Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

Ideas are easy to find, it&#x27;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.<p>We don&#x27;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.

The article says... &quot;that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply&quot;. 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.<p>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.

The funny thing about inventions is that nobody needs them until they have it. So throwing more and more researchers at one topic won&#x27;t change anything as long as there won&#x27;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&#x27;s stupid idea. We don&#x27;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&#x27;t forget about : Great Inventions Are Often Overlooked.

Some time in (I think) the past few months, someone posted a link to an AT&amp;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 <i>decades</i> before deployment -- direct dialing being a 19th century invention, touch tone from the 1920s or 30s, as I recall.<p>The upshot being that innovation had already slowed tremendously.<p>The video begins, approximately, with the speaker relating a story of how an earlier executive had announced to a previous group, &quot;Gentlemen, this company was destroyed last night&quot;.<p>If this rings any. bells, Ma or otherwise, I&#x27;d appreciate the link or reference.

NB: the title is misleading. this is not about pure ideas, this is about <i>economic</i> growth, which to be measurable (significant) needs to be exponential.<p>no doubt, there are <i>more</i> ideas now than ever. technology is a great enabler. but finding <i>economically</i> impactful ideas ... that does seem to be getting harder, from my armchair view.

The problem isn&#x27;t finding ideas, but finding ideas that other people haven&#x27;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 &quot;Are institutions getting less effective?&quot; or &quot;Are research institutions getting less effective?&quot;. Hell, it might even be that our smartest people aren&#x27;t researching and the amount of brainpower we throw at research problems has actually decreased even though the effort&#x2F;money we throw at research problems has increased.

Perhaps.<p>In my mind, it seems there&#x27;s no such thing as an &quot;original&quot; idea, given that all ideas are made from or composed of other ideas (as that&#x27;s how you describe them). Therefore originality, seems to be just a new combination of old ideas you&#x27;ve already been exposed to.<p>As an example, can you ever imagine a color that&#x27;s not composed of a combination of colors you&#x27;ve already seen before? A truly original color?<p>Otherwise, if you&#x27;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...<p>As so, ideas seemingly come from observation - or more specifically - our senses, and any subsequent ideas built from thereof.<p>Thus, if there&#x27;s a limit to we can sense and observe, then ideas would also be limited or &quot;finite&quot;, and we would naturally find ideas becoming &quot;harder to find&quot; eventually...<p>I believe Ludwig Wittgenstein mentioned something like this in his work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Its kind of understandable isn&#x27;t it? The easiest problems get solved first, so people have to &quot;go up the stack&quot; if you will. Unfortunately going up the stack means one needs to get more and more educated or in some cases need to embed themselves in a specific context. But in general though, people are naturally ingenious, they will always come up with new ideas.<p>In the most recent past, the one &quot;low tech&quot; idea that blew me away is the concept of influencers. People understood Instagram and then understood the general psychology of people and then exploited it to create vast empires. I mean previously clout was something only celebrities had after doing extraordinary things like act in movies or be the best in the world in what they do. But people found a way to commoditize it and democratize it. And they didn&#x27;t need any formal education for it. All they needed was a phone.

There&#x27;s certainly phases of progress in particular fields. e.g. in physics, we had relativity and quantum mechanics... and no further revolutions for quite a while. If Einstein&#x27;s genius made some of it possible... he also didn&#x27;t make further progress. He was older yes, but also perhaps there was less to find? Other people were smart enough to find what he found, but weren&#x27;t bold enough.<p>Looking at the bigger picture, Einstein had unexplained empirical evidence (speed of light constant in all directions, inconsistent with waves in an ether). So that was a driver.<p>Looking bigger again, even with better equipment, that senses further, we can only discover new things if they can be sensed with that equipment.<p>(Without evidence) my opinion is we will have periods of slow progress and periods of rapid progress. We are currently in a period of stagnation. We need empirical data, intelligent analysis, and boldness.

The title is misleading and inflammatory: The article itself is making a much narrower claim about the monetary value (economic growth) derived from equivalent amounts of research effort.<p>In that context, they claim it takes more effort now than years ago to achieve the same level of economic benefit.<p>This is <i>far</i> different than anything having to do with the # of &quot;ideas&quot;, which is too abstract of a notion to be meaningful the way they use it.<p>Even if they&#x27;re correct that it now takes more research to produce equivalent economic benefit, then through one concept of &quot;idea&quot; we actually have more than ever: researchers aren&#x27;t doing the same bit of research over &amp; over, they&#x27;re doing new bits. Each bit easily fits into the concept of an &quot;idea&quot;, and so in that sense ideas are plentiful, it just takes more of them than before to achieve a given level of economic growth.

