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The Post-Idea World
An anonymous reader sends this quote from an opinion piece in the NY Times:
"If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it's not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don't care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can't instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passé. ... There is the eclipse of the public intellectual in the general media by the pundit who substitutes outrageousness for thoughtfulness, and the concomitant decline of the essay in general-interest magazines. And there is the rise of an increasingly visual culture, especially among the young — a form in which ideas are more difficult to express. But these factors, which began decades ago, were more likely harbingers of an approaching post-idea world than the chief causes of it."
Because Graham Bell, Thomas Edison and others were interested in "thought-provoking ideas" and NEVER wanted to instantly monetize on them...
It's because we've thought of everything.
Our forefathers dreamed of things we take for granted today. Electricity, transportation, communication, etc. Our ideas are about making things more efficient (smaller, faster, etc) or serving our corporate masters by making them cheaper or more profitable.
We have plenty of ideas, just not all of them serve mankind - they server our technological or cultural needs. Looking back, our forefathers' ideas were about their place in time as well.
The difference is people expect instant feedback/results from their new ideas in the same way they get instant results from almost everything else these days. The bottom line is it takes a lot of hard work and convincing to get an even vaguely new idea into circulation - exactly the same as it always did. Also it depends on the field, in technology new ideas are constantly being tried out and adopted or discarded.
I think we care, we just don't have the framework in place to explore big ideas any more.
We have become very good at improving existing technology. Release product, take user feedback, make improvements, sell update product.. rinse and repeat.
The magic word of the day has become ROI.
We don't have Bell labs doing hard core research any more, and no one will invest in anything which doesn't have a clear pathway to profit.
My big idea is that I do not even have to RTFA to know that this is one of those pieces which is all about the world going to hell in a handbasket, no, this time for real. We are always less smart/less moral/less disciplined/less tough than our imaginary forefathers and apparently always will be.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
All the good ideas have already been patented. Try doing anything innovative and some lawyer, somewhere will tie you up in litigation until the sun goes cold or you run out of money.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Ideas seem not so important is because today's society is based on GREED.Instant wealth and power over the new item or it doesn't get to the people.Sounds a lot like Apple and their i(fill in the blank) whatevers.
Geek Hillbilly
I think there are plenty of good ideas -- small, medium, and large -- today. For example, see TED.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
That is why we don't have such things as 'The Large Haldron Super Collider', The Mars Rover series, The ISS and now private space ships, electric cars, etc. Because of course - none of these things can be monetized immediately.
And folks wonder about the death of Newspapers.
Or perhaps the easiest ideas have already been thought of in previous generation and creating new ideas has become harder.
On the other hand, even though the quantity of ideas has decreased, the quality (in absolute terms) has increased due to the exact same reasons.
All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again.
For example; I'm a programmer and have invented many algorithms. Most of these turned out to have been invented by other programmers before I was even born. There was a time when bubble sorting was a new idea, nowadays you have to think of something much more complex in order for it to be a truely new idea. Quite simply; the intellectual barrier to generating new ideas has become much greater.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I think we generate more ideas .. I mean there are like decades that used to go by without a single new idea .. like say 2500 BC to 2900 BC .. how many new ideas? Writing was invented ... Pyramids .. the concept had been thought of .. maybe a mathematical concept or an improvement to writing happening but can we say new ideas in comparison to what we see nowadays over the past few years (faster CPUs, better phone user interfaces, social networking, etc) ? Doubtful.
Note where they aren't: Corporations. They're seeing a faster ROI by patenting a minor change, rather than researching a major breakthrough. And, worse, they're getting lots of face-time to either cut that ideas factory (The Government) down to nothing or make it a publicly funded R&D outsourced center, where they pay nothing and get to patent the lot.
That some things were better in some distant past is a recurring idea.
I'm calling bullshit on this article. I'm guessing the author has never heard of TED. Sadly, neither have most of the general population. The ideas are still coming, but the masses don't care, if they don't fit in a 140 character tweet, or a 30 second youtube clip. (or an animated GIF)
These days, it seems to me that the place to read a large variety of in-depth, thought-provoking writing for general audiences lies in the blogosphere. Of course, the blogosphere varies tremendously in content and in quality, and I really have no clue how much this compares in terms of volume with previous ideas. But I strongly suspect the author is concerned only with the popular news media, and ignoring new media (well, it looks like new media is mentioned and dismissed in a single sentence). But I don't think there is any real problem with a lack of good, in-depth, well thought out ideas.
Another point to be made is that you can't dumbly compare fractions of media content over time and expect them to compare. The difficulty here is that you might be reaching different groups of people entirely. For instance, the places where you saw thought-provoking essays in the past were generally magazines, many of which were read primarily by people in the middle class and higher, not by poorer people. But these days, even poorer people have no difficulty getting online, so even if the previous magazine readers have moved online for their reading, so have the people who never read magazines in the first place. So even if the number of thought-provoking essays goes down as a fraction of total web content, it may still be reaching no smaller a readership than it did before.
So, in the end, I guess I'll just leave it that I am skeptical.
Evidence of our slow but inevitable descent towards Idiocracy.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
...and he does not seem to understand a difference between an idea and a witty expression.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
TFA to me says more about the media failing their role as societal and intellectual catalysts, than about a shortage of ideas as such. There are big ideas out there, you just don't hear about them from the media.
At the risk of opening up a political flame war, even the political parties here in the U.S. have big ideas built into their platforms. What level of service and what level of taxation do we really want from our government? How do we distribute the costs of government? Why is illegal immigration a problem and how do we address it? What are the costs of dealing with global warming, and what are the costs of not dealing with it?
