
Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? - fovc
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20180338
======
moosey
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.

~~~
Hypx
> 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.

~~~
eagsalazar2
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.

~~~
aaron-lebo
This was originally in response to your parent, but gonna attach it to your
comment instead, cause you're right.

I don't believe we've found the low-hanging fruit at all, it's still all over
the place.

There are hundreds of pieces of software and hardware that are expensive, or
unintuitive, or user-hostile, many are all of the above. HN complains every
day about bad software. Is this really the best we've got?

There's just no way. What it does take is people willing to take a step off
the usual treadmill and getting their talent and ability sucked into large
companies and willing to take a risk to build their own stuff. That ability is
there, the will is not. Some people have 30,000 HN comments. You're telling me
10k of those detailed thoughtful comments aren't absorbing time that can be
put into building better stuff?

Hardware is thousands of times more powerful and cheaper than it was 20 years
ago. Software is likewise more capable, or at the very least, libraries are
way more abundant.. Say what you want about new languages, but I'll take the
option of Rust, Nim, Go, Clojure, etc, than what existed 15 years ago any day.
Not that that stuff was bad, but today you have the option, and it's fucking
cheap to build.

Why aren't we building? Why do we act like we need millions of dollars in
funding to do stuff you can do in your underwear? Do we really believe all the
good ideas are gone or have been executed well? That seems crazy to me. I just
think we're lacking imagination and we've adopted a woe is me attitude (I know
I struggle with this all the time).

That's just software, where greenfield stuff is cheaper than anything in the
world, where implementing your thoughts is a matter of sitting down. If you've
worked in any business, you know of the inefficiencies within, and if you've
worked in a big one, you really know about them.

There is so much low hanging fruit! Just about any product you can pick up in
your house, any regular process you go through, there's a major opportunity to
look at that and think about how that can be done better and cheaper and more
reliably. What's more, that's about the easiest thing to do, because it's just
working off what already exists.

Sorry if I'm not more specific, but there's gonna be people looing back in ten
or twenty or two years and wondering how so many people missed x or y or z,
which in retrospect is so obvious.

~~~
catmanjan
I think its a case of diminishing returns - yes there is sucky legacy software
everywhere, but the ROI was much greater when introducing software in a space
where there was none, or the incumbent system hasn't met growing needs.

~~~
Hypx
Agreed. We're not finding something as big as the Internet again. Smartphones
more or less look like the same across generations now. Innovation seems to be
much more gradual than it use to be.

------
Daub
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.

~~~
mrbgty
"New ideas come mostly from recombining old ideas."

Does this suggest that new ideas would become easier to find over time because
there are more combinations of old ideas?

~~~
Tagbert
It also means that patents restrict the flow of new ideas by locking up the
source material for invention.

The idea that invention is a isolated creative force that pops up without
dependency on anything else has always been a myth without foundation.

~~~
TaylorAlexander
I’ve become extremely interested in this notion lately. When I have
discussions about intellectual property with random people the dominant idea
is that patent promote innovation. People get angry if I suggest that might
not be true, as if they think I want all creative people to go bankrupt or
something.

But its increasingly questionable to me. Open source software has shown the
great wealth of innovation that occurs when we collaborate instead of hiding
our work.

I think we could (probably) sharply increase the rate of innovation if we let
go of intellectual property restrictions. I really want economists and other
thinkers to take seriously this notion that intellectual property restrictions
are deeply harmful to society and study it in detail. Unfortunately entrenched
interests benefit from the status quo (naturally) and I feel they would be in
opposition here. But we can still work to open source our output. It’s harder
when open source competes with closed source, but if we can learn how to use
open source to our advantage we might be able to win.

In any case I think it is desperately important that we take seriously the
idea that IP laws might be doing more harm than good. Most people I speak to
take it as a given that we need them, and I think we’re shooting ourselves in
the foot.

~~~
pacala
How do you solve for 'work for 5 years on open source project, get it to some
degree of popularity, watch AWS making a service out of your code without
paying you a dime'?

~~~
bobblywobbles
A new licensing model where it's prohibitive to make a profit off of this
work.

~~~
kd5bjo
And without any intellectual property rights, what prevents someone from
simply ignoring the license?

