Comment by jandrewrogers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jandrewrogers | Hacker News Reader

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I made this assumption for many years, and yes, that cost would be high. I eventually discovered that, more often than not, everyone assumed that someone must have already investigated a particular hypothesis but if you tried to identify that "someone" it turned out that they didn't actually exist. After doing this exhaustive search a few times in a few different domains and coming up empty handed, it changed my perspective on the matter, to my great benefit.

Searching for evidence that someone has actually done the work is relatively efficient. It never fails to astonish me the number of times that everyone believes a particular bit of ground has been thoroughly tread yet, if I try to find concrete evidence that someone has done the work, there is no evidence that anyone actually has. There is a strong cognitive bias (I don't know if it has a name) where everyone assumes that someone else has already tried every obvious or reasonable approach and that belief is treated as factual.

>if I try to find concrete evidence that someone has done the work, there is no evidence that anyone actually has

Unfortunately, the fact that negative results tend to get little if any publicity works against you here. And it's probably worse outside, not inside of academia. How often would a project team in some big company, or a couple of guys in a garage try out some promising alternative approach to something, fail to realize an advantage over the conventional approach, and then go out of their way to publicize that failure? That would be extra work for no - or even negative - gain.

It might just be meant to be humorous, but even "If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence you even tried" sounds more likely than "If at first you don't succeed, put some extra effort into telling everyone".

Would you be willing to give an example of an area where it was widely thought that "someone" had already checked all the obvious possibilities, but you were able to find an obvious possibility that actually hadn't been explored?

I think you're arguing for doing surveys of literature, which I would also argue for. My argument was against the veneration of From First Principles, which is largely incompatible with Maybe Someone Already Did That, More Completely, More Correctly, A Long Time Ago, And It's Easy To Check First.

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