It's just that no one is having an intelligent discussion about these topics. They prefer to stake out a position on blind faith and then denounce everyone who disagrees. Seems to me more like a lack of discussion than a shortage of societal challenges or of ideas to deal with those challenges.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Max Planck was told in 1874 when looking for a university course "it is hardly worth entering physics anymore because there is nothing important left to discover”
This was long before the days of the atomic model, quantum mechanics, radiation, wave-particle duality etc. All that good stuff that brought us all our shiny electronics and the internet,.
The same is still true - the more we know the more we realise that there's a lot more we still don;t know. Just in the last week I've read about gravity dipoles in qyuantum vacuum fluctuations, and discovery of very dark planets to name but two (ok the latter is a discovery rather than an idea, but we'll now need to work on explaining it, which may lead to new tech., or it may not). It just takes a very very long time for these esoteric ideas to turn into actual useful every day stuff.
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
This is why our vapid society has driven over the edge of the cliff and is in that moment of free fall as the ground rushes up to deliver us to our eventual fate. Big ideas don't matter to most of the population because they think we are flying so big ideas that solve problems just aren't relevant to them any more. Meanwhile stockmarkets oscillate wildly and politicians cannot come up with solutions to the most fundamental structural issues facing our society.
Those who are coming up with those big ideas are enlightened enough to realise that we are falling and are try desperately to stop us from crashing our entire society into an oblivion where the few of us who do survive will speak of times where we used to do the impossible around campfire in the relics of our civilisation.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I think the problem here is that good essays and insights get lost in the everyday noise and only show their value as they persist over time and more and more people get to see the ingenuity and foresight in them.
I don't think Senecas letters were very famous back then or well know beyond a very small group of people (those he wrote them to). And I also am pretty sure that most citizens of the roman empire didn't care squat about a broad transcendent view on life beyond 'lets pray to jupiter as to win this racing bet'. It is only centuries latter that the quality stuff is still around whilst everyday drivel and non-sense go lost in time and replaced with todays everday drivel and non-sense. Thus we get the impression that back in Senecas time society was full of smart and witty politicians and philosophers making great speeches.
When people in 200 years look at todays Inet Tech era and read Paul Grahams essays - which will still exist while every techcrunch feed will have gone the way of the dodo - people will get the same impression. Lot's of very smart and educated people back then, everything today is degenerated, grand old masters, blabla, jadajada ...
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
And your numbers are half as accurate as mine. I can pull them from 3 inches deeper in my rectum than you. And that's 100 times better!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Maybe that's because a lot of the good ideas have already been thought of, so the low hanging fruit is nearly gone. However, there's still a lot of low hanging fruit left (for example my own software project I'm currently working on which x?yy***yzzzzz%%%yyr***trvvrtv), and also that heatsink which rotates instead of the fan rotating. See the programme "Dragon's Den" for many more examples.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Ideas are plentiful. With ~7,000,000,000 people in the world and a large & growing fraction of them having access to the internet, there are ideas everywhere. You're reading my ideas right now, along with those of hundreds of other people all on this one page.
Ideas are easy. Any idiot can come up with ideas. World peace. Flying cars that run on dog poo. Cities on the moon. Ideas are substantially easier to come up with than they are to actually implement. People who come up with 'concepts' for residential towers with farms hanging off the sides; or city vehicles with odd numbers of wheels powered by unobtanium, or political systems where everyone just gets along and are happy are ten a penny, and the abundance of communication that the internet provides makes this painfully obvious.
There are fewer 'good' big ideas left. With all the ideas that everyone has already had and are coming up with all the time, fewer new ideas are actually 'original'; and the originality of an idea can be quickly proved or disproved with 30 seconds on Google.
Specialisation. With the bigger ideas aleady thought of and written about, the lions share of ideas these days is in specialised niches; the 'long tail' if you will. The problem is that such ideas cannot capture the imagination of people at large. There are people coming more ideas than ever, but it's hard to raise enthusiasm for big ideas in computer science or industrial management.
"Good-old-fashioned nostalgia" History seems to be chock full of bold people with big ideas, but a lot of the time it's just dumb nostalgia. Sure, those Victorians wrote a lot of well-considered books and built a fair deal of physical and social infrastructure that persists to this day, but we're talking about 60-100 years here. The innovations and achievements of the past 60 years blow any other 60 year period in history into oblivion. Of course in the past everyone was more 'rational' (ignoring the bigger participation in and seriousness of religion then), was 'healthier' (ignoring the starvation), 'got on better' (ignoring the regular riots/wars/crime) blah blah blah. Probably back then concerned intellectuals railed against the talents of the world being wasted on arranging girders to support mechanical horses, or on the manufacture of cloth etc. No doubt in 100 years time people will be talking in hushed tones about those 'heroes' of the early 21st century, when there were big ideas, and people lived happily in peace without the nefarious influence of xx yy...
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
Too many comments so far are missing the point: the article isn't about lack of new "things." The article is about a lack of critical thinking.
It used to be that, in the past, magazines and newspapers and other "common-man" publications would have essays about heady topics. Now you just get articles about how to get rich quick, how some superstar or politician has done something, or some other essentially mundane topic.
Even the "debates" on economics, social norms, climate change, or intellectual property are very sparse on respectful discourse and are instead filled with emotional responses. There's an interesting quote to which I cannot recall attribution, along the lines of "If you get angry when you're defending your topic, that's probably a sign that you don't feel it can stand on its own merits." The lack of temperance in such discussions - from all viewpoints - is fairly damning.
Modern society seems to frown upon thought for thought's sake: if you can't monetize it, why bother? I'd say that "modern society" in this case has missed the point: earning wealth is not the only goal.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
If the author thinks that a big idea looks like "Marx or a Nietzsche," he's going to be waiting a while. The definition of a "big idea" is that it is novel and game-changing, but based on the examples he gives in the article it appears that what the author is really lamenting is that the world no longer sees the philosophies that excited him in his formative years as new and exciting. I'm not arguing for or against the validity of the examples he gives, but rather that they have matured and are by no means on the front lines of new ideas. Maybe he's just getting old.