The pigeonhole principle [0] is also becoming more of a factor due to the sheer volume of production.<p>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 &quot;good&quot; melodies under 20 notes after 400 years.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pigeonhole_principle" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pigeonhole_principle</a>

Just look what it takes to have a good idea now.<p>A good example is astrophysics. There are so many nice theories around, but they are all wrong. If you want to theorycraft the universe now, you need to deal with an incredible amount of very precise data, advanced maths and billion dollar machines. If you don&#x27;t, the best you get is to have you theory proven wrong by an actual specialist, most of the times it is &quot;not even wrong&quot;.<p>Researchers are now working on a subdomain of a subdomain, and they spend decades studying just to reach the level where they can start having good ideas.<p>Most of the easy good ideas are already taken. What remain are the hard ones, and those that require a lot of luck and&#x2F;or hard work to materialize.

Had a similar discussion yesterday and I am aching for that conceptual freshness.<p>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.<p>In the arts with near infinite creative control lately we are seeing many retreads of past ideas, we need some great fresh ideas.<p>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?

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 &quot;purer&quot; or partially forgotten version of previous explanations.

Don&#x27;t ideas naturally breed more ideas? Perhaps it takes a certain type of mind, but from my perspective, ideas are synthesized from life experience. That life experience could be prehistoric or modern, but the flow of information in life is going to generate ideas. Ideas are needed to solve problems, solving problems ensures survival, so we naturally think in terms of ideas much of the time.<p>Illustration: A prehistoric person invents the basket: They gather apples from a tree that is a mile from their cave, but can only carry 6 apples and must make several trips. On one trip, they pass a tree with a nest, the nest has eggs and the idea happens: eggs:apples, nest:[basket]. They fabricate a basket out of a hide, and can then get all the apples they need in one trip.<p>In Moore&#x27;s law, I&#x27;d argue that keeping apace in fact requires many more ideas to get to the next node than it took to get to the current node. The fabrication complexity is exponentially greater, not linearly greater, and more ideas are required to get there. Getting to node x+1 indicates much greater progress than was seen getting to node x, because exponentially more ideas were required to succeed. Moreover, you had to have all the ideas of x to build on in order to get to x+1.<p>I argue that we are not generating fewer ideas as &#x27;harder to find&#x27; would imply. But rather, exponentially more, and, the resulting achievements are all the more spectacular.

I&#x27;m reminded of the discovery of the &#x27;modern&#x27; variation on the Fisher-Yates shuffle algorithm. Both the original algorithm, and the improvement made in the variation, are so simple that it can be trivially understood, and makes one think <i>Oh yeah. Neat. And kinda obvious.</i> (I&#x27;d forgotten the particulars so I had to look it up on Wikipedia. Took me very little time to piece it back together.)<p>Clearly it&#x27;s not <i>totally</i> obvious, or it would have made its way into the original paper. Still, the barrier to a Wikipedia-worthy computer science discovery, has risen somewhat since then.<p><i>Edit</i> Come to think of it, this is a good example for explaining what we mean by &#x27;improved algorithm&#x27; to non-software folks.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Fisher%E2%80%93Yates_shuffle#Fisher_and_Yates&#x27;_original_method" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Fisher%E2%80%93Yates_shuffle#F...</a>

Good ideas are easy to find in any niche, but the low central bank interest rates make price discovery extremely hard, so most of the time it&#x27;s just not worth to implement those ideas, as people are not compensated well enough for executing on those ideas.<p>I believe that right now any project that gets people closer to hard money is a good direction.

I actually wrote a post about coming up with ideas, and the difficulty of doing so before:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lifehack.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;productivity&#x2F;how-to-consistently-come-up-with-great-ideas.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lifehack.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;productivity&#x2F;how-to-consis...</a><p>There are two things you need for ideas:<p>1. The raw material from which to generate them: Other older ideas.<p>2. A mind that is able to synthesize ideas appropriately.<p>Ideas becoming &#x27;harder&#x27; to &#x27;find&#x27;, is simply a function of one of these two things not being fully optimized.<p>I personally don&#x27;t think that we have less of either of the two.<p>So no, I don&#x27;t think Ideas are getting harder to find.

