Comment by zkmon
4 hours ago
You can't turn a blind eye to the natural saturation of need vs solutions, and derive unlimited optimism from the fact how the people were wrong when they said "everything is already done".
You can't see ideas as some isolated objects that can come into existence on their own. The overall ecosystem breeds the ideas. The forces of demand create the supply chain. Human need funds the solutions. Peace times, plenty of food give the time and effort needed for inventions. If Europe has all the science going on in the 17-19th centuries, it is not because only Europe has best minds. Europe has the people with free time, food and riches to afford the science work.
You can't ignore the overall context of the world around you. You can't keep selling infinite ideas. You can't feed infinite amount of sugar to a person. The so-called solutions can turn toxic, dangerous, and unwanted things. Some ideas might be just be a package of problem and solution packed together. When you buy the solution, you receive the problem as well, which didn't exist earlier.
>You can't keep selling infinite ideas.
You cannot sell ideas at all. That is how it should be. Patents cover methods, copyright covers things made. Ideas should always be free.
I do think it is possible to for ideas to be infinite/
>You can't feed infinite amount of sugar to a person.
No, but you can give them all that they want or need. Once that is fulfilled perhaps they might want or need something else.
Maybe someone should research the idea that there might be a heirachy of needs where once one is satisfied, It causes a higher level of desire.
Perhaps it might get quite sophisticated as you go up.
Where is the evidence of saturation of need? Most of the big problems remain unsolved in medicine, biology, chemistry, physics, and engineering. Even if we eliminated war, poverty, authoritarianism, and economic instability, we would still have more problems to solve.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/06/peak-population-projectio...
Infrastructure been built out with endless growth in mind.
Unless birth rates rebound, and if population does decline by 4-5 billion over 40-50 years we have more infra than necessary that will just crumble and rot and burn up more resources to maintain
Perhaps you meant saturation of individual needs. That’s harder to understand because such varies and not everyone agrees what are legit specific needs.
But generally we won't need more big infrastructure to account for fewer people actually needing
Your last paragraph loses me. Agree that "infinite ideas" is as flippant as "everything is already done". Context is vital. But for every thing that turns toxic and unwanted doesn't that create the opportunity space for corrective measures? We're fucking up our climate and I am not uber accelerationist but the problem very much creates opportunity-space to contribute to the solution.
> When you buy the solution, you receive the problem as well, which didn't exist earlier.
Are you proposing stasis? Anti-growth? The problem with that is that growth is life. I don't see any realistic way that slowing growth makes sense. Not when our reality is biology.
> Peace times, plenty of food give the time and effort needed for inventions.
It's not obvious why peace would be a necessary ingredient. There's plenty of evidence to the contrary from the last few big wars humans engaged in.
It's pretty obvious why peace is a necessary ingredient, firstly the breadth of invention in peace time is wider.
In peace time people invent things for peace and for war, in war time the focus is all on inventing things for war. Screw everything else.
Later on, after the war is over, it may turn out many of the things that were invented for war may also have uses for peace, this however is perhaps not always the case. I don't think the inventions of the first world war that spring first to my mind had a lot of utility beyond war.
The second obvious reason why peace would be a necessary ingredient is the cause of all that inventiveness around creating things for war, it's because in war you are in danger all the time of being killed, which is why when you are not hiding somewhere trying not to be killed you are trying to make things to kill the other guy because if you kill the other guy they can't kill you. If you get killed however, that will be a big dampener on your ingenuity.
Some people might think differently about this state of war, because of historical blindness and the inefficiencies of the English language. If a country is big and powerful enough it can go to war elsewhere, and never have the war touch it.
This is not really war as it has been known in most of the history of humanity, but we call it war. It is really a time of peace in the homeland, and distributed external war.
And in this time of peace in the homeland, people can work peacefully without fear of being killed, and then people who think that this is war say - hey, check it out, peace is not needed for invention and progress at all!
Primarily because war reduces access to certain goods. Certain ideas that could work, need to be tossed due to the war's needs or effects on goods/services.
Much of human innovation arises out of leisure interests where no immediate demand or need exists. Mathematics for example initially arised out of people with leisure time who found some hobby to do.
Think about it. Math is a hobby, practically useless. But it benefited humanity with side effects like engineering and computers.
Now to your point. Because math is initially a pretty useless endeavor it can only arise as a leisure hobby. A leisure hobby can only arise in people who have tons of leisure time and have no need to fight for survival. Thats why peace time is important.
But do those outnumber the "Einstein being bored as patent clerk" type situations? How many bright minds people died as children or soldiers in those wars? Does war spur inventions, or does it concentrate forces and effort to put things into production that were invented by minds that had to have some peace, sleep and food, at some point, to come up with the kernels of what the war machinery turns into weapons and supplies?
It's probably a bit of both, IMO. I don't doubt that pressure and threats to survival can also make people snap out of ruts they have been in, and look for something beyond what they already know. But I still would say you can have inventions without war, but you cannot have them when there is nothing but war. And my argument would be that the extreme of that would be someone who gets screamed at and beaten from the moment they were born, and lives in constant state of war. They will not be able to find the rest and perspective to invent things, they may not even survive.
There’s also huge demand for creating unneeded solutions and making those solutions viable.
The only way to make unneeded solutions viable is to make them needed, so there is huge effort and industries in manufacturing need where need previously never existed. That is modern society for you today.
Take a look at advertising for example.
> If Europe has all the science going on in the 17-19th centuries, it is not because only Europe has best minds. Europe has the people with free time, food and riches to afford the science work.
You are talking about a period in history when children were worked to death in mines. When working people in city lived in unimaginably horrible conditions, barely any education, lack of hygiene, 12- to 16-hour work days, flats without windows. A period with horrible wars. A period when Europe build its wealth through the blood and suffering of the global south, by colonization.
It is absolutely crazy that you talk about it as a peaceful time. No, the vast majority had vastly less time than they had in the "dark" medieval times. And it was much, much bloodier.
So what happened? The Industrial Revolution and with it a new economic order: free market capitalism
If you pay people by the hour, you are interested in them working efficiently. You will come up with technical means to increase their productivity.
You can gain a competitive advantage by technological innovation in a free market that has competition.
That is why science exploded. Out for necessity. There was a need. There was a profit to be made.
This is also why progress is now stagnating in the age of big monopoly capitalism. And no, we can't ever go back to free market capitalism. Certain industries simply need a certain scale that makes it not compatible with it. You can't build a startup training the next cutting-edge LLM model.
We will see a lot of progress once we move beyond our current economic system.
The Renaissance predates colonization.
OP specified 17th to 19th century though.
Also we absolutely see the beginnings of colonization during the Renaissance era. Arguably in 1492 with Columbus "discovering" America.
So not sure what your point is.
> This is also why progress is now stagnating
What? Progress is now stagnating?
> "You can't build a startup training the next cutting-edge LLM model"
Again, what? That's exactly how ChatGPT and Claude were created. And many other startups with targeted models like ElevenLabs.
> once we move beyond our current economic system
If it's one of the other systems tried before, "progress" will not be on the menu.