Ask HN: What are some exciting non-STEM breakthroughs happening now?
We often hear about cool new things in STEM fields, but much less frequently about non-STEM fields. What are some of the most exciting things right now in other fields?
How about the TurDuckEn? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turducken Or the Pake (PieCaken, Cherpumple, or whatever you call a pie baked into a cake).
I'm at least half serious -- the arts, including culinary arts, is a place to look. The color indigo comes to mind as an older example (even if science discovered it, it was a breakthrough due to its adoption in art and fashion)... lately Black 3.0 (or Vantablack) may have made enough ripples to count.
Have there been Legal or Political breakthroughs? Was reopening the Cuban border a "breakthrough"? Is electing female world leaders a "breakthrough"? Legalizing gay marriage? Marijuana decriminalization? I could make an argument for any of those.
I'd make a list of what you think "non-stem" areas are (by career, maybe) and look into that. Finance, real-estate, mechanics, art, fashion -- they probably have "breakthroughs" that people outside the fields are not familiar with, at various scales.
The common way of thinking about a legislature is that it enacts laws that are just. That which is in the eyes of the population "bad" is outlawed and what is "good" is kept legal. That's a model that has been with us since antiquity. Of course, in the old days the law came from the God(s) but the point was the same -- differentiate between right and wrong.
Experimental governance brings in a completely new way of thinking (+). The legislature is instead seen as an experimenter and laws are seen as tools to use to regulate the behavior of the populace. Maybe the government identifies X as a problem, so a temporary law A to combat the problem is drafted. The law is enacted but with a provision so that it expires after say an evaluation period of 18 months. Then the government studies what effects the law had. If the negatives outweighs the positives, maybe try law B instead and the process repeats itself.
The advantages to experimental governance is that laws can be enacted quickly and in response to changing circumstances. And that "beta testing" makes it easier to write tighter laws free of loop-holes and other problems. Disadvantages include: 1) Regimes can abuse the system by extending quickly drafted temporary laws indefinitely (e.g Patriot Act). 2) If there are no checks and balances built into the system, arbitrary or contradictory laws can be enacted. 3) If the population isn't following the political debate, it might not be aware of what the law is. Thus, EG works best in stable democracies with educated populations, like the EU countries where it is used extensively.
+ Of course no idea is 100 % new, but I know of no similar historical precedent. Temporary laws and decrees have been used in the past, but afaik they have always been considered aberrations and not "natural parts of the system."
While not a “law”, the Roman republic innovated by allowing the Senate to elect a dictator to address a specific problem for 6 months or until successful, and was expected to resign thereafter.
Graffiti was a breakthrough in art. (1970's, we all know it existed somewhat in Pompeii)
I guess it's a area were there is an obvious change that's happened and it's good for that field and it doesn't need proving because it's obvious and didn't use the scientific method to bring about the change.
Urber showed it was possible for a company to break corrupt monopolies and break BS government regulations if consumers wanted your product enough. Is a current example I guess? Trump style politics is another. Meme fanaticism is a new field.
Else, finance is not STEM, blockchain is a break through and we are talking what we always talk about. Internet allows non-STEM to train and communicate blah blah blah....
You couldn't have discovered it as a fetish through scientific experimentation. It probably wasn't one until it was used to bypass japanese censorship laws which also accidentally conditioned the popular psyche to associate it with porn.
There are still a lot of ongoing breakthroughs of this kind in hentai. For example the genre of monster/anthropomorphic girls is currently exploding. I recently beat my meat to a world war 2 battleship in the shape of a girl.
There are some breakout genres of self-published entertainment, using Amazon self-publishing for novels, or using YouTube.
Golf course design the past few decades seems to have gotten out of a rut.