~~~
andi999
Exactly! Only because of IP rights you can enforce a license.

------
szczepano
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.

~~~
haihaibye
Countepoint: Covid-19 vaccine

~~~
szczepano
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...](https://ir.editasmedicine.com/news-releases/news-release-
details/allergan-and-editas-medicine-announce-dosing-first-patient)

~~~
haihaibye
The point is, there's a need for the covid-19 vaccine before they invent it

------
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.

~~~
crones
I am pretty sure you are referring to Russ Ackoff's lecture about his time at
Bell Labs: [https://vimeo.com/148192220](https://vimeo.com/148192220)

(If you haven't already read it and are interested in Bell Labs, 'The Idea
Factory' by Jon Gertner is worth checking out.)

~~~
dredmorbius
Bingo! That's it, thanks so much!

------
jiveturkey
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.

~~~
sdenton4
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.

~~~
colinmorelli
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)

------
jonnycomputer
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.

------
Gollapalli
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.

~~~
stcredzero
_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?

~~~
say_it_as_it_is
Research is a privilege

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

~~~
neerajsi
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.

------
Rury
Perhaps.

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.

~~~
axegon_
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.

~~~
Rury
> 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".

------
yalogin
Its kind of understandable isn't it? The easiest problems get solved first, so
people have to "go up the stack" 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.

In the most recent past, the one "low tech" 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't need any formal education for it. All they needed was a phone.

~~~
onion2k
_The easiest problems get solved first, so people have to "go up the stack" if
you will._

The implication of this is that we're running out of problems to solve, and
eventually we'll have fixed everything. That ignores the fact that a solution
to a problem very often creates new problems, and some of them will be
equivalent to the previous easy problems. In some fields you could be solving
the "easy" problems forever.

------
hyperpallium
There'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's genius made some of it possible... he also didn'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't bold enough.

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.

Looking bigger again, even with better equipment, that senses further, we can
only discover new things if they can be sensed with that equipment.

(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.

------
ineedasername
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.

In that context, they claim it takes more effort now than years ago to achieve
the same level of economic benefit.

This is _far_ different than anything having to do with the # of "ideas",
which is too abstract of a notion to be meaningful the way they use it.

Even if they're correct that it now takes more research to produce equivalent
economic benefit, then through one concept of "idea" we actually have more
than ever: researchers aren't doing the same bit of research over & over,
they're doing new bits. Each bit easily fits into the concept of an "idea",
and so in that sense ideas are plentiful, it just takes more of them than
before to achieve a given level of economic growth.

------
symplee
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeonhole_principle)

~~~
throwaway1777
Sure, but that’s not accounting for rhythm, different instruments, etc.

~~~
symplee
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?

~~~
mettamage
It is, but it is increasing the branching factor by much more than finding all
the "good" melodies in 400 years.

Here's a good example of music that stands on it own right despite using the
melody of despacito:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydqReeTV_vk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydqReeTV_vk)
\- I'm pretty sure that most people at HN will appreciate this one whether
they like despacito or not :)

------
GuB-42
Just look what it takes to have a good idea now.

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't, the best you get is to have you theory
proven wrong by an actual specialist, most of the times it is "not even
wrong".

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.

Most of the easy good ideas are already taken. What remain are the hard ones,
and those that require a lot of luck and/or hard work to materialize.

~~~
etrautmann
I think this is slightly specific to astrophysics and cosmology. In
Neuroscience, it definitely feels like there is plenty of headway to be made
by individuals with good ideas, although I admit that it feels as though ideas
are harder to come by as more is published and the bar is continually raised.

~~~
hilbertseries
This is certainly also true of mathematics and many other areas that have over
a century of modern research work done on them.

------
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?

~~~
petra
Few ideas:

Many personal robots and services - we'll do almost nothing. So we'll have
more time for hobbies, which will need more tools etc .

Building a green economy.

Higher quality food more often.

More healthcare, with aging etc. And maybe more emphasis on selling care.

The real problem is this: why hire humans do all those jobs, when machines
could do(or create substitutes) for most of those new jobs ?

~~~
friendlybus
Good machines compress time for tasks. Dishwashers still need human stackers
despite reducing an all day job down by the river to 3mins of
stacking/unstacking dishes.

