Ask HN: How much extra work does intellectual curiosity cost the tech industry?

1 pointcanuckcanuck2 comments

A lot of the people in tech also have tech as a hobby, which tends to lead to reinventing the wheel in service of intellectual curiosity. How much extra work do you think this causes? Or are all new systems progress?

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You’re begging the question. By assigning the losses from things that reinvent the wheel to intellectual curiosity, you’ve skipped over or ignored all the other causes.

Are you interested in looking at how to better harness intellectual curiosity, or are you more focused on the possible productivity losses resulting from reinventing the wheel?

A huge amount of the work that all of us do is, in fact, duplicating stuff that's already been done by someone at some point. This isn't just curiosity, it's also a big part of learning a field and of, ultimately, creating new things.

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