Hacker News Reader

Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Many "obvious" inventions take a very long time to happen. For example, the very slow evolution of boats. It took forever to come up with the keel. Also the fork.

Rigid, authoritarian societies also seem to have a lot of problems inventing new things, especially disruptive things.

James Burke's "Connections" is a great history of invention.

View on HN

Conversely, as many on HN would attest, plenty of novel and inevitable ideas never saw traction and disappeared to history for being too early to market. Being too early is often worse than being too late. At least with software you can pocket it and maybe in 5, 10, 20 years pick things back up when the winds go your way[1], but in earlier times the next opportunity might not come for generations, long after the inventor and any memory of their contraption are gone.

I haven't read that book; maybe that's pointed out as one of the reasons it can take so long for an invention to appear in history. The stars have to align. It's rarely if ever enough to create a working implementation, let alone merely conceive of it.

And I guess it's probably also worth considering that notwithstanding all the advanced knowledge pre-Columbian civilizations had, they were still nonetheless millennia behind the Old World. The Old World was highly interconnected even 4000 years ago, and even if the New World had the equivalent of the Silk Road, there were just fewer people, fewer civilizations, and fewer cycles of civilization building to shake things out.

[1] Even open sourcing it doesn't help. If I had a nickel for every cool open source project I've noticed that gained huge mindshare and was thought to be novel and heretofore unimplemented approach, yet actually had a substantially similar if not identical 20+ year old implementation sitting on some on old SunSITE FTP server or as a PoC for some ACM paper published circa 1970-1999....

> authoritarian societies also seem to have a lot of problems inventing new things

I'm not sure evidence can easily sustain this. Even putting aside the kind-of-tautological "rigid societies don't invent disruption" sentiment.... not only is "authoritarian" a pretty vague phrase in terms of economics, but we have a good deal of evidence of societies we mostly consider authoritarian inventing plenty of "disruptive" things. Just not a generally beneficial sort of disruption.

Inventions that disrupt the status quo tend to go nowhere in rigid societies. Inventors thrive in free market societies.

I'm not sure I've ever witnessed a free market society, but surely one is not incompatible with rigidity of social structure or (lack of) values. Undermining the basic social necessities of society doesn't tend to produce people able to produce innovation either....

Consider the free market in the US. The greatest lifting of scores of millions of people ever from poverty into the middle class and wealthy. The enormous generation of inventions.

I'm not convinced that the unprecedented advantages of setting up base camp on the other end of a major global ocean on both sides of the landmass, the almost completely unfettered access to a continent of largely untapped natural resources with virtually no competition from established powers, of being in the right place at the right time to find enormous reserves of oil (and ultra-high grade anthracite coal) so close to the surface that it is possible to discover them by sight alone, and well over a century of widespread exploitation of pre-industrial society's version of market-disrupting robotic labor, AKA slavery, to undercut our competitors on top of all of our other advantages, have been sufficiently controlled for in this "we won because free market economy" analysis. Though I concede that the last one, slavery, is a feature you'd expect to emerge from of a pathologically under-regulated free market economy.

Allow me to present Japan. With none of those advantages, after WW2 they turned to free markets and became a powerhouse of invention and prosperity.

Allow me to present China.

Super authoritarian and yet super invovative.

Totally fair. Direct to this one, you could probably look at the evolution of rope and generally fabric. I imagine without modern techniques, many of the clothes that we wear would probably not be possible? Certainly not at the scale that we have them.

The scale of textiles happened because of factory weaving machines. Before 1800, making thread and fabrics was all done by hand, and consumed an enormous amount of time.

That is the scale. My assumption was more asking if you also needed mechanical help to get fine threads?

You could certainly get help that was 'mechanical' but which did not involve machines or robots as we think of them today. More of an older, original definition of robot.

Without wheels, people can't spin thread as fine as they can with. Full stop.

Directly to this thread, nobody is claiming they didn't use tools. The question is specifically why they never invented a specific tool. My specific question is why the cart wheel needs to be a prerequisite to a spinning wheel.

The common answer is that you don't need carting wheels without drafting animals. My question is why does that preclude pulleys and spinning wheels? They seem they should be unrelated.

Pulleys, in particular, seem an extension of levers more than of carting wheels.

> The common answer is that you don't need carting wheels without drafting animals

Considering the large stone structures and pavilions they built, they sure could have used a wheelbarrow.

Their "roads" were impassable by wheeled vehicles, but I suspect that passable roads were a consequence of wheeled vehicles, not a prerequisite.

I agree. General consensus is otherwise, though?

Thinking more on it, I confess the "they had wheels in toys" is actually more confusing than not. I would think it common for toys to mimic non-toys.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com