Compressing design work from hours or weeks of thinking about different forms
down to a few minutes of machine learning pattern recognition cpu cycles,
means we have to move our knowledge work from massaging clay into new Porsche
designs to higher level abstractions about what function in society cars can
fulfill. The abstractions get higher, we can fit more into our time on this
planet and the detailed oriented will be required to keep all of this from
breaking down and succumbing to entropy.

Humans at the bottom of the chain will have nothing to do except hold the
world together, people falling out of work, machines breaking and money and
time being wasted away on excessive drug use and manufacturing for pleasure
instead of progress too much can grind this potential for new life to a halt.

Agriculture is direly needed in the dirty thirties if we are to avoid
repeating the hunger caused by the dust bowls in the 30s. A green base is
fundamental to surviving the crash of the roaring twenties. Automating farming
and increasing food production to multiple times of what the US can demand is
a life saving purpose. God only hopes you have ‘nothing’ to do when it comes
to crass commercial works. Building self sustainable farming for homes so that
families can survive on and off grid is also has a potential for great
application.

------
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.

------
11thEarlOfMar
Don'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.

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.

In Moore's law, I'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.

I argue that we are not generating fewer ideas as 'harder to find' would
imply. But rather, exponentially more, and, the resulting achievements are all
the more spectacular.

------
MaxBarraclough
I'm reminded of the discovery of the 'modern' 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 _Oh yeah. Neat. And kinda obvious._ (I'd forgotten the particulars
so I had to look it up on Wikipedia. Took me very little time to piece it back
together.)

Clearly it's not _totally_ 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.

 _Edit_ Come to think of it, this is a good example for explaining what we
mean by 'improved algorithm' to non-software folks.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%E2%80%93Yates_shuffle#F...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%E2%80%93Yates_shuffle#Fisher_and_Yates'_original_method)

------
xiphias2
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's just not
worth to implement those ideas, as people are not compensated well enough for
executing on those ideas.

I believe that right now any project that gets people closer to hard money is
a good direction.

~~~
md_
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 arise from low interest rates?

~~~
xiphias2
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 money for lawyers, so he
became in a bad position very fast, even if he was quite certain that the
competitor didn't have any case against him.

Another example is cheap loans driving up ad prices and rent in SF, which I
have seen often talked about here.

~~~
mrfox321
Money _can_ be created from nothing.

[https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-
bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy)

~~~
xiphias2
I was specifically talking about money defined by the Austrian theory of money
(buying power / store of value). Just because monetary units (currency) are
created, it doesn't increase buying power of the total amount of the total
amount of monetary units. For example if people buy houses from additionally
created currency (even if it's debt), the buying power of one unit of that
currency goes down, which can be seen by the number of required units needed
to buy a house going up.

The problem with banks is that they have a good reason to conflate unit of
account with store of value: they make lots of profit on people not
understanding the difference.

~~~
dumbfoundded
Money is made up in all cases. It's an abstraction of relative demand. Even if
governments abandoned fiat money, they could still pull money from thin air.

Mostly because governments use violence to change the relative price of
anything. If a government made owning a gold coin or a bitcoin a crime
punishable by death, I think its buying power would go down. Similarly, by
forcing citizens to pay taxes in a specified currency at the threat of jail
time, a new currency is created.

It's made up all the way down.

~~~
xiphias2
Sure, money is a man made belief, Yuval Noah Harari's books are great at
explaining this :)

Generally gold confiscation doesn't mean the purchasing power going down, just
transfering it to the governments. It's still quite scary though, as I
wouldn't be surprised if it happened again :(

The scariest thing is if all the countries in the world try to ban gold and
Bitcoin at the same time to preserve the fiat system.

I'm hopeful that as Schnorr signatures will make coinjoins more practical, it
will be easier to use as well, thereby making ownership of Bitcoins less
visible to governments. Wasabi wallet is great at doing coinjoins, but when I
tried it, it was just too slow.

------
taphangum
I actually wrote a post about coming up with ideas, and the difficulty of
doing so before:

[https://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/how-to-
consis...](https://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/how-to-consistently-
come-up-with-great-ideas.html)

There are two things you need for ideas:

1\. The raw material from which to generate them: Other older ideas.

