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Comment by mannykannot | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate where you are coming from, but I'm not willing to say that there is no objective truth to it. Take the triode, for example, or the transistor. I include the latter because while it did something that functionally the triode could also do, it did it by exploiting different physics, and the difference was significant.

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Sure, but my point is that for either of those, someone could mount a spirited argument in any of four directions (innovation / invention x yes / no) and it’s all just semantics.

We humans desperately want binary definitions, but things like this are gradients coupled to imperfect terms.

Yeah, but then some of us might mount a spirited argument along the third dimension - (honest / lying). In my experience, most of the "semantic arguments" you mention happen in context of someone wanting to sell you something (whether a product or a belief) - so while it's never binary, the borders get fuzzier the further you go towards "lying" on that third axis.

So one must choose between seeing every issue as a stark dichotomy, or never doing so?

Some people think sustaining debates by splitting hairs indefinitely is productive, some don’t. Debating the point isn’t useful because there’s no objective truth to get to.

You're doing the same thing, but instead of invention/innovation you're saying how productive something is. That is also a sliding scale.

I am choosing to believe you were smiling and enjoying the humor in that question.

Some could argue that the transistor wasn’t an invention but a discovery: the physical behavior of the semiconductors has existed for millennia, and we discovered that behavior, but we had already invented vacuum tubes before which did the same thing, just a lot less efficiently. Notice that I said “invented” vacuum tubes because the behavior comes from careful engineering and manufacture which didn’t exist in the known universe before that.

But here too, arguing on invention vs discover is pointless because there’s no common truth…

From Wikipedia: "After the war, Shockley decided to attempt the building of a triode-like semiconductor device." If attempting (and succeeding) in using one's knowledge to produce a specific thing that does not currently exist is not invention, what is?

More generally, if there's no common truth then that itself cannot be a common truth...

> Notice that I said “invented” vacuum tubes because the behavior comes from careful engineering and manufacture which didn’t exist in the known universe before that.

That would mean an invention can become a discovery, potentially millennia later, if we discover (no pun intended) that the thing already existed in some form. I think few people would agree with that.

Also, the same ”discover or invent?” question is frequently asked about mathematics, where “exist in the known universe” is very much open for interpretation. Euclidean geometry ‘existed’ in the known universe for centuries, for example, until Einstein found out that it didn’t.

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