Slashdot Mirror
'Innovation In a Flash' Is a Myth
An anonymous reader writes "A New York Times article spells out what most of us probably already knew: real innovation takes lots of time and hard work to come to fruition. The article looks at the origins of new ideas, and attempts to dispel the myth that 'Eureka' moments create change. Comments author Scott Berkun, 'To focus on the magic moments is to miss the point. The goal isn't the magic moment: it's the end result of a useful innovation. Everything results from accretion. I didn't invent the English language. I have to use a language that someone else created in order to talk to you. So the process by which something is created is always incremental. It always involves using stuff that other people have made.'"
You may think my hamburger earmuffs were thought up in a flash. But it took a long time to get the pickle matrix just right.
Prior art is the road. Hard work is the engine. Intuition is the steering wheel. You get
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
And that, my friends, is *exactly* why Open Source is so successful and important.
Now let's go manufacturing open source hardware...
I'm an infovore...
Which major IP holder sponsored the "research" behind the article?
I have a patent on innovation :-).
Take Nobody's Word For It.
All the time I have little flashes of realization or inspiration. Being that I'm a software & hardware designer and developer, had I not had these "flashes" I would never have made any of the things I did. The author of this article is selling opinion and personal viewpoint as some sort of psychological "fact". I wish slashdot wouldn't post these stories because it gives the impression this opinion is widely held or fact.
It always involves using stuff that other people have made.
Or, in Microsoft's case, buying stuff other people have made.
I didn't invent the English language. I have to use a language that someone else created in order to talk to you. So the process by which something is created is always incremental. It always involves using stuff that other people have made.
Lucky for us, corporate america is catching on, and they're probably working on a subscription service for that incremental innovation. Because you can't just have un-owned ideas out there, floating around.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
The patent regime in Europe invented the concept of the "computer implemented invention" in an attempt to sidestep article 52 which prohibits patents on computer programs. And this really is the key issue; that everything can be reduced to a semantic game.
It cannot be possible to infringe on a patent if you merely reinvent the core terminology. Otherwise "computer implemented inventions" would be equivalent to software, being "programs for computers" as such.
You say "tom-ar-to", I say "to-may-to"!
Investigation is 10% imagination and 90% perspiration. That's why most investigators smells so bad.
I have to use a language that someone else created in order to talk to you. So the process by which something is created is always incremental. It always involves using stuff that other people have made.
I speak therefore everything is always incremental? Ok Descartes...
Live according to the Categorical Imperative. If the Categorical Imperative tells you not to live by it... ignore it
"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Not Newton, but Bernard of Chartres (or John of Salisbury, depending on how your citation system works). Newton just recycled the line as a way to make fun of someone else who got annoyed after Newton had plagiarised his work.
Its just that most often, they come at the tail end of alot of hard work. Everything comes together in a flash, seemingly in one brilliant moment. Those moments are what many of us live for, but in truth, they really aren't the result of our brains exceeding physical and computational limits and suddenly operating at infinite clock-speed. The truth is you were probably working on the problem for some time (possibly unconsciously). Give yourself a little credit for having an efficient background scheduler.
/* MAGIC THEATRE
ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY
MADMEN ONLY */
Refining and idea and turning it into a process, product, or whatever else it might describe takes time and effort, but the idea, as in the core concept, really a few words or images in one's mind, sometimes *might* come in an "enlightenment" of sorts. Maybe those aren't big things, but it's innovation nevertheless. Or, in my case, something between innovation and evolution, as I often think about how all the devices I use every day could be improved - and sometimes, I end up with a sudden outbreak of simple, yet effective ideas. I test whichever of them I can and they usually work (that is, I get some tools and hack something out of the original device and some scrap parts lying around). The hard part is taking it further - as a student, I don't really have the funds or connections for that - so most of those end up in the proverbial drawer.
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
Quite apart from the "10% inspiration, 90% perspiration" adage, most of the big technological advances are widely understood to have come about simply because it was their time - the foundations were in place, the need was there, and one of society's more creative and industrious members put the two together. That's called progress, people.