2\. A mind that is able to synthesize ideas appropriately.

Ideas becoming 'harder' to 'find', is simply a function of one of these two
things not being fully optimized.

I personally don't think that we have less of either of the two.

So no, I don't think Ideas are getting harder to find.

------
skybrian
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.

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.

Which is to say, I think the answer to this question is probably "no" in the
short term, and we should see more ways that creative thinking pays off.

------
conorliv1
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.

EDIT: This quote seems relevant[1]:

> It is fair to say that, in general, no problems have been exhausted;
> instead, men have been exhausted by the problems.

[1] [https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-most-important-
scient...](https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-most-important-scientific-
problems-have-yet-to-be-solved/)

~~~
valachio
I seriously wonder this as well.

I managed to build a profitable small business and mostly automate it. But now
that I'm back in the search for another more ambitious idea to work on, it is
way too easy to be distracted by all the electronics around me than to be able
to ponder deeply about ideas.

I tried reading a novel the other day, I couldn't make it through 3 pages
without reading some random BS on the interwebs.

Damn capitalism for incentivizing companies to make everything as addictive as
possible...

------
hajderr
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

------
vinceguidry
Note that the article is talking about _research_ ideas for researchers to
research. Not for business ideas for entrepreneurs to develop. I clicked
expecting the latter. It doesn't surprise me that academic research fields dry
up over time.

------
yters
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!

------
teunispeters
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)

The last is touched on by community in-fighting. People fighting over which
standard product to look like.

PS: I work in wireless. Some of the barriers are there because people do
really insecure new ideas that risk people's security. That's generally a good
reason for standards and standard bodies.

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

------
griffzhowl
tl;dr We haven't had any deep conceptual revolutions nor massive new sources
of cheap energy for a while

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's getting incrementally harder to
squeeze out the benefits.

------
nikofeyn
no. i think it'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.

------
alexgvozden
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...

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't foresee
in near future death of ideas

------
ctoth
For a deep dive look at this, I highly recommend
[https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-
sing...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-singularity-
was-cancelled/)

Funny that Scott wrote this exactly one year ago today.

------
candiodari
0[poiw

------
arjunbazinga
Maybe, it's getting hard to find ideas due to all these paywalls.

~~~
moab
Yes, but sites like: [https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-
chrome](https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome) [https://sci-
hub.tw/](https://sci-hub.tw/) exist and make it trivial to get around
draconian publishing practices. I'm not advocating not paying for journalism
---it's just that not everyone realistically can, and paywalling them seems
like a bad solution.

A more plausible reason, at least to me, is the increasing specialization of
fields and lack of cross-field communication.

Also, ideas seem to be flowing plentifully at least in math and TCS, where old
and hard conjectures are still being proved with astonishing regularity.

------
CoderMoose
Betteridge's Law of Headlines: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can
be answered by the word no."

~~~
dang
Mr. Betteridge retired many years ago.

Not literally!

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10393248](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10393248)

------
cocktailpeanuts
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?

------
adamnemecek
I'm pretty sure that Ancient Greeks thought that everything has already been
discovered.

~~~
strken
If the ancient Greeks thought that subsequent discoveries would get harder and
harder, they might have been right.

~~~
ressetera
The implementation get trickier. Better solutions to existing problems are
usually more complicated.

------
carapace
Two words: Rex Research

In the aftermath of WWII the so-called "Men in Black" were formed, not to
police aliens (what a conceit!) but to sequester _dangerous technology_ like
free energy and anti-gravity.

With great responsibility comes great power.

There are all kinds of awesome technologies but each one is as dangerous as it
is powerful, and we are fucking nuts, so it's kept a secret. Rex Research is
one of the "holes" where the knowledge is allowed to leak out as a kind of
pressure-release valve.

~~~
ozten
> _Rex Research_

Can you back this up with sources? This sounds like paranoid conspiracy
theory.

Most inventions are "invented" in multiple places at nearly the same time. If
free energy is possible, how was each and every discovery nation, by nation,
squashed? How do you stop it from spreading once that cat is out of the bag?

~~~
carapace
Some secrets keep themselves.

