Never Enough Knowledge

Some blame the lack (if there even is a lack) of original thought on the public school system. I'll edit this if I can find the article.

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Original post by ATH_Labs When does one stop learning and start doing?

Never and right away.

You will never stop learning, I dare say even the great minds of years gone by never stopped learning, however as they went along they took what they have already and worked with it, refining that knowledge as their actions and thoughts uncovered new knowledge along the way.

There isn't some great point where you declare 'I have learnt all I need, now I will work', it simply doesn't work like that.

People learn through doing (and making mistakes).

I learned to ride a bike through riding it. Sometimes I fall, now less than at first.
I learned to program through writing programs. Sometimes they crash, now less than at first.
I learned to play the piano through playing the piano. I'm not that good at it, but I was even worse at first.
I learned to use HTML through making websites with it. Sometimes it's misformed or produces an ugly result, now less than at first.
One learns through correcting the mistakes made.

You now pose the question of how to do.
I suggest doing, and learning from that.

We live in a world of incomplete knowledge.

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Original post by MaulingMonkey People learn through doing (and making mistakes). I learned to ride a bike through riding it. Sometimes I fall, now less than at first. I learned to program through writing programs. Sometimes they crash, now less than at first. I learned to play the piano through playing the piano. I'm not that good at it, but I was even worse at first. I learned to use HTML through making websites with it. Sometimes it's misformed or produces an ugly result, now less than at first. One learns through correcting the mistakes made. You now pose the question of how to do. I suggest doing, and learning from that. We live in a world of incomplete knowledge.

I completely agree

OP is talking about originality. I agree with him. Coincidentally I was thinking exactly the same a few hours ago.

The problem is that as disciplines become more deep, wide, complete and complex, it's harder to know them 100%, thus it's harder to master them and then to complete them more or to know what hasn't been done/invented yet. And if it weren't enough difficulty, there are millons of people already working in almost every field, so, you never know if one of them will beat you in the work of your life.

It's demoralising...

I think one area that is almost undeveloped is "thought". I realise that we continue thinking exactly the same than when humanity begun, still slaves of the 7 sins to say it short.

"Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration"

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Original post by owl The problem is that as disciplines become more deep, wide, complete and complex, it's harder to know them 100%, thus it's harder to master them and then to complete them more or to know what hasn't been done/invented yet. And if it weren't enough difficulty, there are millons of people already working in almost every field, so, you never know if one of them will beat you in the work of your life.

At the same time information is more easily available. Today is an awesome time to live if you want to learn and invent. You can easily get access to almost all research done, most people can go to college and study whatever they want and knowledge is published in easy-to-absorb forms. We even have large databases of information available to search data.

Today we can choose to dedicate most of our lives to study a fairly narrow field of research with no obvious practical applications. Innovative things are published in all fields regularly and there is no question that if you have the knowledge and the skill, then you can too make innovations. Maybe not the kind of innovation that everyone will know about, like planes and cares, but just imagine creating an algorithm that Google choose to base their software on.

There are plenty of stuff to be done. People have predicted the end of innovation for many centuries yet we have continued to innovate. Even many hundreds years ago it was impossible to learn everything, so you have to just learn as much as you can and innovate with whatever is at your disposal.

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I think one area that is almost undeveloped is "thought". I realise that we continue thinking exactly the same than when humanity begun, still slaves of the 7 sins to say it short.

Philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and artificial intelligence are just some of the sciences which try to reason about the thought process. Even though it might seem undeveloped compared to something like mathematics a human still couldn't learn everything there is to learn about it in 150 years.

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Original post by CTar At the same time information is more easily available. [...] There are plenty of stuff to be done. People have predicted the end of innovation for many centuries yet we have continued to innovate.

Ok you are right, but I was comparing today days with the those in which scientific technics weren't as developed as today (500~700 years ago?).

What I meant, and I think also OP, is that the days of revolutionary discoveries look like if their were decreasing. Today you see revolutionary improvements to what's already going, but one hardly sees things new as discovering a new continent, the structure of the atom, the rocket, relativity, etc... big stuff

.

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Original post by CTar Philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and artificial intelligence are just some of the sciences which try to reason about the thought process. Even though it might seem undeveloped compared to something like mathematics a human still couldn't learn everything there is to learn about it in 150 years.

I was thinking more about the vices of the way we think...

Discovering planets arround other stars was pretty neat though.

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Original post by owl What I meant, and I think also OP, is that the days of revolutionary discoveries look like if their were decreasing. Today you see revolutionary improvements to what's already going, but one hardly sees things new as discovering a new continent, the structure of the atom, the rocket, relativity, etc... big stuff .

It depends on what you mean by big stuff. Much of the stuff discovered today isn't as likely to make it in the newspapers, but we still regularly see quite big discoveries in all sciences. Take physics, one very old science, the biggest discoveries since the eighties were (copied from Wikipedia's timeline of Fundamental Physics Discoveries):
1980 Quantum Hall effect
1981 Theory of cosmic inflation proposed
1985 Bose-Einstein condensate found
1995 Top quark found
1998 Dark energy discovered
2000 Tau neutrino found
2003 WMAP observations of Cosmic microwave background
All seems to be very "revolutionary", but just more to physicists than to normal people. Actually try to compare that with the fundamental discoveries from 1780 to 1805:
1782 Conservation of matter, Lavoisier
1785 Inverse square electricity confirmed, Coulomb
1801 Wave theory of light, Young
1803 Atomic theory of matter, Dalton
I don't know how Wikipedia have chosen the entries in this timeline, and whether the old discoveries are truly greater (I'm not a physicist), but the amount of discoveries seems to have been pretty constant since 1780, except for the first half of the 20th century because of the discovery of quantum mechanics, relativity and the development of those branches. In the first 50 years or so of any science you're going to see a huge amount of fundamental discoveries, but after that the number of discoveries is pretty constant.

