The book <em>Sleeping Beauties</em> looks at everything—biology, skills, ideas—that lies latent.
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The power of dormant ideas
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Perhaps another take away: try and try again.
Perhaps a particular innovation failed previously not because it was flawed but it simply wasn't the right time (or perhaps place) for it.
An economist professor once told me that innovation typically takes place when something from one field (or industry) is applied to another.
Perhaps a particular innovation failed previously not because it was flawed but it simply wasn't the right time (or perhaps place) for it.
An economist professor once told me that innovation typically takes place when something from one field (or industry) is applied to another.
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To me it sounds like the question of whether mathematics is discovered or invented. Arguably the relationship, or isomorphism, between the disparate things was there all along, and it wasn't so much "thought up" as noticed.
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Having an innovative environment requires an institutional willingness to drop 'process' in favor of 'good idea' whenever the two collide with force. From where I sit at my employer I've watched a lot of imaginative plans be rejected out of hand by the people who invented them because they can't let themselves dream of anything without the prospect of selling their idea to a gauntlet of stakeholders. A lot of energy has been spent on trying to create a "good ideas assembly line", like Agile practices in software dev, but the adherence to ritual demanded by those approaches is itself a suppressant to the spirit of invention. The result is that most innovation you find in the world is incremental in scale. That's not a bad thing by itself - there's something to be said for constant iteration - but it certainly is frustrating for the impatient among us with little respect for The Way Things Are.
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I cannot tell you how much this reference warms my heart. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is genuinely wonderful.
Neat review, I'm intrigued.
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ThatGuyFromEarth
Ars Praetorian
I get the part about innovations "waiting for a time and place suitable for them to take hold"...
I've always been somewhat of an inventor and as a kid living in a world without a practical internet of any sort, I thought that my innovative solutions to fixing things and solving problems was special, but eventually I'd find that a tool I made, a mechanism I cobbled together or whatever solution to a problem I came up with already existed outside of my immediate ability to find that item or identify that concept... it's great that you can do it independently and think these things up on your own, but it was disappointing to eventually find out someone either did it first or long after you forgot about it or more or less simultaneously created an actual product that was sort of identical... and even when it was a unique or clever solution or invention, the other thing is that the world in general doesn't value problem solving or thoughtful design.
Eventually you realize that without a way of boldly marketing something, its pretty much just something you made to solve your problem and that's it... it never goes beyond you.
On top of that, society in general is far more appreciative of the the guy who says "we need a thing to make nails go into wood... make me something that does that", than the person who invents the actual hammer for him.
For every genius out there that is credited with being a maverick innovator, there are countless actually talented and creative people who actually create and refine what that individual sort of incoherently dreamed up... and I think that's a big part of why innovations often take a while to land too.
Then there is deliberately holding back innovation... Think of how many companies sit on the inventions and ideas of their employees waiting for existing patents to expire or existing technologies to become worn out economically before they move to replace it.
I don't know about the advice from Wagner to would-be innovators... knowing what the world wants or needs is actually often kind of irrelevant... in practice... mostly "the world" doesn't know or care about what it wants or needs, and is far more interested in being told what it wants and needs by people who don't actually care if it's needed or wanted, just that they can sell whatever it is to them for a substantial profit and insure that the particular thing becomes a perceived necessity until it is either used up, antiquated or no longer sustainable.
I've always been somewhat of an inventor and as a kid living in a world without a practical internet of any sort, I thought that my innovative solutions to fixing things and solving problems was special, but eventually I'd find that a tool I made, a mechanism I cobbled together or whatever solution to a problem I came up with already existed outside of my immediate ability to find that item or identify that concept... it's great that you can do it independently and think these things up on your own, but it was disappointing to eventually find out someone either did it first or long after you forgot about it or more or less simultaneously created an actual product that was sort of identical... and even when it was a unique or clever solution or invention, the other thing is that the world in general doesn't value problem solving or thoughtful design.
Eventually you realize that without a way of boldly marketing something, its pretty much just something you made to solve your problem and that's it... it never goes beyond you.