Weren't we JUST discussing space elevator technologies and personal fission generators that never needed refueling just a couple of days ago?
End of ideas my ass. It's like those idiots in the late 1800's who thought they knew everything there was to know about the universe, and that all that was left was to "tie up the loose ends".
Perhapps recent intelectual property protection process and corporate patent practices have served to stifle creativity or at least the promise of potential benefit for most individuals with a spirit of inginuity.
Communism
Fascism
Eugenics
Killing off all bothersome insects with DDT
Endless suburbs
A car in every garage
The Atomic Bomb
Perfect White Bread
Cheap sweeteners
Eliminating all infectious disease with antibiotics
I know I don't trust big ideas because those ideas are usually the ones that lead to big problems.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
This guy seems to be wanting to coin the "idea" that "ideas are dead".
Now we have the Snuggie, dammit!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Yes. Then he can copyright the 'Post Idea World' idea and sue everyone who coins it for money.
The 'medium' is not the 'message', it's a trap.
historical myopia
the perception things are changing, only because you are forgetting how things really were
people are not more or less susceptible to bad ideas, or outrageous propaganda, or visual aesthetic, than they were in 2011 BC as they are now. why? because sociology and psychology are constants. culture and civilization changes, not our basic mental weaknesses and strengths
this idea that certain social phenomena are getting worse over time is a side effect of forgetting. when in truth, much of social phenomena are constants across all cultures and all times. you see it constantly inn conservative thinking: freak outs about rising crime, barbarism, immorality, disrespect... when of course, these things are constant, if not getting better. there is no magical past, there is only nostalgia: the effect of forgetting all the bad parts, remembering only the good, and misremembering made up feel good impressions
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The Author of the article looks at todays popular culture and wonders where all the big ideas are... they had big ideas 100 years ago he says! But he's comparing today's popular culture to yesterdays underground subculture. If he were to look at the pop-culture of 100 years ago he'd see a plethora of paperback westerns in which Indians were evil savages. There's plenty of big ideas going on right now, all the author is revealing is the not-so-new trend of the media being too lazy to go look for it.
I would say that the dearth of grand-visions problem is twofold:
- One one side, is the widespread, modern concept of the "hero", the one people others look up to. The "heroes" of today are sportsman and celebrities, not thinkers or explorers which both feeds and reflects a society that values luck, inherent ability and monetary success above all.
- On the other side is the democratisation of culture, where everybody is supposed to have a voice and (unsurprisingly) those who think the least, react the fastest, use the shortest soundbites and shout the most drown out those who actually think about things.
People are just doing their own shit. There can't be era-defining ideas because all the different little conversations we're having don't even connect anymore. For an idea to make an impact on society, we first need a society that's more or less on the same page. That's what's missing. Sure, the internet makes everything easier, including the communication of ideas. Just look at fora.tv or bigthink or TED. You can fill every free minute listening to brilliant people talk about some pretty deep ideas. But what you can't expect is that these ideas will be a part of some larger social conversation. They happen off to the side somewhere. My academic friends and I give a fuck, but not many other people do. Or maybe they do, but they have no idea that I do too, because nobody can assume anymore that the people standing around the watercooler read the same "ideas" books, saw the same "ideas" discussion - or even the same news program. Only events are a part of our common culture, so you can talk to anyone about Breivik, or dumping Bin Laden's body in the sea, or the future of the Euro. But there are very few ideas in general social circulation, apart from maybe stuff about Keynsian interventions and other macroeconimic stuff. These are big ideas for sure, but nobody I know (myself included) feels like they have any solid understanding of what's involved. Macroeconomics looks like voodoo, so it's hard to talk about while feeling like you're having an informed conversation.
It's not just nostalgia or some historical distortion that things were different between the two world wars. There was relativity, Communism, anarchism, feminism/sufferage, the uncertainty principle, Bauhaus functionalism and a dozen other art "schools" organized around ideas, the incompleteness theorem, Freud, social Darwinism, logical positivism... and I really could go on and on. And cafes were abuzz with conversation about this very stuff. Not everyone had an opinion about all of it, but everyone did have an opinion about some of it, and it was in your face, because people took it as obvious that these aren't just ideas. Each one you accept gives you an obligation to act, and these actions were impossible to miss for anyone who lived in a major European or North American city. Things really are quite different now. Big ideas are still being thought, but somewhere out of sight. Which means that they don't get a chance to get "big" in the same way they used to be.
I came for this theme but I'll raise it up a positive level.
There are some severe downsides to be sure, but we are teaching ourselves slowly, painfully, to be racially smarter. The Flynn Effect is a lagging representation of us getting "ten steps farther in the idea flow" within days rather than weeks or even months. For example it's in general way harder for con artists to snowball people. Not counting brilliant psychological exploits like Facebook, the garden variety cons don't work anymore. If you see something suspicious, you visit a smart forum and post a note. Basically within a day, you have reasonably good proof whether it's remotely legit or not. As a funny example, the internet busted Phone-a-Friend on the gameshow Millionaire.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
"If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it's not because we are dumber than our forebears but..."
If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it's ... because we're standing on the shoulders of giants?
Seriously. Most people are motivated by money. If corporate ownership of patents were outlawed tomorrow, and only individual flesh-and-blood humans could hold patents, you'd see a creativity explosion of "big" AND small ideas.
Ideas are a dime a dozen, but if, in order to work, my company forces me to sign a contract whereby it owns anything I think up, why bother? I'd go to another company, but they all do the same thing. I'd start my own company if I had the capital, but I don't. If I get the capital from someone else, I'm right back where I started from, signing away my patent rights.