People are still innovating and discovering new things today, they are just a bit more specialized.

And one thing I missed in the original post before:

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Statical the great minds of the past have already done their great work by my age, and I feel I have missed the boat.

Statistically people didn't live as long, so if they lived to be 40 and you live to be 80, and they make a discovery at age 30, then you can make it at age 60 and still accomplish the same amount of work.

I believe an original idea requires a full depth of knowledge on a subject. I feel that with the increasing rate of new data being created in a given field, it becomes an increasingly difficult task to gain a full depth of knowledge - thus the difficulty with being innovative.

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Original post by ATH_Labs I believe an original idea requires a full depth of knowledge on a subject. I feel that with the increasing rate of new data being created in a given field, it becomes an increasingly difficult task to gain a full depth of knowledge - thus the difficulty with being innovative.

This is waaaay not true. People approaching a subject with a different perspective are often the ones who make the most important discoveries, precisely because of their naivete!

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Original post by ATH_Labs I believe an original idea requires a full depth of knowledge on a subject. I feel that with the increasing rate of new data being created in a given field, it becomes an increasingly difficult task to gain a full depth of knowledge - thus the difficulty with being innovative.

Hardly. With the sciences, you just need to know enough to notice when something doesn't fit together right. Einstein didn't know everything mankind knew about fundamentals of the universe when inventing relativity, for example -- instead, he noticed and explored a seeming contradiction in previous works that everyone else had basically glossed over. From what I recall, in fact, many were (at first?) quite skeptical of him for how little he knew compared to his contemporaries on the relevant subjects.

With the arts, it's even simpler: you can just try random shit and experiment. There's enough room for variety that it's harder to make a duplicate of previous work without reference than it is to create something somehow new.

For example, I recently invented "Hobo Tacos". I wanted to try making enchiladas, so I got some small tortillas, and cheese. Get the simple stuff working first, you know? Only I had nothing to steam the tortillas with to make them flexible or anything -- I tried putting tortillas in a pan with a thin layer of water -- and only found out they stick to said pan really well when you do that.

I had also picked up some salsa, so I could have steamed tortillas with just the salsa, like they've had available as appetizers while you're waiting for your table at some Mexican restaurant, but those are steamed too. So with two failed attempts at duplication in my pocket, I got to experimenting with the stuff I had, since I had no better use for it:

A cheese coated tortilla without any steaming process or anything, in a pan. I added some salsa on that, and found that the heat + cheese let me bend the tortillas around without crumbling -- folding in half a lot like a taco. And well, they were made like I'd imagine a hobo would cook his food -- just a frying pan on heat, no fancy tools. Hence, hobo tacos, which aren't really tacos at all, and contain no hobo meat, but still carry the unfortunate moniker.

They make a good snack, and cook about as fast as I eat them, meaning they're nice and fast on top of hot.

Ask me to bake a cake or cookies, and I will almost certainly fail without explicit instructions. I'm hardly the master of cooking, yet I still had no trouble inventing hobo tacos with largely dumb luck (otherwise known as experimentation).

In a related vein, Chupaquesos were an originally completely fictional foodstuff, until the author of Schlock Mercenary (by Howard Tayler) ended up actually trying to make his invention. Which apparently actually turned out to be pretty good.

Might also want to keep in mind that the people who are largely credited for making major break thoughs tend not to have all of thier craft to thier exclusive credit. Small, seemingly insignificant, advances are made frequently, and it's just every now and then that somebody looks at the body of work from many others and finds in it the missing piece to the puzzle required to bring together the work of many others into a single cohesive idea. Often times those who make those huge one-hit advancements are brilliant, and often times they were just in the right place at the right time.

Not saying that everyone is going to contribute to research in some fashion though [I've known people through my life who I would be willing to bet my existence that their contribution to the world will be little more than a whole lot of carbon dioxide], but progress is being made, even though only in baby steps.

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Original post by owl Ok you are right, but I was comparing today days with the those in which scientific technics weren't as developed as today (500~700 years ago?). What I meant, and I think also OP, is that the days of revolutionary discoveries look like if their were decreasing. Today you see revolutionary improvements to what's already going, but one hardly sees things new as discovering a new continent, the structure of the atom, the rocket, relativity, etc... big stuff .

And how many times have people discovered new continents? How much original thought was involved in that? (Odd example to pick, imo. Discovering a continent is a result of travelling, more than inventiveness. Still, in that vein, how many new planets have been discovered in the last couple of years? Dozens. How many have been discovered before then? 7 (since we got rid of Pluto, and I choose not to count Earth as a "discovered planet" [grin])
And how many of the other examples have not happened in the last 100 years?
How many groundbreaking "big stuff" revolutionary discoveries have been made in, say, the last 100,000 years before 1800?

No, we don't get a new Einstein every week. But what makes you think we would?
You or I might not invent the Next Big Thing. But how many people in the history of mankind have done so?
And how many of these Big Things have been discovered within the last 50-100 years? Compared to how many have been discovered before then?

Could someone in the stone age learn all there is to learn? How could he? He never got to talk to people further away than the neighboring tribe. He'd have to invent everything pretty much from scratch. You at least can take the internet, the computers, the cars, the space shuttles, the quantum theory that others have come up with, and build on top of that.

If it's hard to come up with original ideas when you have access to all the existing ideas, it's virtually impossible to do so when you don't have access to those. Then you'll just end up, well, reinventing the wheel.

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Statical the great minds of the past have already done their great work by my age

Yes. That is because of a small flaw in your statistics. The great minds of the future are not included, so yes, your statistics will be biased and show that all innovation happened in the past. Gosh, surprising, isn't it? [lol]