On top of that, society in general is far more appreciative of the the guy who says "we need a thing to make nails go into wood... make me something that does that", than the person who invents the actual hammer for him.
For every genius out there that is credited with being a maverick innovator, there are countless actually talented and creative people who actually create and refine what that individual sort of incoherently dreamed up... and I think that's a big part of why innovations often take a while to land too.
Then there is deliberately holding back innovation... Think of how many companies sit on the inventions and ideas of their employees waiting for existing patents to expire or existing technologies to become worn out economically before they move to replace it.
I don't know about the advice from Wagner to would-be innovators... knowing what the world wants or needs is actually often kind of irrelevant... in practice... mostly "the world" doesn't know or care about what it wants or needs, and is far more interested in being told what it wants and needs by people who don't actually care if it's needed or wanted, just that they can sell whatever it is to them for a substantial profit and insure that the particular thing becomes a perceived necessity until it is either used up, antiquated or no longer sustainable.
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I love it when someone from one field completely re-invents something well established in another field.. In this case he's more or less re-invented STS (science and technology studies), a mainstay of sociology for over 50 years.
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Of course there are also Sleeping Dragons -- that neutral mutation may prove baneful when the environment changes as well. Decades ago in the era of "six sigma" we realized the software we updated had more latent bugs than the ones we were injecting with the new code, so one could not get to the desired quality without hunting out bugs that had just never had the opportunity to be triggered yet, but were lying there in wait for the right inputs to emerge.
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A harmless pie
Ars Centurion
A lot of this tracks for me. Working on mobile VR projects, I have to work around the less capable hardware and shader model. I've always been interested in older rendering techniques so I watch tons of videos about PS1, Saturn, N64, and older PC games. If I hadn't needed to work around the hardware, that info wouldn't come in handy as it does super often. One example is manipulating transparency sorting to get effects that normally require a stencil buffer (no buffers with tiled forward rendering -sad face-), which let us see enemies through walls. Thanks necessity!
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This is my take on so called junk DNA. It is a library of potentially useful phenotypic mutations that could end up useful for the lineage when the environment changes.
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Plants can synthetise C4? There hasn't been news this explosive since the time I had that dodgy seafood!
That's fairly standard. Many times the actual workers are uncredited, as is common with manga. You see the name of the mangaka (main artist) in large print but never know who their assistants are.
Mangaka names can even be used to add credibility to something. For instance, in the hit app Bleach: Brave Souls, they occasionally have anniversary editions of characters that were "design supervised" by Tite Kubo, the original mangaka. However, they don't say who actually designed those outfits. How much input he actually gave for any individual design, no one knows.
It's the same with novels. The editors are silent collaborators. There are always the whispered stories that famous author so-and-so has amazing plots and ideas but can barely write coherent sentences and needs everything carefully sculpted by their editor(s). Of course, no one is going to admit to that publicly.
It's similar in films. Editors shape the final product but mostly you hear about actors and directors, or even executive producers! In this case, though, they do get credit.
Many people behave as if they believe Apple was run entirely by Steve Jobs and expect it to fall apart at any moment now that he's dead.
Perhaps it's because humans enjoy underdog stories. All Silicon Valley companies were started in garages. We like the idea of "The Power of One" that one individual person can do anything and change everything.
Or perhaps it's because we're mortal so we don't have the time to really see exactly how everything is made because it's just too many working parts.
I shall sleep on it.
That's fairly standard. Many times the actual workers are uncredited, as is common with manga. You see the name of the mangaka (main artist) in large print but never know who their assistants are.
Mangaka names can even be used to add credibility to something. For instance, in the hit app Bleach: Brave Souls, they occasionally have anniversary editions of characters that were "design supervised" by Tite Kubo, the original mangaka. However, they don't say who actually designed those outfits. How much input he actually gave for any individual design, no one knows.
It's the same with novels. The editors are silent collaborators. There are always the whispered stories that famous author so-and-so has amazing plots and ideas but can barely write coherent sentences and needs everything carefully sculpted by their editor(s). Of course, no one is going to admit to that publicly.
It's similar in films. Editors shape the final product but mostly you hear about actors and directors, or even executive producers! In this case, though, they do get credit.
