
Today’s Innovations Are Tomorrow’s Baseline - FigBug
http://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/todays-innovations-are-tomorrows-baseline/
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spodek
While teaching entrepreneurship, I pointed out that since people don't try to
make the world worse, many problems today started out as solutions.

It follows that most of today's solutions will become problems someone has to
solve later.

It was one of those moments when all the students picked up their pens and
wrote it down, like it was a big revelation. I hadn't planned on it being
deep.

~~~
ssivark
Paul Eddington was an acclaimed actor who played the "minister" on British TV
series "Yes, minister" and "Yes, Prime minister". Quoting him (Ref: Wikipedia
page [1] and references therein)

 _PE: "A journalist once asked me what I would like my epitaph to be and I
said I think I would like it to be 'He did very little harm'. And that's not
easy. Most people seem to me to do a great deal of harm. If I could be
remembered as having done very little, that would suit me."_

I found that quote moving when I came across it several years ago, especially
given his life experience. His attitude makes me enjoy his acting even more.
(To those who haven't seen the TV series I mentioned above, they're simply
brilliant)

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Eddington#Final_years_and...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Eddington#Final_years_and_death)

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buzzybee
To improve in any field, you basically have three options to choose from:
Reference existing work and instruction, philosophize about ways to
intentionally design a new concept, or iterate within your existing processes
often towards a specific goal.

On all fronts, you can find ways in which we are better at doing those things
than in previous eras: more source material and access to formal instruction,
more access to high-level conversations and criticisms, better venues for
practice and iteration.

To the extent that young people can do increasingly amazing things and raise
the bar, they are still limited in every era, in that their best efforts are
primarily a reflection of the environment, vs. an extension of the
environment. The 10-year-old can achieve a 900 not just because there is
inspiration but because broader support also existed - the parents are OK with
this kid vert skating on a regular basis, and he can access a ramp in order to
practice.

In contrast, the pool skaters of the 1970's had to trespass on the property of
strangers to have a shot at skateboarding for an hour or two, if they were
lucky. But they had a strong in-group culture that made them persist despite
large barriers, which eventually led to unmatched skills and a level of
commercial success as performers. But as stars, they in turn had to lay a lot
of the groundwork for future success stories like Tony Hawk; there was no
framework or playbook to draw from of "how does one have a career in
skateboarding" at that point, and indeed, that side of things has continued to
evolve today with the advent of social media: if a kid did a 900 20 or 30
years ago, it might have gone unrecorded and had no impact on his external
life. It's easy to see the technical achievement, less so the human factors
surrounding and supporting it.

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elihu
This seems like it's more true of software than most other human endeavors;
anyone can come along and "git clone" someone else's best work and start right
where they left off without having to re-trace their steps from the beginning.
Or, if understanding what they did enough to improve on it is too hard, one
can just re-use their work as is and innovate in a completely different
direction.

One way this breaks down, though, is that a certain way of doing something
becomes "standard". It's really hard for everyone collectively to move forward
when we're all using abstractions that are decades old because that's how new
software inter-operates with all the old stuff.

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lunaru
I think your last paragraph just described email. There are so many apps that
are built on top of email and it's only very recently that pseudo-standards*
of communication (Slack, Facebook Messenger) have sprung up as an alternative
upon which you can build your apps with reasonable ubiquity.

* The commercial nature of the internet is likely to produce more pseudo-standards than actual standards for us to build on going forward. These are platforms that everyone now takes as baselines. Stripe in payments. Shopify in e-commerce. And so on.

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gh1
In order to innovate, one usually needs to get familiar historical progress.
While Einstein had to master mechanics, electrodynamics and thermodynamics in
order to build his own theories, a Physicist working in today's day and age
has to also master the explosive progress made in the last 100 years. The only
way to mitigate this problem seems to be (at least in scientific fields and a
bit in computer science too) is specialization, which is not always a good
thing.

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ThomPete
I don' think thats entirely correct as information technology has given the
individual scientist access to specialized information outside their own and
the scientific community in general is much more aware.

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joe_the_user
If progress is measured relative to the levels of other people, it's plausible
that many fields experience constant improvement in the sense of "a 12th
grader today performed at what would be world class levels ten years ago".
Because that can happen even in a field that is experiencing diminishing
returns by some more absolute yardstick.

It is worth noting, however, that some human skills, I think reading speed,
haven't shown any improvement over time whatsoever.

