive history.
I think there is a huge dividing line between inventing to seek profit and seeking "other kinds of status". The only thing in common these motivations have is that they arise due to our relations with other humans. Likewise, many motivations, depending on the predominant point of view (which certainly does change with time and place) can be viewed either altruistically or selfishly. I'd wager that a cynical society, or one dominated by the totalizing logic of capital ("accumulate!") would have a tendency to see previous motivations as selfish, because it's very hard to empathize with people through history. In other words, we view things in a certain way because it is unimaginable to us to see it any other way, since we have no experience with those times and places and the motivations therein.
The ancient world is filled with proverbs and sayings and stories of heroism for some kind of greater good, certainly without looking for some kind of profit, and more often than not, without looking for some kind of recognition. As to whether these are just stories we tell or whether there is some truth to them is an important question. It's probably worth asking anthropology, or at the very least sociology. The latter has discovered huge changes in public consciousness since the industrial revolution.
They were certainly less consumerist and didn't have the constant onslaught of advertising telling them to buy shiny new things. They were far more self reliant and able to repair things for themselves, which tends to constantly breeds it's own innovations. Lots of little tricks and custom devices tend to crop up (over engineering isn't just for programmers) yet very few will get commercialize, at best they'll be passed along to future generations but many will get lost.
> 'd wager that throughout history, most great ideas and optimizations came from people who were either seeking profit or other kinds of status
I'd wager most were out of necessity and/or laziness and most died out or were replaced by newer technology. Swords, scythes and shoes didn't have single inventors, they had generations of hackers tweaking them.
Einstein certainly was.
Regis McKenna, the marketer who introduced first Apple, first microprocessor Intel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Z13NI0SuyA at 4:30
"The span of my existence in the valley is going to collapse to about a third, maybe less in your lifetime and the challenges that you are going to have in the office and the opportunities is going to be very very significant but it's going to require a lot of you much more than of me or of anybody in the past because the technology moved actually fairly slowly"
Just for a moment, assume there is an abundance of people with interesting ideas that deserve to be pursued, but for some reason these people are being stifled. Why are they being stifled, and are there ways we can better support them, so they can move forward?
On this theme, and speaking of a specific startup where I worked, where some of us were deeply excited about the project, I was recently writing a response to some criticism I received in response to "How To Destroy A Startup In Three Easy Steps":
https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/09...
In response to the criticism I received, I wrote:
------------------------------
Leimgruber phrased it best, in his review on Amazon, so I quote him here, to answer everyone:
Personally, I find the book most interesting not for the absurdly lousy management characters, but for giving a glimpse into the mind of a person that accepts this kind of treatment as okay, shoulders unreasonable burdens, and seems repeatably drawn into difficult situations with the corresponding drama that inevitably ensues.
This begs the question for me (and likely much of this book's readership):
Why are many talented software developers drawn to solving impossible problems, drinking unhealthy amounts of coffee, neglecting their sleep and personal lives, and constantly trying to fix everthing and everyone around them while ignoring their own psychosocial needs?
To my mind, the interesting question runs in the other direction. Why is bad leadership so common? Why is it so universally accepted? To anyone who suggests that we should quit our jobs after some disagreements with management, I would ask why is it that we need to leave? Why doesn't the leadership leave? Shouldn't management resign, if they are unfit to get the mission done?
Some questions have large implications. Why are so many leaders so completely self-destructive? If Milton had simply been greedy, in a rational way, he would have allowed me to work on the technology that might have eventually generated a lot of money for him. But I find that business leaders are rarely rational. Impulses and ego seem to be the most common forms of decision making. Why is this accepted?
The second comment I'd like to respond to was written by "Antoni" on Goodreads:
I loved the first 80% of it, which is enough to give a positive opinion I guess. What I didn't like really is that the book is written from the perspective of startup employee, not the founder. So there's only part of the story. Only information that the writer assumes. He uses a lot of exaggerations as well that are fun to read and enjoyable but some dialogues are hard to believe to be true.
I would recommend it to people working in tech startups, to feel good about the environment that they work for rather than take some valuable lesson from the book since it's more about management tyranny, mobbing and lack of transparency rather than actual reasons why startup failed from a perspective of a person that had full picture (instead of an employee).
In response, please consider these four ideas:
1.) The failure of any venture is always a complex event, and no one can easily say why it failed. Consider when an airplane crashes, it often takes an army of investigators years to figure out why the accident occurred, even though the investigators are guided by the experience of all previous airplane failures. A startup with an entirely novel idea will be too unique for anyone to easily diagnose its failure. There are too many variables, and too many embedded assumptions.
