Today’s Innovations Are Tomorrow’s Baseline | Hacker News Reader

Today’s Innovations Are Tomorrow’s Baseline

collaborativefund.com

51 pointsFigBug9 comments

While teaching entrepreneurship, I pointed out that since people don't try to make the world worse, many problems today started out as solutions.

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

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

I think it might be a little more nuanced than that. While I'll agree that most people aren't in the business of making the world actively worse, neither are they in the business of making the world better* . Therefore, a lot of problems today are caused by half-measures and optimization of metrics with questionable correlation to the betterment of things, rather than just 'solutions' of a general form. This also doesn't include the subset of problems that are deliberately introduced in order to create business.

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* according to some definitions of 'worse' and 'better'. The debate on which could render both of these comments meaningless with out consent on something operational.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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