And no offense, but I don't want to publish a $500 million idea and get a $5K bonus and a pat on the head for it. Fuck 'em.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Disillusionment with "ideas" permeates our culture and has lead to a lack of interest in pursuing and discussing new ideas. Despite all of the grand ideas of the past 125 years, our wealth gap is widening and for the first time we are losing ground financially, educationally and socially. All of the past ideas have not changed one thing about the realities we live with. As a matter of fact we could argue that many of those ideas got us into the mess we are facing today.
People are tired of ideas. Ideas don't work in resolving the issues of survival most of our society is facing, they don't put food on the table, and they haven't lead us to the Promised Land envisioned by many Enlightenment and modernist thinkers.
"Big ideas" are ten-a-penny, particularly now that the internet makes it so easy to publish them. It should be no surprise that incremental improvements - which evidently require more thought and are more useful - are more valued.
I am trolling
There's plenty of ideas out there, but most of the good ones are ones that they NYTimes politburo disagrees with and ignores.. All of the 'great' State-embiggening social program ideas were already had, tried, and proved failures for the most part..
As far as tech goes, plenty of ideas still get funded, and some of them are even good!
I think the main reason for the lack of grand, all-encompassing ideas is that these ideas are almost always scientifically wrong. Look at Marx, Freud, and really the whole history of philosophy: when you try to examine their claims scientifically, they fall apart or evaporate. These days, if someone makes a claim we say "Prove it: where's the data?" If they can't come up with something scientifically substantial, we ignore them. Our willingness to call bullshit may be due to our increased access to information, but it is mad to say that this is a bad thing.
The reason is that America and the west are giving away their economy. Here in America, even pols count on the gov to do things, rather than the gov. helping the citizens to do things. We used to care about having schools, infrastructure, even top vaccines. But we also had the BUSINESS to do this. Not any more. So now, ppl do not have access to the resources to be able to dream big. Unless we restart manufacturing and our economies, then we lose the ability to have big dreams.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I the link wasn't working for me, so thi is just based of the summary; which is probably foolhardy.
No big ideas? NO BIG IDEAS? are you blind?
Besides:
Driver-less cars?
Mapping all the roads in the world?
Exploring other planets?
Building a build over a half mile high?
Peering into the very clock work of the universe?
Finding a common means for the whole world to communicate?
I Have a device in my pocket, right now, then can translate any language for me, talk to almost anyone on the planet, give me direction to almost anyplace on the planet.
So, don't tell me no one values big ideas. What we have is too many simple minded people who have no clue what a big idea is unless it meets their personal immediate need.... or the summary is inaccurate; which I hope it is.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm pessimistic / optimistic - we're not at the worst of this time yet, but after we pass it, (literally) unthinkably wonderful things will become possible as our civilization regains its collective confidence.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
" The "heroes" of today are sportsman and celebrities,"
Just like it's always been.
Big ideas need to be backed with money, and that means government money, and that means...Taxes duh, duh, DUUUUuuuuuhhh.
Who looked up to Columbus? Galileo? Thomas MacDonald? Joseph Strauss? Ford? Edison?
None of them were Hero's before the implemented their big ideas. and 2 of them you probably never even heard of.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The author of TFA is simply having problems FINDING his 'big ideas'. I believe there are plenty of great ideas out there, and and plenty of thinkers too. But you have to look in the right place. I suspect that the author, and in general the media, and perhaps all of us, are simply not very good at sifting through the surge of information available to us with social networking, news feeds, the web, etc. Or, perhaps, he's not very good at identifying 'big ideas'. What is a 'big idea' anyway?
I think the author is confusing ideas, scientific theories and ideologies. An idea is nice, but not necessarily valuable. Scientific theories (if they stand scrutiny) are ideas that enable us to understand and shape the world around us, and are therefore valuable. There are plenty of new and possibly useful scientific ideas out there, but you need to look in scientific journals or popular science magazines. And you need to be somewhat knowledgeable the scientific field to understand them. The author calls Einsteins work a 'great idea' but does he understand it? I suspect he calls it a great idea because it resulted in the A-bomb and nuclear power, but that doesn't per se make it a greater idea than new theories, for example the hypothetical Higgs boson (which, who knows, might give us anti-gravity technology or FTL space travel?).
Ideologies, on the other hand, are not valuable like scientific theories. In fact, some ideologies have kindled hatred, caused wars, held back prosperity etc. There are more benign ideologies, promoting things like 'equal rights' and 'peace' and 'save the planet', but these are very generic and obvious wishes, not practical ideas. Ideologies that prescribe ' the way' for obtaining these goods are often dangerous when followed through, because they are not based on science. Ideologies cannot be proved right or wrong, their value is not easily shown, and can be thought up by quite stupid people and still become popular. Perhaps the author finds that ideologies are getting less attention? That would not be such a bad thing. Unfortunately, there are still plenty of hateful ideologies and backward religions - they make the news all the time. And I have no doubt that there will be plenty popular and potentially harmful ideologies in the future.
All other ideas are just opinions. And there are plenty of those (with merit or without) on twitter, facebook, blogs, magazines, newspapers, etc. See for example TFA.
assignment != equality != identity
Ideas are plentiful. Imagination is scarce.
I think the author could use a refresher in critical thinking. It seems to me that he's making an appeal to ignorance; I don't know of any big ideas, therefore they don't exist. These days it's easy to point at things like the rise of social media and the rapid dissemination of trivia, but that isn't evidence of a reduction of big ideas. It's just that the signal/noise ratio is particularly bad if you stick to the regular old internet.
Look deeper.