Maybe we should take an evolutionary perspective on this? Some ideas may be good in any environment and I expect they would be harder to find over time. Other ideas are probably good or bad depending on their environment.<p>If the environment is fairly stable then we would expect good ideas to get harder to find (evolution slows down), but when there is a big change, I expect it would be a lot easier to find new ideas that only made sense recently.<p>Which is to say, I think the answer to this question is probably &quot;no&quot; in the short term, and we should see more ways that creative thinking pays off.

I wonder if this is partially a function of decreased attention spans. It takes more discipline than ever to turn off distractions and focus on innovative solutions to hard problems.<p>EDIT: This quote seems relevant[1]:<p>&gt; It is fair to say that, in general, no problems have been exhausted; instead, men have been exhausted by the problems.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thereader.mitpress.mit.edu&#x2F;the-most-important-scientific-problems-have-yet-to-be-solved&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thereader.mitpress.mit.edu&#x2F;the-most-important-scient...</a>

Good ideas that are beneficial, yes. However, there are a lot of less optimal solutions for the human race out there, some are even in production, e.g. tracking people, social media

Note that the article is talking about <i>research</i> ideas for researchers to research. Not for business ideas for entrepreneurs to develop. I clicked expecting the latter. It doesn&#x27;t surprise me that academic research fields dry up over time.

Intelligent design theory is a giant unexplored pool of ideas. I am currently looking into bioinformatics applications and there are just so many! Ask me questions if interested!

We stand on the shoulders of giants... ... and there are many barriers to access to those giants these days. (paywalls, patent overuse, market exclusion by .1%, ideological blind spots in communities, too many standards, too many standards behind paywalls or other blocking infrastructure)<p>The last is touched on by community in-fighting. People fighting over which standard product to look like.<p>PS: I work in wireless. Some of the barriers are there because people do really insecure new ideas that risk people&#x27;s security. That&#x27;s generally a good reason for standards and standard bodies.

I was going to make a pithy comment here, but everything had been said.

tl;dr We haven&#x27;t had any deep conceptual revolutions nor massive new sources of cheap energy for a while<p>Estimating how much innovation to expect depends on how you set the baseline. There are a couple of reasons for considering the first half of the twentieth century to have been the most revolutionary period in history both theoretically and technologically (not unrelated areas) at the same time as harnessing vast reserves of hydrocarbons to give us millions of years of stored sunlight to burn as fast as we can build machines to consume it. Theoretical revolutions involved working out consequences of Electromagnetism, Einstein and Quantum mechanics, and of course computation powering the calculations. Electrification, real-time long-distance communication, cars, trucks and planes... We were riding out the consequences of the easiest applications of these novelties and now it&#x27;s getting incrementally harder to squeeze out the benefits.

no. i think it&#x27;s ideas are harder to get funding for. everyone wants results and wants them now. this short term pressure creates noise, and noise is expensive.

options for us as humans are growing, today you can travel by plane, travel to space, buy something around the world, learn whatever you want online...<p>hyperproductivity is here, but both market and options are increasing too so not sure what math could be used realistically but for sure we can&#x27;t foresee in near future death of ideas

For a deep dive look at this, I highly recommend <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slatestarcodex.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;22&#x2F;1960-the-year-the-singularity-was-cancelled&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slatestarcodex.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;22&#x2F;1960-the-year-the-sing...</a><p>Funny that Scott wrote this exactly one year ago today.

0[poiw

Maybe, it&#x27;s getting hard to find ideas due to all these paywalls.

Betteridge&#x27;s Law of Headlines: &quot;Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.&quot;

i have a feeling there may be some interesting ideas hiding in the paper somewhere, can someone who happens to read the paper share a TLDR?

I&#x27;m pretty sure that Ancient Greeks thought that everything has already been discovered.

Two words: Rex Research<p>In the aftermath of WWII the so-called &quot;Men in Black&quot; were formed, not to police aliens (what a conceit!) but to sequester <i>dangerous technology</i> like free energy and anti-gravity.<p>With great responsibility comes great power.<p>There are all kinds of awesome technologies but each one is as dangerous as it is powerful, and we are fucking nuts, so it&#x27;s kept a secret. Rex Research is one of the &quot;holes&quot; where the knowledge is allowed to leak out as a kind of pressure-release valve.