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Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

Thus showing that ideas are a dime a dozen. It's realization that's hard.

You've missed the profound part. The author was probably not the first person to think of wireless communication, but they thought through the ways it would negatively affect our day-to-day lives. This is a rare perspective. Even today we typically only see speculation on what benefits new technology will give us (or doomsday scenarios of how they'll ruin society). It's impressive to predict how new abilities plus ubiquity equals expectations of utilization, which burden the individual. Although even the poor are godlike in their capabilities compared to the ancients, we're dying from stress.

Right, it's the classic premise of science fiction: how could hypothetical future technology change society? Maybe it's not deep insight, but it is an interesting thought experiment, and now amusingly accurate.

That seems like an odd thing to takeaway from this. Envisioning the cellphone and it's social implications in 1919 is quite impressive. Making it a reality wasn't hard because it was missing the right person to build it, it was literally impossible without half a century of enabling technology development.

I know you didn't mean any harm (so please don't take it personally), but yours is the third comment of this type I've seen in a relatively short time this morning, so I'm going to point it out. Your comment repeats the exact premise and conclusion of the parent comment, but in a critical tone.

It's like it's a common personality quirk amongst users of this site. I think I avoid it in writing (though check my comment history? I may not be blameless!), but it's something my wife (with justified irritation) pulls me up on in person, because I do it all the time to her. She'll say "babe, we're agreeing loudly", and I'll have to apologize for doing the it again.

Does anyone have any insight into why the hell we do this?

> Does anyone have any insight into why the hell we do this?

Well, it simply appears to me that the responder above believed they were contradicting the grandparent comment. So they responded in the tone of a rebuttal, without realizing that two different ideas were actually the same idea. Most likely they misinterpreted the top-level comment because it was glib and not elaborated. Perhaps the cynical tone of the top-level comment also primed them for disagreement.

The top comment read (to me) as critical of the post, by implying that it was any easy thing to think of, and that maybe the author should have tried building a phone instead if they were so smart.

But as for "agreeing loudly" , I love the term never heard that before. Its definitely something I notice myself and my friends do and stop the discussion when I can. My guess is that it usually starts with some sort of misunderstanding and kinda spirals from there, but also interested to hear thoughts!

Many years ago colleague of mine intervened in a heated argument between myself and another colleague and pointed out that we were having a 'violent agreement'.

As an aside, it's commonly called "Violent agreement".

It starts with "I can assume what this person is about to say". Because you can project how the conversation will go (You're in "good company" - family, friends, hackernews colleagues - you are all used to linguistic shortcuts as well)

The reality of what they say differs from how you imagined it. Maybe it was close, but they participated new information, so now you feel the urge to contribute as well. Add your own perspective.

You are now suddenly in an arms race with the other person to find the "correct perspective".

That's really insightful. I definitely do this! Even when I correctly anticipate their point it's not a good conversational approach - and when I get it wrong, it's a major miscommunication. I think for me it happens when I prioritize information over people. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to extrapolate that point across the HN demographic.

Does anyone have any insight into why the hell we do this?

the best i can think of is that those that do it learned it from their parents. if parents don't take us seriously and treat everything we say or do with skepticism, and yell at us for things we didn't believe we did then we grow up with the attitude that anything someone says is to criticize and our first reaction is to defend ourselves. meaning it doesn't come to our mind at first that the person talking to us could be saying something we would agree with.

it takes some time and patience to develop the trust that not everyone is against us, especially not the partner we love.

That's helpful. My father was an academic, so his way of showing respect (as he thought it) was to approach every statement with skepticism, and subject every utterance to inquiry. He "treated us like adults", which I appreciate, but I'm not sure that's a great way to treat adults, either! (At least, not outside actual academic discourse.)

A sibling reply said something about assuming the content of someone else's statement, and thereby missing what they're actually saying. I know I do that, too. That's a hard one for me to break, because often - in an area that I know something about, at least - I can anticipate the question, so 90% (or something) of the time there's no immediate negative feedback. Wait... No negative informational feedback: there's probably a negative interpersonal reaction, to which I'm not properly attuned. Right.

That's worth thinking about. Thank you! I really appreciate your response.

I can see that maybe I was violently agreeing with the second part as I can't know why the parent comment was saying realizing the invention is hard. But I think my quibble with the first part stands. I'm not convinced that this idea was extremely common in 1919, it seems quite visionary to me to have this idea at that time.

EDIT: I also think that the premise of ideas are easy and realization is hard implies that it would be contemporaries having the ideas and doing the realization. Otherwise all we're really saying is that ideas precede realization.

It makes internet points go up

You're missing the point: anyone can claim they "invented" the flying car or 2-way wrist radio. So looking back at 1919 and saying the "idea" of a pocket phone was profound is as silly as the guy who claims he invented email because he was the first one to use the word.

It isn't a "criticism" that he didn't realize the device.

As for the social implications: so what? Survivor Bias / Hindsight Bias going on here. There were probably a lot of predictions made in 1919 that never panned out.

I'm not missing the point, I'm disagreeing with it. Sometimes ideas are insightful and this seems like one of those to me. It's OK that we disagree about that. It's too easy to just paint all ideas as trivial because there's lots of them. That seems silly to me.

Sometimes it's fun and interesting just to see what we have in common with historical people, rather than judging their relative ingenuity or lack thereof.

Who's judging?

Well, I'm not a mind-reader, but I'll humor your question. A charitable reading of your post is that you are refuting a hypothetical reader who might think that the point of the post is that the artist came up with the idea of a cell phone decades before such a thing existed (and was thus judging them to have extraordinary ingenuity). A more straightforward reading is that you are independently judging their contribution to be inconsequential because they didn't go on to realize the idea as a working object. Maybe you meant some third thing and hoped we'd read between the lines to find it. Regardless, my contention is that question of whether to credit the artist with inventing the cell phone is beside the point (however you come down on it), and the real interest of reading this has to do with empathizing with a century-old observation that feels relevant today, despite the gap in (realized) technology.

> A charitable reading of your post

I don't need you to perform any reading of my post, charitable or otherwise. It says what it says; nothing more.

When I was 5 I "invented" the TV watch.

Good boy / girl. Bonus points if you imagined what it would be like to watch TV while you're in public.

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