Meta will eat itself
Apart from rather out-of-place remarks about language - which I'm not sure I really understood, so I can't say if I agree with them or not, there is a lot of column-inches given to one single example of a guy who re-invented the globe, to help teach geography. Surely there are better examples of innovation than this?
I'm also not convinced that innovation for it's own sake is necessarily a good thing. There are lots of innovative, but really dumb ideas out there.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The mistake is thinking that they arrive without any prior work. They arrive usually not in the absence of previous work, but in the absence of a previous solution. How can you have a sudden idea about a solution unless you've been working on the problem in the first place?
I had one a few years back, when as far as I could tell, a whole years research was about to go down the toilet because I'd hit a brick wall.
I spent several days stressed out of my head over it, and finally resolved to get out and do something else.
Whilst I was relaxing the solution suddenly popped into my head, complete. If that isn't a Eureka moment, then I don't know what is.
I certainly had done plenty of work prior to this event, but I had no idea that solution was possible until that moment, none of my work directly pointed to it that I could tell (consciously at any rate, obviously part of my brain got it). It took seconds to realise it, and an hour to write it down, then four months to instantiate. It worked even better then I'd dared think possible.
This is true, it takes us a while to come up with all the mental material for a "Flash" innovation, but I think the "Flash" is when you suddenly work out HOW all the mental material involved fits together to make an understandable innovation.
Take the original "Eureka!" moment. Before Archimedes got into his bath, he had already formed many ideas about the nature of physics, he wasn't going into the experiance totally blind, however the "Flash" innovation moment came when he made a CONNECTION between the things he already knew.
The human thought process is a very difficult thing to quantify, and I think this article is misleading in the way that it lends to the idea that Archimedes in the space of 30 seconds came up with the concept of density through displacement, when actually, the the water displacment was simply the final peice in a subconscious puzzle.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
There must have been some innovation or we wouldn't now have 8GB cards for just a few tens of dollars.
Oh wait, in a flash.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
I guess it all comes down to how one defines "innovation". If you take the word to mean invention, then the slow, incremental process can be called innovation.
However, I think most people use the word to mean "something radically different", as in a new way of doing something, or a never before seen product. This is the definition that most advertisers want people to have in mind when they describe their product. This kind of innovation is the result of a paradigm shift, which can come about either through Eureka moments, or it can come about when new people come on board and bring a new perspective to a problem.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Newton just recycled the line as a way to make fun of someone else who
got annoyed after Newton had plagiarised his work.
It was to make fun (of Hooke, who was a shortarse) but because he had
a different theory of light.
Newton was a great mathematician, but something of a twat.
but I do know that there's no innovation in Flash. The Korean websites where the page is 15m long and everything is in flash kill me. And they kill my browsing experience.
Put identity in the browser.
After all, is it any different when IBM or Sun pays the wages of the folks working on httpd or OpenOffice? All they're doing is paying for man hours. Microsoft also pays the innovators... they just pay several orders of magnitude better. (And this is why every OSS Visio-clone will always be an OSS Visio-clone, rather than Microsoft playing catch-up by cloning successful OSS programs.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
the plaudits do not go to those who have the great idea - they go to those who persuade everybody else that it's a great idea.
I don't know who said this, but it's dead right.
Peter
What are you talking about? If Microsoft has taught us anything, it's that innovation *does* happen in a flash. I mean, it doesn't take *that* long to write a cheque, now, does it?
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
http://www.pcbookreview.com/reviews/other/review-the-myths-of-innovation.html
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
I had a flash and pounded out a patent - a cell phone, a camera and a web browser all in one. A little money for the patent application and now I'm filing lawsuits against all the big boys. Who says you need to do lots of hard work!
Where's my pet boy sherman, oh sherman!
Donald Ray Moore Jr. (mindrape)
Suspected Terrorist
real innovation takes lots of time and hard work to come to fruition
Tell that to Watson and Crick, who for decades could never really explain how they "stumbled" upon the secret of the DNA double helix - Until it recently came out that the thought it up while tripping their balls off.