2.) A good leader over-communicates in a crisis, and every day is a new crisis for a startup. Above all else, the leadership needs to "listen real loud." A startup is either a transparent learning organization or it is dead. Milton's crass hoarding of secrets was a self-inflicted injury. While there might be some other reasons why the startup failed, it is absolutely true that our lack of communication was the starting point of all the other problems that we faced. Since I was central to the technology effort, the startup could only succeed if I was well-informed about our real needs. Keeping me in the dark was a problem for the whole company. I'm confused how anyone could complain that this book is about "lack of transparency rather than the actual reasons why the startup failed." I've tried to be clear about this, but I'll repeat it here again: lack of transparency was one of the reasons why the startup failed. We can debate whether it was the most important factor, but it was obviously a significant factor.
3.) Antoni says they wished the book was told "from the perspective of a person that had the full picture (instead of an employee)." Possibly I failed to emphasize this enough, but no one at Celelot had the full picture. Just like the three blind men in the fable, we were each touching a different part of the elephant, and we were reaching different conclusions about its shape. I was holding onto the technology, so I believed one thing, while Milton was holding onto the sales leads, so he believed something else. This much is completely normal at all businesses, it is a problem with a standard solution: lots of honest communication. Sadly, honesty was lacking. A series of lies were told about the company's finances, so myself and Kwan were constantly guessing at the truth. At some points we felt we were working at a well-capitalized firm, other times we thought the whole place was about to run out of money. But neither Milton nor John knew much about the company, either. At no point did Milton sit down and have a good faith conversation with me about the status of the code at the company. At first I was elated with the level of autonomy I'd been granted, then later I realized that the leadership was operating with assumptions that were out of line with reality. A ship captain who has no idea of their location near the coast is a ship captain who is about to run aground, and likewise, Milton's ignorance of our progress meant the whole company was slipping toward hidden reefs. If Milton were to write a book about Celelot, he could fill in his side of things, but his side of things would not represent the total truth.
4.) We have suffered a glut of books that aim to build a cult of personality around certain entrepreneurs. This tendency has gone furthest with Steve Jobs. What is remarkable is that this trend should get going at a time when innovation from Silicon Valley is clearly decreasing. In his 2006 book, The HP Way, David Packard talks about the process by which he and Bill Hewlett grew Hewlett–Packard. In their rejection of standard corporate hierarchies and their hunger for input from everyone, they were clearly blazing a radically new path in both management style and technology. It is noteworthy that when they were at their most creative, in the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s, no one set out to create a cult of personality around them. In 1968, when Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore founded Intel, no one thought to write them up as heroic characters, but it was in that era that their technology was creating the most profound shifts in industry. At some point after 2000 the rate of innovation in Silicon Valley began to slow, and yet this was the era when the rhetoric about visionary geniuses and innovation began to take on the tone formerly reserved for artists and military conquerors. Real leadership is rare, so we should celebrate it whenever it appears, but we should remember it comes as often from the lower ranks as the upper ranks, so a series of books that only looks at the upper ranks must automatically leave us with a skewed picture of reality. My point is, we need more honesty about what is actually happening in these companies. We need less books written by or about founders, and more books written by those who are in the trenches, working everyday to build something new. Above all else, we need better documentation of the ways that management often sabotages the worker's efforts to invent the future.
----------------------------
A final point for Hacker News to consider: some of these distortions that we are seeing, regarding misalignment of leadership styles, and in particular misalignment between short-term goals and what the team is committed to building, is a political question that very much goes back to the question "Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?"
Now as always, there are a lot of people with interesting ideas. Are they getting the support they need to move forward with their ideas? Or are they being stifled?
As to the question, where new ideas come from... I teach creativity... the literature is in near agreement on this topic. New ideas come mostly from recombining old ideas. Essentially, this is an act of playful association. New Ideas also come from new technologies. For example... the neodymium magnet is the reason we had the Sony Walkman.
Can you point me towards some good papers to start with? I don't really know my way around any of the academic literature outside of engineering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samarium%E2%80%93cobalt_magnet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neodymium_magnet#History
I've worked as a developer a number of industries, and as an MBA consultant in 3 times as many more. I'm in a developer job at the moment, but when I was actively consulting I'd just learn how they run operations, and the glaring opportunities for substantial expense eliminating and productivity enhancing changes glow like the sun.