Since many people who posted here did not bother to read the article, and just read the title like good time conservative Americans would do, I will point out that the title is a little misleading. The author is not asserting that there are no good ideas to be had but rather that the body of people willing and/or capable of contributing to the development of those ideas is dwindling at a time when our population is growing more rapidly due to advances in communications, transportation, medicine and other technological fields. The ever growing amount of distractions presented by consumerist popular culture don't stop people from thinking, or exhibiting intelligent behavior, most people are just too distracted by entertainment or the rigors of working to survive to contribute to the communal consciences in the form of relevant ideas that impact large numbers of people for the "better". The issue we are presented is that problems are evident but large portions of the population have been lead to believe that they are too disenfranchised to even make an iota of a difference in any of these issues, so they have fallen into the realm of apathy for lack of affecting mechanisms (capital, organization, policy).
His point is that corporations are making mostly evolutionary improvements while governments are doing the revolutionary/breakthrough stuff, which has a poor ROI (pharmaceuticals being an obvious exception - they've got enough money to dump billions of dollars and years of time into research).
The billionaire space adventure companies and Tesla Motors have only made evolutionary changes to existing tech. Heck, a gearhead with a six-figure budget could have easily built the Tesla Roadster in his garage using off-the-shelf parts.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The problem is, nobody wants to knowingly take any sort of risk. Implementing a Big Idea usually involves going out on a limb to a certain extent. If you take a "brave decision" and it goes pear-shaped you'll have inquiries/reviews/committees/auditors sifting through the wreckage with 20/20 hindsight and the clear knowledge that witch hunters won't get employed again unless they turn up a few pointy hats. Of course, if you're high enough up the greasy pole then all that means is you'll only get a 6-digit bonus this year or, at worst, will have to resign and spend a decent interval pruning your roses until another directorship comes along - but hey, all suffering is relative and they seem to think its a big deal. If you're lower down the pecking order, though, you're scapegoat material, and mistakes are not an option.
And of course, he who makes no mistakes, makes nothing.
However, politics would benefit from a few less Big Ideas (like Capitalism, The Market, Socialism, Libertarianism) - a bit more emphasis on tailoring solutions to problems based on evidence and critical reason and a bit less time thumbing through Karl Marx or Adam Smith in search of a one-size-fits-nobody solution.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
perhaps big, bold new ideas in terms of the current worldview and paragdim are indeed a bit thin on the ground.
but there is some very radical new thinking starting to appear right now, which is conducted from the post-rational perspectives that are starting to appear at the leading edge of culture. by "post-rational", i don't mean "irrational", but rather of a higher order of cognitive complexity than that required for basic rational thinking.
not only are integral perspectives sufficiently radical to turn the thinking of the current paradigm on it's head, they are starting to become increasingly visible in the success stories of the world. why is apple so successful? why did facebook's specific information architecture take the world by storm?
because integral perspectives are of a different paradigm to the prevailing (post enlightenment) worldview, they aren't generally visible though. you won't see them in the mainstream, in the status quo, or in the universities, any more than during the age of the enlightenment you would go to church to hear the leading edge scientific thinking.
anyone interested in integral, i'd recommend checking out "a theory of everything" by ken wilbur.
phil
40 years ago Alex Toffler coined the Third Wave of the knowledge industry, following manufacturing and agriculture. It is unclear whether there anything to follow the third wave.
The main problem with this idea (other than the fact that it is a paradoxically self-defeating idea) is that they are comparing modern popular culture with past intellectual culture.
Do they not remember a not so distant time when "nerd" and "geek" were insults in mainstream culture? Computer geeks only get any respect today because they make the wheels turn for everyone else. It's the same sort of respect a airplane pilot or train conductor gets.
My grandfather had to defy his father in order to graduate from high school because his father felt that much education was useless...the past is full of such stories that just get forgotten with the passage of time.
In any case, what this writer is observing is a sort of Jevons Paradox for information. As the efficiency of exchanging information electronically has increased, it has become more and more heavily used...and in particular it is being used for more and more things that would have not been worthwhile when efficiency was lower (and therefore the cost higher). As one might expect, most of the things that would not be worthwhile at a high cost are not particularly worthwhile. Usually it's because the information has little to no practical or intellectual value ("I'm eating a delicious sandwich"), but it can also be because the idea is unpolished and unready.
This second case really changes our perception of the emergence of world-changing ideas even in intellectual circles. In the olden days, a new idea would seemingly emerge fully formed from out of the blue. One day you open the paper and there's an article on this newfangled "airplane" thing that just made its first flight yesterday in North Carolina. Perhaps instead you walk into a bookstore and at the recommendation of one of your friends you pick up copy of this Nietzsche guy's book. For most consumers of ideas in this era, there's a clear dividing line between the world before the idea and the world after. However, for the originator of the idea there's not such a clear line. Big ideas have long private and semi-public histories before they reached their final public form. In the electronic age, we are more likely to be privy to this long history. When the big breakthrough happens we're much less likely to realize its importance, because its really just an incremental but important step up from what we knew before. In this way, even highly intelligent people can miss big changes as they occur. Instead, we usually notice years later...when we wake up one morning and HOLY SHIT THERE'S A ROBOT CLEANING MY FLOOR.
It'll be interesting to look back and see which big ideas stand the test of time. There's a good chance it will be the ideas of intellectuals that few people know about or take seriously today, like this guy: http://marshallbrain.com/ or this guy http://www.peoplescapitalism.org/
Those are some pretty big ideas if you ask me...
The changes in culture and the rise of extreme consumerism are having very similar changes to ideas AND imagination. (they are not the same but are close enough to be equally harmed.) My mother was an art teacher, she's seen the huge plunge in imagination over the decades -- you don't get that many good ideas without imagination; in fact, all studies show that students with art education (the old kind) do better in other topics-- the well rounded mind does do better.