Or Einstein? He went from a hack dabbling in the works of Planck to the greatest physicist of all time in a matter of 18 months; and while some have accused him of "borrowing" his ideas from patent applications (or his wife - Which would make this no less of a leap rather than slow progress), no one can deny that he (or she) took a mess of conflicting ideas and unified them, practically overnight, into the single most functional theory of how the universe works we have available today - And he did so as a hobby, not as his day-job.
Freud? He got really, really high while bored at university, and noticed the influence the subconscious has on our overt behavior. That didn't "evolve" from Brücke and Helmholtz' work, it appeared as a whole new ballpark almost overnight (and in fact, when he personally went on to do the "hard part" of fleshing out his ideas, he created his modern tarnished image as a dirty old man).
Making that flash of LSD-inspired insight into the modern biotech industry took 50 years of hard work. Turning a short paper on physics into the LHC took a century. And turning "the subconscious" into modern psychoanalysis still has some way to go, 125 years later.
The "little" leaps come about as a result of work. The jumps happen in a flash.
Not Newton, but Bernard of Chartres (or John of Salisbury, depending on how your citation system works). Newton just recycled the line as a way to make fun of someone else who got annoyed after Newton had plagiarised his work.
I worked for a physics professor that said Newton liked to say that because one of his rivals, Leibniz, was rather short. Like another poster said, (who attributed it to another reason), Newton, brilliant as he was, was quite an asshole.
In the liberal arts circles this has been recognized for ages. Many people still think those "Aha" moments are supposed to just burst forth regularly from the unique depths of your individual Romantic coolness. It's very uncool to work diligently in the arts. Unless it's working on your image of bohemian slothfulness.
But contrast that with most other ages where skilled craftsmen of all types have worked together in shops all day. The emphasis on individual "aha" moments is an historical anomaly.
Having had one of those innovative 'flashes' in the past, I think I'm qualified to comment
First, yes the flash of inspiration IS very quick. You find a way of looking at a subject anew and everything just tumbles out. I'd say roughly there is a period of about 30mins where you are exploring the new understanding, kicking the wheels, poking around to find the limits. This stage is better than sex.
However, you then have quite a few hours capturing it, checking it, understanding it in explicit rather than tacit forms. This takes up to a few days.
THEN you have the real problem. Its not that innovation takes a long time, its that dealing with the arseholes takes a long time. Nobody believes you, nobody understands you, not invented here takes over, funding is difficult to find (where's the track record of this idea). Most ideas, even brilliant ones, fail not because of the idea, but because management and the system are generally crap. They are not setup to accept change, they are setup to kill it. I think the stats are roughly 1 commercially exploited idea for every 3000 flashes of inspiration. Most of the time your baby is killed.
Somehow management sees this as YOUR failure, you are supposed to go through heartache to push it through. They never consider that THEY are the problem and need to be fixed. In general, if you have a great idea keep it to yourself. Explore it yourself in your own time, develop it, and if its commercially viable walk outside whatever organisation you may have and do it yourself. Sure the thieving little bastards will try and claim it after the event, but providing you are smart enough to leave a gap you have much more chance of seeing benefit from it, with less heartache, than would be the case if you kept it inside and tried to convince people.
So in short, yes innovation is a flash - but making it real involves years of wading through shit created by arseholes - which is what THEY call innovation.
Doing all that research was too time consuming and expensive. Corporations have found a shortcut: file IP patents for prior art and rely on their deep pockets to over come any legal challenges, except that most interested parties cannot afford to the legal costs to challenge. So corporations win by default.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Research can 'appear' to have an instantaneous "a-ha!" moment but in actuality, it has the many years of supportive effort by the researcher. The flood gates of creativity might burst open at some point, but it takes a lot of time to fill that reservoir.
Innovation doesn't *normally* occur in a flash, or suddenly. But, it can. There are instant winners. There are instant breakgroughs. There's also the luck factor. Sometimes, you just get lucky. Mere chance.
How to Download YouTube Videos
.. make that 13.
Back to you, Bob!
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Am I the only person who is sad that the word "invention" seems to have disappeared in favor of "innovation".