Many people behave as if they believe Apple was run entirely by Steve Jobs and expect it to fall apart at any moment now that he's dead.
Perhaps it's because humans enjoy underdog stories. All Silicon Valley companies were started in garages. We like the idea of "The Power of One" that one individual person can do anything and change everything.
Or perhaps it's because we're mortal so we don't have the time to really see exactly how everything is made because it's just too many working parts.
I shall sleep on it.
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I figured all of this stuff out on my own, but dang now I come to find out that everyone else did too!
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I wish the claim that bacteria have always had antibiotic resistance was explained a bit more. I have a B. Sci. in biology and I'm pretty sure we learned that variations which have no effect on fitness don't get conserved, they change over time.
If he means they have resistance today because they had the ability to evolve yesterday I guess it becomes a kind of tautology? Could it be a claim of pre-existing metabolic pathways from non-pathogenic species having transferred horizontally into pathogens? That could make sense.
If he means they have resistance today because they had the ability to evolve yesterday I guess it becomes a kind of tautology? Could it be a claim of pre-existing metabolic pathways from non-pathogenic species having transferred horizontally into pathogens? That could make sense.
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The internet is quite the depressing reality check that way. Many's the time I've come up with what I thought was a clever observation, turn of phrase, pun, whatever, and run it by Google only to find that 200 people have already thought of it and are already selling the t-shirts.
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I think the metaphor does apply to art. People are constantly creating art, music, literature, etc., and it is very diverse. Whether it is considered great art, or even good, depends on cultural norms, people who know how to appreciate it and can communicate what they think is good about it, and a healthy amount of luck.
Also there is a continuum between cultural practices that have practical utility, such as linear algebra, and purely artistic or decorative practices. Much of mathematics was pursued as an art form for its own sake, and only later did it turn out that topology and group theory have practical applications. Architecture is both practical and artistic. Martial arts were developed to meet practical needs for self-defense, and then over time became an art form.
I haven't read the book, but its premise is intriguing and makes sense to me.
Also there is a continuum between cultural practices that have practical utility, such as linear algebra, and purely artistic or decorative practices. Much of mathematics was pursued as an art form for its own sake, and only later did it turn out that topology and group theory have practical applications. Architecture is both practical and artistic. Martial arts were developed to meet practical needs for self-defense, and then over time became an art form.
I haven't read the book, but its premise is intriguing and makes sense to me.
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A "cat's eye" is, according to Wiki
A cat's eye or road stud is a retroreflective safety device used in road marking
The man who invented it was walking home from the pub, and there along the road was a cat looking at him. He noticed that, when a car came from behind him, the cat's eyes lit up.
If the cat had been looking in the opposite direction, he would have invented the pencil sharpener.
A cat's eye or road stud is a retroreflective safety device used in road marking
The man who invented it was walking home from the pub, and there along the road was a cat looking at him. He noticed that, when a car came from behind him, the cat's eyes lit up.
If the cat had been looking in the opposite direction, he would have invented the pencil sharpener.
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I'm a business owner in retail and have been for awhile. Also interested in inventions and the like and an adage I personally ascribe to is: "ideas are shit, execution is king".
Every idea you have ever had someone else beat you to it, but that doesn't mean they were able to execute or as this book notes that the world was ready for that invention. A lot of people assume if their idea isn't perfectly novel that it's worthless because someone else already tried and failed with it, but again execution is what actually matters. Everyone has ideas.
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It makes sense that primates have repeatedly invented the wheel. It's not a wonderful scientific hypothesis, because it's hard to disprove or prove conclusively with observation. But it's plausible.
But the idea that somehow this time its invention is different, that the "world had caught up" to it, implies that we live in the ultimate world. It implies we live in the world that was always meant to be. This in turn implies that this wheel invention has now become permanent. It's fun to think this way--triumphalism rocks--but that's a time-scale category error. The kind of deep time where an invention like the wheel might have been repeatedly invented and then forgotten is not comparable to the perspective of the few millenia of recorded recent history. And it's a mistake to unquestioningly use the tools of recent history to examine it. It's the same error that leads to the ironic cartoon of the primate standing upright gradually, then slumping in a chair. Is the world progressing towards an ultimate goal? Ask the intelligent-design crowd that question if you want. For the rest of is it's a tacit assumption that probably obscures our perception.