However, we are now undermining that as well. Art is being turned into a standards testing gig and a cover for helping do the other subjects; they've taken art out of art. Soon, money and lack of peripheral benefits will eliminate art programs. People won't be clever enough to realize why it changed; even more likely, they'll just assume it has always been that way and never investigate if it was any different.
We have increasing numbers of entering college students who do not even have the elementary skill of discriminating between fact and opinion! How is such a person going to even START to investigate anything further? Its like trying to get a Rush or Fox viewer to read...
Customization technology is giving us the ability to live inside a bubble where all unpleasant thoughts are filtered out. Just the hint of some disruptive idea and it gets filtered out and the mind's defenses are deployed. The geometry problem that starts to look like it will undermine your belief in a FLAT earth is just a trick for some crazy liberal with their round earth conspiracy promoting their disturbing opinions so they can change your way of live (which is better than theirs.) Oh, and its politically incorrect to upset anybody...
Good ideas should shake things up a bit; they require some imagination to even realize the possibilities involved-- which are often upsetting in many ways; the more touchy you are the sooner your ego will jump in to defend you with mindless rationalizations (and if you can't tell fact from opinion you'll have a hell of a time defeating your natural illogical defenses.)
This is also why democracy does not work. The culture has to be healthy for its democracy to be healthy; essentially, the democratic government reflects the people and rather than see it as some removed mythical creation (as many do today) it should be seen as a manifestation of the social development of the society. A really complex survey/study in people's collective decision making. (yeah, today's system is broken; it is our collective fault... the reasons Americans are so big on responsibility and accountability is because they are over compensating for their lack of it. They are in denial.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
That's not really true. There are people working on those things, but nobody cares because most people don't have any money.
I can't even imagine what it's like for a 22 year old graduate hoping for a future.
You make it sound like it is the end of the world. It isn't. What a 22-year old young grad should expect for a future depends on
1. What he/she did in HS (yes, it does count),
2. what discipline the youngling is graduating from. Sad but true (not to mention that a 4-year college experience is not necessarily the right thing for everyone),
3. what he/she has done through college (just take courses VS taking courses beyond the curriculum + networking + looking for internships (specially this) + study-related part time jobs at college),
4. GPA (yes, it does count),
5. went to community college first as opposed to go straight to college and was willing to leave with parents as much as possible vs racking up an additional $25-$35K (or even more) on loans just to be on a dorm on a 4-year college more often than not needlessly far away.
6. willing/unwilling to go to grad school either directly off undergrad school or on a part-time basis while working full-time
7. has not racked up unnecessary debt through college, and lives under a budget, driving a beat-up car, living in a hole in a wall until he/she saves at least 1 year of salary (or reduces his/her student loans by at least a 1/3), OR racks up the credit cards to get an expensive car (or some other unnecessary things), leaving beyond his/her means. *
It has been true before, it is true now, and it will be true again. In education and college experience, you get what you put in.
* Regarding #7, I speak from experience since I was very guilty of that in my youth (in addition to several others in this list.) If you live wrong through college, you will have a bleak prospect even when the economy is booming. Live intelligent, and a 22-year old recent graduate will do fine, if not great, even in this economy.
It is bad out there, but it is not the end of times. It will be pretty f* up if we do stupid shit with our education and finances.
Oh, one last thing. Constant distraction is indeed a bad thing for deep thought, but this isn't really a difficult problem to solve. One simply needs to cut down on the distractions. Go somewhere quiet and unplug nearly all forms of communication. Only leave open one channel of communication (if that) and only give it to people who can be trusted to only contact you that way if it is truly important. For most people the world isn't going to stop because they're not there to keep it turning (or at the very least there are regular times in the day where your absence will not be critical).
There are some very important jobs that require you to be in constant connection with the rest of the world. If you get into one of those careers, don't expect to think deeply very much. If deep intellectual thought is important to you, then you should consider getting a different job. This is one of several reasons I gave up on a career as a system administrator.
How sad. Literary intellectuals Krugman, et al ... can't get any attention despite the fact that they have solutions for all of our problems.
They have done so much for our civilization : if only we had listened to our very educated denizens from the worlds best educational institutions, we might have avoided the world-wide depression, massive failure of the banks, bankruptcy of nations, and failure of every single gov-based institutions, e.g. science funding (global warming advocates don't support research which could disprove their positions, high-energy physicists won't support research into 'cold fusion'), the FDA becoming protector of the US's domestic drug manufacturers, the dept of agriculture pushing gasohol, ... And, of course, we would have avoided all of the recent wars had we listened to their excellent foreign policy advice.
We might have heeded their advice to reduce costs of college, so the current generation isn't burdened with debt in a time of no jobs. You all read all of those warnings from our intellectual elite, right?
Right. They are just another interest group sucking off the public tit, hoping that the NYTimes can stay in business to publish opinion pieces like this.
Progressives in both parties have a lot to answer for.
"The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."
I think the article, and the general sense in American culture now, is that technology has engendered a sort of "fast food" mentality towards information. The firehose of bullshit that comes through our phones and computers has led to a "least common denominator" cultural context that we now live in, whereby any intelligent, thoughtful discussion is steamrolled over by angry political rants and "keeping up with the Joneses" ala web 2.0, and instant everything. This is probably the best line from TFA: "We prefer knowing to thinking because knowing has more immediate value."
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Its probably already patented. If not, some corporation will claim it infringes with their generic "do anything on the Internet" patent and haul me in to court for the rest of my life.
Have gnu, will travel.