As far as I'm concerned, innovation is what happens when the marketing department slaps a "cool evergreen scent" sticker on the latest jug of Tide detergent.
Invention is what happens when someone develops a new idea -- via a lot of thought and hard work -- into an invention.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
How is this article not tagged 'fluxcapacitor'?
http://greenobyl.com/ please.... think of the children!!
Many innovations are instant...okay...so many are mistakes.
> Corn Flakes
> Penicillin
And while many innovations have been gradual - a great many innovations have occurred in leaps and bangs!
I Believe James Burke did a better job making this exact point back in 1979 with his 10 episode "Connections" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)
There were 3 total Connections series, but that 1st one changed the way I think about history and was amazingly prophetic
I thought that it was Hooke rather than Leibnitz. vid. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants
Elgon
"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration."
(Thomas Alva Edison)
"If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once
with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found
the object of his search. I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that
a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labour."
(Nikola Tesla, New York Times, October 19, 1931)
Creative epiphanies are real enough. True, they are neither a sufficient nor a required condition for successfully bringing an
innovative idea to happen in the real world. But they are hardly "Balderdash".
In theory, it shouldn't matter whether an idea has developed gradually or came in a "thunderclap". In either case there's a long road afterwards. But the memory of that special moment can fuel the determination to keep on the road through the inevitable hardships - and to inspire others.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
that doesn't promote some sort of socialist mindset? Yes, of course, the innovator is no one. He owes the work of his mind to the society and other people who made his innovation possible. Sure, sure. The individual is nothing and contributing to society is the only noble reason for living. What a bunch of nonsense! Innovation comes from two sources: wondering of the curious and gradually developed vision of forward-planning. The first is instant the latter is painstaking and slow. It is Mozart vs Salieri, if you will. And while the Salieri's make innovation useful, without the Mozarts it would never be possible. Standing on the shoulders of giants is important, but to say that it is all that matters when it comes to innovation is to refuse to acknowledge that innovation takes standing taller than anyone has stood before.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Arthur Koestler's "Act of Creation" (1975) still fetches about $45 on Amazon - compared to a lot of old books which go for a penny, this jibes with my memories of reading it. These days it is hard to imagine not knowing the structure of DNA, much less the Benzene Ring - I remember that Koestler spent a few pages detailing how Kekule loaded up his buffers with the data to support his crystallizing insight - (( kekule benzene snake )). "Act of Creation" had quite a collection of case-histories in addition to Kekule. You need to load up your buffers, and the insight needs to crystallize, which often requires a "Reculer Pour Mieux Sauter" because "What you think you know that ain't so" so frequently is holding you back. What I would LIKE to read is "Act of Creation" updated by the awesome amount of neurophysiological advance since 1975. Like the article we are discussing there is a lot of shallow garbage out there - can anyone recommend a current work with this kind of depth ?
This is the topic of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in which the term "paradigm shift" was coined.
years or decades later.
Crisis is the rule, not the exception.
1) Ideas can come in a flash, sometimes with little work beforehand. However, turning ideas into products or services--making them concrete--is very difficult, and that process is often incremental and iterative. Consider computing, where many researchers and science fiction authors imagined vast networks and tiny hardware a number of decades ago. Yet, it is only now that we are getting the actual products they imagined (invented). Read "The Mote in God's Eye" by Niven and Pournelle, and pay attention to the descriptions of the pocket computer and screens everywhere. Their capabilities are available today, but it took 20+ years for that to happen.
2) Yvon Chouinard was founder of both Black Diamond Climbing Equipment and Patagonia--two of the most innovative companies in the outdoor industry. In his book "Let My People Go Surfing" (highly recommended), he defines a difference between "invention"--the creation of something wholly new--and "innovation"--a new application of an existing invention. For example at a trade show he found a polyester fabric treatment that was invented for football jerseys. But he licensed it and created the first wicking polyester underwear--Capilene. He said that because it takes so long to go from idea to product, most businesses don't have time for real invention. He wants to innovate instead because it is faster.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
A distinction should be made between creativity, which does involve mysterious flashes of insight, and innovation, which is "99% perspiration." Frankly, articles like this always sound to me like attempts to devalue creativity. Creativity by itself doesn't buy you a thing: it's a necessary, though not a sufficient condition for innovation. Creativity is a very annoying phenomenon to managers, who wish that with the right methodology they could use a team of interchangeable staffers as a substitute for those awkward, hard-to-manage creative people.