Who's to say what history will look like 100K years from now? Will it be continuous? Or will some things have been forgotten and rediscovered?
Are the currently expressed human genes adaptive in the hundred-thousand-year long run? Obviously there's no way to know for sure. But there's no harm in thinking about this sort of question with less triumphalism.
But the idea that somehow this time its invention is different, that the "world had caught up" to it, implies that we live in the ultimate world. It implies we live in the world that was always meant to be. This in turn implies that this wheel invention has now become permanent. It's fun to think this way--triumphalism rocks--but that's a time-scale category error. The kind of deep time where an invention like the wheel might have been repeatedly invented and then forgotten is not comparable to the perspective of the few millenia of recorded recent history. And it's a mistake to unquestioningly use the tools of recent history to examine it. It's the same error that leads to the ironic cartoon of the primate standing upright gradually, then slumping in a chair. Is the world progressing towards an ultimate goal? Ask the intelligent-design crowd that question if you want. For the rest of is it's a tacit assumption that probably obscures our perception.
Who's to say what history will look like 100K years from now? Will it be continuous? Or will some things have been forgotten and rediscovered?
Are the currently expressed human genes adaptive in the hundred-thousand-year long run? Obviously there's no way to know for sure. But there's no harm in thinking about this sort of question with less triumphalism.
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This sort of thing is why I think that far too many patents, often valuable ones, are granted for innovations/inventions that are actually rather trivial -- but well-fenced by legal paperwork by the first legal team to submit a description to the patent office.
For example, does it really make sense that smartphones are wrapped in hundreds or even thousands of patents?
I think that a lot of patents are indeed "clever", but not really worth 20 years of government enforced exclusivity.
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Just as importantly is the issue of the "Whatever" filling a need. Sounding good to your mother isn't the same as broad acceptance of an idea or product. Globalization has brought products quicker than centuries past simply because they could ship them to potential customers.
It's no different in many respects than Jobs and Apple "innovating" a product but in most cases they were able to market it better and prettier than their peers.
Some ideas are timeless and others just need time to find their place, if ever...
It's no different in many respects than Jobs and Apple "innovating" a product but in most cases they were able to market it better and prettier than their peers.
Some ideas are timeless and others just need time to find their place, if ever...
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We know the first time failed because marketing couldn't decide what color the users wanted it to be.
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Maybe we should talk about the time when somebody invented a workable axle.
Without that, the wheel doesn't do much.
Without that, the wheel doesn't do much.
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That seems to be the path more frequently taken.
And that assumes what the world wants is what it needs. Wants are transitional, and empirical. Needs are forever.
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I didn't see Lenski's name in the article, but his long term evolution experiment is a great example of this.
It turns out the mutation that allowed one flask of E. Coli to eat citrate was actually two distinct ones- the first one happened several thousand generations before the second and didn't appear to have any effect either plus or minus. It wasn't until the second happened that they gained a really useful trait.
It turns out the mutation that allowed one flask of E. Coli to eat citrate was actually two distinct ones- the first one happened several thousand generations before the second and didn't appear to have any effect either plus or minus. It wasn't until the second happened that they gained a really useful trait.
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all the 'context' in the world will be of no value (to humanity) when extinction of our species eventually happens.
the remaining forms of life that regard all this existential thought process as simply unusable for their own survival, won't bat an eye and will continue living successfully without it.
consider the ongoing global/local conflicts that progress into full scale military murder campaigns, the context of each reveals a common component of social dysfunction (ideology) that is an innovation in and of itself.
every legal agreement to protect an 'innovation' (patent/copyright/etc) yields an unfair distribution of value to all who could benefit.
the remaining forms of life that regard all this existential thought process as simply unusable for their own survival, won't bat an eye and will continue living successfully without it.
consider the ongoing global/local conflicts that progress into full scale military murder campaigns, the context of each reveals a common component of social dysfunction (ideology) that is an innovation in and of itself.
every legal agreement to protect an 'innovation' (patent/copyright/etc) yields an unfair distribution of value to all who could benefit.
