Comment by Nevermark
3 hours ago
I took humans thousands of years, then hundreds of years, to come to terms with very basic concepts about numbers.
Its amazing to me when people talk about recombining things, or following up on things as somehow lesser work.
People can't separate the perspective they were given when they learned the concepts, that those who developed the concepts didn't have because they didn't exist.
Simple things are hard, or everything simple would have been done hundreds of years ago, and that is certainly not the case. Seeing something others have not noticed is very hard, when we don't have the concepts that the "invisible" things right in front of us will teach us.
Anyone in the arts is aware that creativity is not the new, it is the repackaging of what already exists into something that is itself new.
Except for "Being John Malkovich". That movie was way out there on its own.
It's "just" a Man-vs-Self story, of the ~7 story archetypes out there.
It's why the invention of teaching has been so important. Took a long time for humans to develop calculus. A long time to then refine it and make it much more useful. But then in a year or two an average person can learn what took hundreds of years to invent. It's crazy to equate these tasks as being the same. Even incremental innovation is difficult. You have to see something billions of people haven't. But there's also paradigm shifts and well... if you're not considered crazy at first then did you really shift a paradigm?