I think it's the opposite. We have so many ideas that we don't recognize them anymore. We have more people on earth, a greater percentage of those people is educated, involved in science, technology, or other sources of big ideas. In centuries past, when somebody wrote a book, it was a Big Thing. Nowadays, thousands of books are published every day. Any one of them could hold some big ideas, but no book is read by everybody, and we're too spread out to let any one idea get a significant impetus. But below the surface, some ideas still grow, and suddenly erupt, and then everybody wonders where it's coming from.
The big ideas of today are mostly about democratization. About getting stuff done without needing big corporations or governments. Look at the open source movement, MythTV, CyanogenMod, musicians, writers and others publishing their work without help from record labels and publishers, crowd-sourcing/crowd-funding stuff that used to require big studios and deep pockets, Wikipedia, organizations like WikiLeaks, Anonymous and Lulzsec taking on really big opponents in ways nobody considered possible, revolts in northern Africa fueled partially by social networks, etc.
From the article
"It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy."
They have a point. And it's a real problem, because when some new problem comes along, society seems unable to deal with it.
Consider the current messes. Nobody in public life expresses a good understanding of the current economic situation. The political consensus is "it's just a big recession". It might be a permanent situation. (Japan had a real estate crash in 1989, and neither real estate nor the stock market ever came back. To some extent, the current US model of capitalism is broken, yet nobody is proposing a better model. (Should we have a tax model that doesn't favor debt so much? The US taxes companies' dividends but not interest paid on debt, stock buybacks, or executive compensation. As a result, most companies don't pay dividends and borrow too much.)
In the 1930s, it was very different. All sorts of big ideas were proposed to deal with the Great Depression. Some of them were nutty, like Technocracy. Some of them were implemented, like the Works Progress Administration. It was a tough time, but the problems were discussed and solutions tried.
There's a fundamental assumption that economic growth will continue. That may be incorrect. Looking ahead, we have big issues. Some major natural resources run out in the next few decades. There's no cheap source of energy even being seriously talked about. No new source of energy has been developed in the last 50 years. (Nuclear reactors and solar cells are now more than 50 years old.) Demand is going up as China modernizes. Now what? We have no clue how to run a post-oil world with 6 billion people. World oil production peaked in 2005.
At venture capital conferences, I'm not seeing new great ideas. More like endless me-too presentations. (Way too much "social networking". I've seen a pitch for a social network for cats.)
We're seeing regression in developed countries. Israel used to be a modern country dominated by kibbutzim with a strong work ethic, the people who "made the desert bloom". Now, Israeli politics is dominated by the religious right (the "ultra-orthodox"), who are a welfare-supported dead weight on the country. The Islamic world's religious right is at least as bad. (It's amusing to observe how much the Jewish and Islamic right wings resemble each other. Oppress women, check. Anti-education, check. Anti-progress, check. Old Testament mindset, check. Old guys in black with beards in charge, check.)
and there is the rise of an increasingly visual culture, especially among the young â" a form in which ideas are more difficult to express.
While I agree that there is a dearth of visually-oriented critical thinking pieces out there, I think it may simply be that we have not yet adapted to the new media. It used to be difficult for Joe Thinker to put out something with a significant visual component, so most critical thinking has been focused on prose. You can, however, go at least as far back as Tufte, or as recent as Lessig and TED, to find that people are putting critical thinking into visual forms.
So while the article may be right, I think the message that we (critical thinkers) should take from it is that we need to put some effort into the visual component to remain fresh and expressive in tomorrow's world.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Most people have not cared about new big ideas throughout history.
Well, maybe, and maybe not. I think you might be surprised at how widespread Enlightenment ideas were in Europe. Faraday used to give public scientific demonstrations that were widely attended. However, what matters I think more is that the elites of our society, those who make the important decisions are increasingly seeing the world through dollar signs. The Public Interest is less important to them, and private interest is their dominant concern. They backhandedly acknowledge the Public Interest by saying that it is served by everyone acting in their own private interests. This is a profound shift from the Enlightenment approach, that led to the rise of our modern democratic systems. Enlightenment philosophes like Locke, Rousseau, and Voltaire tried to balance the Public and private interests; they believed in liberty and justice for all members of society. Today, politics seems to be an exercise in maximizing the gross national product.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
The way in which the author is comparing now with history gives history a huge advantage. The chances of today being as good as your best day is small, because the past contains more days. So on any day I could write a "today is dead" article as long as today isn't my best day ever, and I could do that for any day in the past.
There is an elegant way around this skewing of perspective: Make the comparisons proportional. If we compare today with a day before, and then look ahead to a day after, today is rarely dead. It is usually much like yesterday, and most days are the same. No drama, no article.
Now expand "day" to "50 years" for the purpose of this article. Comparing the big ideas between 1910 and 1960 with those between 1961 and 2010, and then looking ahead to the next 50 years, I find it is extremely difficult to be pessimistic. Rather, one could easily argue they are getting bigger. And that would be an article more worthy of a read.
A widely held prejudice this, that ideas are somehow created by our arrogant selves. There's another side to reality, the inner. Is it all that unbelievable that, being more and more enticed and accustomed to interact one with the other, we leave unexercised that other organ, the one dealing with that other side, the abstract, well structured and beautifully ordered? Again, we should acqaint ourselves with this http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/05/10/1008636108.full.pdf
I wouldn't call that a small idea (on the other hand, there are you "young people" who can't seem to think of anything more exciting than 3D movies on your 'pods...)
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
of NYT to confess their own marching orders
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Tell that to National Geographic... where I read most of what I wrote.
Guess they're the chemical brothers, troll.
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
Big ideas are happening all the time, but you can't look for them in all the old places and expect to find anything. We're making huge advances in neuroscience that are completely revolutionizing the way we look at the human mind. We're finding novel ways to collect energy, discovering new ways of communicating that are having powerful societal effects, making advances in artificially intelligent machines, moving the power of manufacturing into our homes with the promise of 3D-printing, building autonomous vehicles, putting space travel into the reach of civilians, changing our genes, developing regenerative medicine technologies, and on and on and on...