I don't think the "epiphany" stories are all nonsense, or false. (I don't have time to check these in depth now, so if they're like George Washington and the cherry tree, so be it...)
Kekule supposedly intuited the ring structure of the benzine molecule while dozing in front of a fireside, dreamed of carbon chains as being snakes, and suddenly dreamed of one of the snakes biting his own tail.
Mozart claimed that whole symphonies popped into his head in a flash. I don't know if that claim has been critically examined, or how you'd test such a thing. I believe it, although I'm sure his right brain was laboring hard for days before sending the news to his left brain.
It is not uncommon for writers to maintain that they get the inspiration for entire novels in a single flash, know what the last sentence will be before they write the first one, and have to hurry to get it down on paper before they forget it. Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed, although some are skeptical about the truth of the story, to have lost much of an important poem through being interrupted while trying to capture it by a "person from Porlock:"
"On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!"
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
When Thomas Edison said that "Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration", he was one to know, since he had hundreds of other people on staff helping thinking up inventions and doing practically all the sweatwork to make a patentable version.
And even there he left out the bankers and lawyers geniuses require to protect every innovation from further innovation that could threaten some of the profits.
That whole ingenious system took years to hammer out and perfect.
If only he'd patented it, others couldn't have just copied his way of extracting every possible penny from any possible invention. Instead of just getting the biz model in a flash, they'd have had to maintain a stable of pros to come up with it for them.
--
make install -not war
I tried to tell that to Macromedia, but would they listen? Noooo.
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Not really. Source code is most of the time absolutely useless in that context. Most of any code base deals with the mundane. Thus, even though a program is a representation of human thought, much of this thought is trite or fallacious in one way or another. Its poor readibility (regretfully, the concept of literate programming never really took root) further confounds the situation.
Blazing your way through is costly and takes your eyes off the prize. This is in clear oposition to the wonderfull invention of a textbook or a scientific paper, where the author took it unto himself to present things in proper context, with necessary background information and in a linear sequence.
I would like to die like my grandfather did - sleeping. And not screaming in terror, like his passengers.
About 30 years ago, when I had another life as a medical school professor and NIH researcher, I had reached a point in my research that was seemingly a dead end. I tried experiment after experiment attempted to resolve the impasse with no success. This went on for months and I would wake up obsessing in the middle of the night. I was at my wits end with this project and was thinking that I would have to return the balance of my grant back to NIH.
One day as I was finishing cleaning glassware in my lab, I was walking through my lab when I had an experience that could be called a Eureka experience. What I remember about it most was that it shook me physically and stopped me cold in my tracks. It had kind of felt like a bolt of lightning had hit me and in a flash, I suddenly saw a way through the impasse. It took me a couple of days to work out the details, but a whole new avenue of research opened up in that split second. It was quite remarkable.
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- Dr. Strangelove
I've found no more true statment in my years in engineering.
I just read a chapter of the book Guns, Germs and Steel talking about innovation and invention. The author, Jared Diamond, makes the same point: Necessity is not usually the mother of invention; rather, invention is the mother of necessity.
For example, James Watt is usually credited with inventing the steam engine in 1769, but he wasn't inspired by watching steam rise from a teakettle's spout as the story goes. Watt actually based his work off of another steam engine created by Thomas Newcomen. There was also Tomas Savery and Denis Papin's engine design even before Newcomen.
Another good example is Thomas Edison's phonograph. He originally intended it for dictation and other office use, but eventually admitted (twenty years after its invention) that it's best use was for recording music.
Evolution does not negate epiphanies. The argument that it's all evolution is a twisting of the idea that no one really invents anything, and is foisted off by people who simply have not invented something. That's my take-away from L. Sprague DeCamp's book, The Ancient Engineers - here's a crappy synopsis of it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ancient_Engineers and here's a better one: http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-0345320298-4
I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in this controversy.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
To the English language example: what about Esperanto?