Absolutely. Not just in literature/arts but science as well. The ideas of atoms, physics, etc are a "rehash" of ancient greek ideas. Though obviously not the same, but there is no doubt that the study of pre-socratics influenced science.
> New Ideas also come from new technologies.
Even more true. Everything from the invention of letters, numbers to telescopes and microscopes led to new ideas, new arts and new sciences.
Also, another major component is wealth. Research, new ideas, etc require wealth so that you have the time and resources to pursue and expand on these ideas. Ancient greece was a wealthy slave owning society which allowed them the freedom to pursue noble ideas rather than slaving away to make ends meet. This is where we get the idea of "liberal" education. Liberal here doesn't mean the education is free, but rather education is for those who are free ( aka wealth slave owners ). Wealth frees you from life's mundane tasks. It's also why every major civilization or flourishing of knowledge/ideas always was preceded by immense wealth ( america, ancient greece, mesotopamia, ancient egypt, italian renaissance, the englightment, etc ). People mistakenly assume you get knowledge and then wealth, but historically, it's always been the other way around. You get wealthy first and then you pursue knowledge.
So, take all the ideas, compute their cross-product, sort, and voila! Found all of them, though as it is itself a new technology, recurse... this will take a while...
Does this suggest that new ideas would become easier to find over time because there are more combinations of old ideas?
The idea that invention is a isolated creative force that pops up without dependency on anything else has always been a myth without foundation.
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
- Beveridge W. I. B., 1950, The Art of Scientific Investigation, New York. https://archive.org/details/artofscientifici00beve
A charming and easy-to-read enquiry into how scientists conduct research. Old but (like all good science) still applicable.
Kaufman, J. C., & Sternberg, R. J. (2010). The Cambridge handbook of creativity.
Tons of great material. Section 1, chapter 2 gives a literature review of the topic.
- Johnson. S., 2010, Where Good Ideas Come From, Penguin UK.
Packed with lots of good anecdotes, this is a very accessible book.
- Currey, M. 2013, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, Knopf. Blog avaiable here: http://dailyroutines.typepad.com/.
This started off as a blog and developed into a wonderful and useful little book. In my opinion, creative rituals are a very under-estimated component of creativity.
- Sternberg, R. J. (2001). What is the common thread of creativity? Its dialectical relation to intelligence and wisdom. American Psychologist.
A very readable 3 page essay.
- Christensen, C. (2013). The innovator's dilemma: when new technologies cause great firms to fail.
Perhaps the most well-known book on this list. It was this book that addressed the idea of 'disruptive innovation'... innovation that completely destroys some businesses, and creates others. He uses the railroad as an example, but clearly the internet falls into this category as well.
- Seelig, T. (2012). inGenius: A crash course on creativity.
This evolved from the course notes from one of the first university courses on the subject of creativity. A bit annoying to navigate (her chapter headings are 'too creative') but it has good stuff.
On top of this, there is almost everything that Edward De Bono wrote (the lateral thinking guru).
This may be why it seems like it's harder to find new ideas now. It was relatively easy during the waves of "do X on a computer", "do X on the Web", and "do X on a phone", but now we're waiting on the next transformative idea that will allow everything old to be reinvented again.
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I'm curious what a syllabus for your class looks like.
Here are my course notes, which include assignment descriptions: https://www.dropbox.com/s/m3s83x036makvhu/Creativitity.pdf?d...
To answer your question directly, like all teaching, it requires that the assignments and exercises be appropriately designed. No matter how much I tried to design an assignment that embodied the ideas I was teaching, students would still come up with really un-creative responses. I came to the conclusion that the only way to guarantee success was to mentor them individually.
Most creativity courses just deliver the 'received wisdoms' (i.e. they are theory courses). Very few actually try to foster creativity. The book inGenius: A crash course on creativity (Tina Seelig) was written by someone who did.
Here is the course description to a creativity course delivered at the University of New South Wales. Its not bad, but for a creativity course, the assignments seems a bit un-imaginative.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/mnbw3v4qzrtpx14/D52C5C9E-1043-4261...
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.
(If you haven't already read it and are interested in Bell Labs, 'The Idea Factory' by Jon Gertner is worth checking out.)
no doubt, there are more ideas now than ever. technology is a great enabler. but finding economically impactful ideas ... that does seem to be getting harder, from my armchair view.
All of the work involved needs financial and material support to happen. It's easy to have an armchair idea, but to put a hundred+ hours into the very first realization is extremely difficult if it's not your day job. (And repeat for the thousands(?) of hours necessary for bringing to market...)