Oh, and BY THE WAY, Pedantic Pete... Chemical resistance to DDT by mosquitoes happened in areas where DDT was used in FARMING. There IS no chemical resistance when DDT is used to fight malaria... because it doesn't take a HUGE dose of DDT to protect people FROM malaria (Ecuador, when it increased DDT usage malaria rates went DOWN 60%. And places where DDT was curtailed? MALARIA RATES WENT UP, sparky.)
DDT is STILL the leading help in combating malaria in the REAL world... not fucking mosquito nets. Next time you start ranting about chemicals, Mr. EDF... take some Drano. Do the world a favor.
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
Or is this article entirely backwards from reality? There is something inverse about this idea about ideas.
Fiat Homos et Pereat Theos
I wrote the “Kernel of Truth” comment, but I didn’t realize I wasn’t logged in. In any case, I think I can make my point more concisely after a few moments of thought.
I’m not sure Gabler is saying that we live in a time where there are no big ideas. I think he is saying that big ideas are increasingly irrelevant in the public consciousness. The general populace is no longer ‘fed’ big ideas and as a result the category of thought is easily drowned out in a deluge of small ideas, gossip, and conspicuous consumption. Big ideas may still be happening, but they are no longer of any importance to the average citizen the way the Apollo program was important to its epoch. New inventions may become the next iPad, but they don’t spark the imagination the way the ‘home of the future’ did.
There are a lot of implications to this kind of change, not the least of which are political, but that’s a whole other topic. To reiterate, I think Gabler has a point, but it’s a very easy to misinterpret his point to mean that big ideas are themselves becoming scarce.
PS The Slashdot community is not a good measuring stick of the public consciousness. Just because you and your peeps still like and know about big ideas, doesn’t mean that is statistically typical.
Can we finally move on to a post post society? Declaring ourselves Post X is so passe and it gives us so many excuses to just stop trying.
We all need to apply our intellect towards something to self actualize.
In the old days when little could be done, you philosophized.
Now that so much can be done, we mostly do stuff.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
"Everything that can be invented has been invented." ~Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. patent office, 1899
5. went to community college first as opposed to go straight to college and was willing to leave
with parents as much as possible vs racking up an additional $25-$35K (or even more) on loans just to be on a dorm on a 4-year college more often than not needlessly far away.
Maybe it's worthwhile to save the commute and spend the extra time studying grammar?
I kid. 4-year colleges don't teach grammar anymore either.
In any event, it seems that a grammar error is all required to invalidate an argument. Me no know grammar, but me knows the logic do not work like that. Likey forkie? Likey knifey?
What can I say? as a non-native English speaker, I still mix a and an, even after using English for 18 years. Or you can scratch that out as a/an typing error made in jets in a forum in the interweebz (OH NOES, TEH LOLCATS!!). Either way, here is a cookie, a trophy for your nomination for the Interweebz Nazi Gramm3r awards.
Then explain the popularity of TED. Explain the Maker Fairs. Explain the continuing development of computer software and media from the home.
This idiot snob from the NYT (But I repeat myself) is acting as if these things need to show up in the Legacy Media to be considered "popular."
Has it ever occurred to him that he might not be looking in the right places?
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
Yes -- Slashdot has far and away the best system for moderating comments, and all web sites should adopt it! I would mod you up above Score:5 if I could. (Maybe the upper limit of 5 is a flaw in the system.)
I bet many Slashdot users aren't even aware that you can see a sweet summary of all your comments, and how many replies each has received, by going to http://slashdot.org/~insert_your_User_ID_here/comments. That summary really facilitates the exchange of ideas.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
It's not just nostalgia or some historical distortion that things were different between the two world wars... cafes were abuzz with conversation about this very stuff. Not everyone had an opinion about all of it, but everyone did have an opinion about some of it
And you know this because you were alive and frequenting cafes in 1930?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
The big ideas happen once, maybe twice in a generation
I can think of three specific really big sci/tech ideas in the last 100 years:
* the Double-helix model of DNA (Watson and Crick, 1953)
* General relativity (Einstein, 1916)
* the Transistor (Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley, 1947)
(Am I missing any?)
Everything since then has been either a smaller idea, or an evolutionary refinement of one of these big ideas. We're about due for another big idea, don't you think?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
T.S.Eliot wrote (in a play about religious decline, in 1933):
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
Which is pretty much the tl;dr of TFA.
I had a great idea once, but it turned out that implementing it required assembling numerous parts, 160 of which were each similar enough to about 160 different patents. I am confident that if I had opted to fight the patents in court, I could have defeated 159, if not all of the patent infringment claims, but I ran of money to pay the lawyers. Now I'm in debt, and my idea hasn't made me any money or even been offered capital investment (because no one wants to touch me for fear of the cost litigation).
Full disclaimer, I am making this up, but it's still totally true.
We're not in a "post-idea" world, we are in a world where ideas are heavily discouraged from being capitalized-on. Unless, that is, you work for a major corporation where your idea can be arbitrarily exploited by upper management with minimal compensation or remittance, arbitrarily have its development canceled and locked in a safe until after you have retired, or arbitrarily marketed to the wrong audience only to be declared that your idea was actually never very profitable. And by arbitrarily, I mean "depending on what Steve Jobs is doing today."
AI, robots, nanotechnology, and genetic therapies will change mankind's future at least as much as electricity, transportation, and communication changed it in the past.
I would also say that the full societal implications of the Internet are just now beginning to appear. It's hard to tell now, in the moment, but the truth is that global societies have already changed dramatically since the Web was launched in 1992. I would argue for the better.
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.