Hacker News Reader

Comment by glhaynes | Hacker News Reader

Innovation is generally not accelerated by people that are comfortable/have all of their basic needs met.

Really? We could certainly come up with stories of great innovation being done by uncomfortably poor people, but I bet if we came up with a list of 100 innovators, at least 80 of them would be from middle-class-plus homes and could almost surely have gotten any number of comfortable-enough jobs doing something un-innovative.

(Edit: which isn't at all to say that non-poor people are more innovative. Just that people who aren't in poverty are far more likely to have the chance for their innovativeness to have a broad public impact.)

View on HN

You're right, but I would retort that not all innovations are created equal.

Example: The French artisans, the middle class of their time, created wonderful toys for the gentry but almost none of their wonderfully intricate work had any impact on the Industrial Revolution in Britain, while a handful of illiterate working class types turned the Roman water wheel on its side and massively improved mechanical power production.

Their work would have been seen as obscene by the artisans but it was fundamentally more important.

There is a wonderful 1973 documentary by Jacob Bronowski on this topic:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x206z0e_bbc-ascent-of-man-0...

Anybody can be 'possessed' by an idea, but it is clear that Silicon Valley has too many smart and well educated people wasting their time on trifles, their choices significantly retard what ought to be natural advantages.

Most important thing anyone can do is to choose their environment carefully e.g. having the right mentor, role models, choosing the right problem.

>Anybody can be 'possessed' by an idea, but it is clear that Silicon Valley has too many smart and well educated people wasting their time on trifles, their choices significantly retard what ought to be natural advantages.

Look, I like criticizing Silicon Valley for its ad-dollar silliness as much as anyone else, but that's fundamentally down to what VCs and angel investors are willing to fund. Everyone would work on Mars colonization, self-driving cars, and artificial intelligence if they could. Nobody pays you for that, though.

That has something to do with it.

However I notice we have a lot of billionaires and millionaires in comparison to the former centuries. Not many Renaissance Men or aristocratic scholar-patrons (think Lord Asriel from HDM) though. The groups aren't special either. The modern cliques of the rich and powerful I see today are pathetic in comparison to the likes of the Royal Society or the Lunar Society.

Imagination and implementation of the new is hard, but is also a cultural issue. Today I think many people are convinced the low hanging fruit is picked and what remains is the difficult stuff that shall require large sums of capital and decade long education to solve for X.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com