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toss in some persistence and disregard for collateral damage and .........
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James Lind identified citrus as a cure for scurvy. It took more than fifty years for the British Navy to adopt those learnings into practice.
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For some reason books about innovation, creativity, etc. tend to conclude with some advice on how to facilitate those things, even though they never have anything non-obvious to say.
(But if it was just an excuse for him to bring up Jonathan Strange, that's more than fair)
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The book isn't saying "primates" repeatedly invented the wheel, it's saying humans did so.
From Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel
Note that the term "wheel" typically refers to the technology "wheel and axel," which is separate from just having a round disc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel_and_axle
This video goes into this a bit as well, noting that the wheeled vehicle shows up relatively late in human history due to a number of factors:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBqV0OpTo0o
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I believe the Jonathan Strange example is supposed to be advice for focusing innovation on an actual problem that needs solving at the time. It's been a while since I read the book, but I believe Strange offers Wellington all sorts of fancy magical spells and attacks to help in a war, and Wellington's response is essentially "I just need good roads to move my men and equipment on."
The timing has to be spot-on though. I watch retro-tech videos on Youtube, and old tech is littered with examples of tech that was just a little bit "too soon", where it was either too expensive, or too impractical, or both. It's like how there were MP3 players before Apple released the iPod, and smartphones before Apple released the iPhone, but Apple hit a perfect mix of price, features, and ease of use that made their implementations take off.
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This made me think of the fact that before writing, most knowledge was passed on orally. People world learn absolutely mind bogglingly long poems, stories and myths as a way to pass on knowledge to the next generation. We’ve mostly stopped doing that, though the latent ability is probably still there in many people.
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It will be interesting to see the impact of climate change in coming decades and centuries. Some animals already do well, mosquitos love the warmer, wetter weather in some areas and have longer breeding seasons as a result. If things get really bad and we see a significant decrease in the human population over coming centuries if we fail to win this battle, we could see other creatures start to thrive that haven't done so before.
My partner is an author and involved in a lot of book communities, the number of people who come along going "I don't know how to write, but I can give you all the ideas for a book if you just write it. We'll split it 50/50" is just hilarious. Like the ideas are the hard part and the 18 months of writing, editing and self motivation are the easy part.
My partner is an author and involved in a lot of book communities, the number of people who come along going "I don't know how to write, but I can give you all the ideas for a book if you just write it. We'll split it 50/50" is just hilarious. Like the ideas are the hard part and the 18 months of writing, editing and self motivation are the easy part.
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I don't believe that the author (or reviewer) are being absolutist or triumphalist in their assessment of what "success" of a particular iteration of an innovation means. Rather, the idea is much more straightforward: this particular expression of this particular innovation appears successful to our examination from this particular observational viewpoint (i.e. current time and place) because of the confluence of the innovation's attributes with a certain environment. That's all. And that's plenty.
There's no need to attribute absolutism or triumphalism to the author in advance of actually reading the book, and only then deciding how balanced/relativist the author's viewpoint has actually turned out to be.
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It started before the internet. In my career, every new senior leader came in with a "great idea" that had failed three times previously, and was utterly uninterested in learning why the first times had failed. Nope, we got to do the calisthenics again.
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Isn't it sort-of a consequence of the idea that evolution isn't directed? Bacteria didn't realise humans were using antibiotics on them, then look around for a way to counter that. More likely, 1 in a million already had the resistance, and one day the other 999,999 got killed off leaving the survivors an opportunity to exploit. It's unlikely a beneficial random mutation happened to turn up just when it was needed. Either it was there all along, or else it was a relatively common mutation that keeps reappearing and then dying out, and this time it didn't die out.
Also, since most antibiotics are natural, some degree of resistance may have been beneficial all along. Penicillin in mould might have been encountered in the wild, before humans weaponised it.
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That's happened to me (and literally with tee-shirt slogans that can be a low-barrier way to making money from ideas). I choose to see it as validating rather than depressing. It shows I had a good idea that could be successful.
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