So, when we look at the monkeys that wash potatos in sea water, we see a methodology that has no obvious predecessor and was most likely the result of a pure accident (dropping a potato in sea water). Spontaneous invention of condiments.
I only need one example to show it can't be a truly universal principle. "Invention in a flash" may be a myth in specific cases, maybe even many specific cases, but it is NOT, and never has been, universally so. True "eureka" moments are clearly rare, but they are provably non-zero, as I've found one. Even just a value of one is greater than a value of zero. And I doubt it's unique. My guess would be that there's a genuine, unassailable "eureka moment" at least once a century, and that during times of Classical or Classical-derived thinking, I would expect this number to maybe even get into the realms of four or five "eureka moments" a century.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
And:
Peter Drucker wrote about this way back in 1984 in his book Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The paperback edition is about 250 pages and he devotes about a page and a half to the 'flash of brilliance' innovations. The rest of the book is his attempt to categorize different methods of innovation and rank them in order of greatest change of success to least change of success. The 'flash of brillance' innovations rank last, of course.
Did intelligence just take a nose-dive? Innovation results from accretion? The simple facts are that todays researchers/scientists simply specialize too much to gain the needed mental facility to achieve the "Eureka" moment. Once, long ago, people had to be knowledgeable in many diverse fields, and could mentally assemble innovative ideas, whereas today people focus on a single discipline, and almost never see a bigger picture. We've also forgotten how to daydream - an important ability in the creative process. It's sad. I myself am a student of multiple disciplines, master of none. Over the 44 years of my life thus far I have independantly conceived of several new devices, as well as alternative methods to transmit data, etc. I lack the desire to learn to network with others (I won't play that game, and so stay true to myself). I also lack any financial resources to see these innovations through to fruition. Because of these personal limitations, my ideas and inventions have either remained in my head or as notes scribbled on paper, while sometimes years later someone else has been able to successfully bring them to market. So keep trying to convince yourself that there are no true "Eureka" moments. There most certainly are.
I remember reading that Kerry Mullis said that the idea of PCR (method to amplify DNA) came to him while he was driving on a mountain road. He pulled over to reflect on it because he was afraid he would be too distracted to drive safely. He won the Nobel prize and the rights were eventually sold for a billion dollars.
"I didn't invent the English language. I have to use a language that someone else created in order to talk to you. So the process by which something is created is always incremental".
What a terrible analogy. Language was created by many people, therefore ALL inventing is incremental. You might as well say, I didn't grow this log, it grew over hundreds of years, therefore falling off it must take hundreds of years.
I think I know what he was trying to say. He was trying to say that to invent a better mousetrap, someone had to invent the drawing board and the pencil, and the first mousetrap, etc. That doesn't prove that you don't walk down the hall and stop dead saying "Swipe me! I've just invented the ultimate mousetrap!". ONly production problems from there on in.
Unicorn Setu. "Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines".
Just wondering if this article is actually a response to the Black Swan book, which says that innovation is often a result of randomness.
All he's saying is that progress, by and large, is evolutionary, not revolutionary
Obvious to most technical people, of course, but it can be damned hard to convince upper management of that.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
In Newton's "shoulders of giants" quote he is in fact having a bit of dig at Robert Hooke http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hooke (a natural philosopher and contemporary of Newton with whom he had a bit of disagreement) who was rather short in stature!
Advances within a paradigm are incremental.
A leap towards a new paradigm happens in a flash.
This story reminds me of a the discussion to a previous /. story
- Move "Sig". For great justice!
I stand corrected!
Clearly my giant isn't as tall as yours!
Moderation -1
100% Flamebait
TrollMods are afraid Thomas Edison will flame me from beyond the grave.
--
make install -not war
So English is "a language that someone else created"...
I'm not criticising the accessibility, utility or creativity of English, but if someone actually sat down and invented it then they would be almost as crazy as the people who (might have) said "hey, that's a great language, let's use that!"