In my most anti-elitist frame of mind, I expect there's a mismatch between who has good ideas and who has time to prove things out... Elite business schools are populated (on average) by walking Dunning-Krueger effects, powered by trust funds and lack of consequences: of course they have a shortage of good ideas... Meanwhile people with the actual experience and expertise to produce good ideas have day jobs to keep them from executing.
In other words, the bar for quality and capability in all products we use on a daily basis continues to rise. That has the direct effect of raising the expectations that consumers and businesses have for new products they want to purchase, and thus the cost to build them. That translates to more time needed to deliver something meaningful to market, which is also likely correlated with higher amounts of VC funding concentrated in a smaller number of companies (pre-COVID)
First, the productivity gain should scale with economic growth. A technology that leads to a 5% improvement in productivity of a farmer leads to 5% improvement in productivity of 1000 farmers.
Second, the fixed costs of innovation--capital costs and research costs--should in many cases increase sublinearly relative to the above (linearly increasing) returns on investment. Thus relative to available capital (which increases as the economy grows) these innovations should become cheaper.
Finally, some per-unit production costs may also decline as scale increases.
As a simple example, if a farmer makes $100/year using a donkey and $200/year using a tractor, a tractor costs $10, and a tractor factory costs $10000...well, you get the idea.
So I don't think this is explicable by economic growth, unless there's a facet of growth that hinders innovation (or its application).
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 optimization, etc.
Second, even if the small inventors expected mean return has gone up, so has the standard deviation, so risk has gone up.
Anything that discourages or inhibits individuals and small teams from following through on new ideas will have a big impact. Because most good ideas are by individuals and small teams, and few of us have the ear of CEO's or other efficient fund decision makers.
Answers used to be expensive, but now it is pretty much free to get answers.
It may be that questions will become more valuable than answers.
Lots of progress might be stymied by entrenched interests using laws, regulations, or some form of corporate bureaucracy/cronyism as a "moat" to ward off competition.
The short shrift paid to EVs by auto makers and car dealers before Tesla came along is one example. (Yes, I know that batteries also had to improve.) Intel's practices before AMD stepped up its game recently can be seen as another example. Then there's SpaceX.
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
Is research now a "2nd tier" career? Are you thinking this is based on economic competition from industry?
Hasn’t the trend always been to favor industrial application rather than fundamental research, in terms of pay at least? Or do you mean second tier in terms of status/prestige?
People get paid based on what they contribute to the economy not what they contribute to science
Such tremendous effort for little reward tends to dissuade many of the brightest minds from research careers and towards other careers like finance or consulting.
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"
In my mind, it seems there's no such thing as an "original" idea, given that all ideas are made from or composed of other ideas (as that's how you describe them). Therefore originality, seems to be just a new combination of old ideas you've already been exposed to.
As an example, can you ever imagine a color that's not composed of a combination of colors you've already seen before? A truly original color?
Otherwise, if you're trying to communicate an idea to another, and cannot describe the idea using existing ideas, it might be considered truly original. But what does one do in this case? You show or demonstrate it to them...
As so, ideas seemingly come from observation - or more specifically - our senses, and any subsequent ideas built from thereof.
Thus, if there's a limit to we can sense and observe, then ideas would also be limited or "finite", and we would naturally find ideas becoming "harder to find" eventually...
I believe Ludwig Wittgenstein mentioned something like this in his work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
But even if we ignore the philosophical aspect of it, it seems a bit like Duell's "Everything that can be invented has been invented" statement from late 19-th/early 20-th century. A statement which hasn't aged too well for better or worse.
Correct, any new ideas you abstract are composed of pre-existing ideas you have. Trace any of those ideas to their roots and you'll realize all ideas come from what you originally had to subject your senses to (i.e seeing it, hearing it), otherwise they're some abstracted combination thereof.
Although my prior post was an attempt at a logical proof of sorts, the only real caveat I find in it, is this part: if there's a limit to what we can sense and observe. This is not proven as far I can tell (which is why I prefaced it with an 'if').
Again, I think Ludwig Wittgenstein's work may say all of this better, but then again I find it hard to grasp everything it tries to convey.
EDIT: As for Duell's statement, perhaps it's taken too literally. I can see they had an equivalent to email (e.g. regular mail), atom bombs (regular bombs) and AI (basic schemes & algorithms) back in those days, just not literal equivalents. But his statement is not the argument I'm making in my prior post. Rather it's more "our ideas are limited by what we sense".