This was one of the best posts I've ever read. Thinking about printing it out and framing it. It's more inspirational than anything I've read, and it articulates the elephant-in-the-room problem we all know but aren't talking about.
No one is innovating anymore. Everyone copies each other. Even in the YC crowd, every other thing is a dumb CRUD app or AI snake oil project that has been rehashed since the 80s. Where's the thorium reactors? Why does it still take 3 days to wire money? Where's the brain-computer interface? I never imagined people would be so lazy in the future. The idea of passive investment in an index fund has analogized to every part of our culture. We have come to expect things to magically grow on their own without any effort. Just showing up is supposed to be a sufficient condition to reaping the rewards of growth. You would have thought the 2008 financial crisis would have put an end to this mentality, but it actually made it worse because now everyone who invested in anything in 2009 is now a millionaire without having lifted a finger. Faith in the System restored. Why build anything when your survival doesn't depend on it--the System will take care of you automatically.
All you have to do is "get in"--we see this in the heavy credentialism/careerist people. We are a culture that shows up to the race and starts celebrating at the start line. We are more interested in proving status with fake competition trophies (e.g. degrees, medals, CVs) than doing that which the status was meant to predict.
None of this happens when you're actually on the frontier. In the late 1800s, America was really on the frontier. Large parts of this country had untapped natural resources. There was no shortage of mystery.
Now people believe that there are no new problems to solve. "Someone else is already working on that." This is demonstrably not true--otherwise we would all be living in post-scarcity Neptune colonies--yet everyone acts as though it is true.
People by and large do not work to fulfill their curiosity; they work to survive. They do the minimum to survive. In frontier eras like the late 1800s in America, curiosity and survival happen to align. The principal problem in all this is how to inject curiosity into a jaded populace who believes there is nothing new to discover or accomplish.
Thanks for the post! Why be entrepreneurial if you can just put your money in the SP500 and watch it go to the moon thanks to unlimited QE? The current paradigm is being kept alive by the Gov with all tools it has at its disposal (QE, bailouts), while the right move would be to let it go bust and push the restart button. Making space for a new generation of entrepreneurs to pick up the pieces.
Maybe like many things the OPs post is an indirect consequence of 2008 bailouts and QE.
Zombies were propped up so the only thing entrepreneurs could go after was CRUD apps and adtech.
If banks, airlines, manufacturing were forced to face that reset then entrepreneurs and startups could have a go at genuinely reinventing those industries.
I believe we have reached a point where most people are in an equilibrium of comfort and desire, where the desire to innovate and do more, is perfectly balanced out by the present comforts we are able to enjoy.
People are so doped up on Netflix, cheap takeaway, porn etc. There is relative safety, lack of disease and war for the most part. People no longer desire to improve the world. It's about maximising the small pleasures for as long as possible and then dying.
America used to innovate, improve the world, improve our knowledge. Now it has stagnated. The populace is obese, lazy, and getting dumber.TV and porn were bad ideas.
This is the kind of response that comes from, and please excuse my language, someone who doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about.
There is barely a safety net. There is barely any institutional support for innovation. Accessing either is a competitive process that is purposely obfuscated to reduce costs. The downside involved in preparing for and executing on innovative ideas is potentially lethal for the individual, even if it might be incredibly advantageous for society for even one person to be successful.
If you want people to fly high, you start by putting a trampoline under them, not a trap pit of crocodiles. Things are as bad as they are because the people with the means to push us onward do not understand the problem.
It's not obvious to me your comment has more truth than the one you're replying to. Either argument could be made. Why the rude animus towards the original poster?
The parent argument has been made for going on 3 decades now and is the source of the austerity and institutional divestment that has proven unworkable at best, and disastrous at worst.
It's telling that a single f-bomb is interpreted as more rude than calling the American public - which is by far the most overworked workforce in the West and among such as far as the developed world as a whole is concerned - "lazy."
It's stagnation all the way down. Not only porn, video games, and TV, but cannabis and opiates have taken the 21st century by storm. Before that, the most popular drug was cocaine (and amphetamines). It's symbolic how as Americans lost that rip-roaring innovation culture, they retreated to their couches and numbed themselves with literal opium.
I think there is a ton of innovation occurring. Biotech is exploding right now with CRISPR-CAS9, optogenetic application to mind-machine interfaces are already in rats and monkeys. Medicine, despite covid, is doing great stuff. I'd bet that the large scale testing we're doing will be somewhat sticky and our risk tolerance at the FDA will expand a lot. EE is about to take off again when someone can come up with a cheap and workable memristor; it'll completely change how we do logic at the substrate level, going from discrete to 'analog' math. We're revolutionizing history and literature with tools like google trends. I think a lot of the 'malaise' is just cyclical. Innovation comes in spurts, we're at the end of a business cycle, it's kinda normal.
That said, yeah, the elephant in the room is the massive concentration of wealth and regulatory capture. All the innovations I just mentioned are kinda happening in the back-rooms and on obscure boards like HN. Getting these things to markets and in the hands of professionals is really just terribly difficult. I get the FDA pushing back on things (and largely agree with it), but the big players just seem to push down really hard on innovators. I mean, look at the App-store, it's nutters. Paradoxically, more government intervention is needed, but against the big fish.
> Where's the thorium reactors? Why does it still take 3 days to wire money? Where's the brain-computer interface? I never imagined people would be so lazy in the future. The idea of passive investment in an index fund has analogized to every part of our culture. We have come to expect things to magically grow on their own without any effort.
Not "where's the thorium reactors?" That probably won't work. But why don't we have rows of windmills from the Texas panhandle to the Canadian border (the real US wind belt), and EHV DC lines west to California, east to Chicago, and south to Houston. That could power the US west of the Mississippi. Totally do-able. Proven technology. Profitable.
Because rich people have huge market stakes in the status quo. That's how you get billions in oil company subsidies and token garbage for wind, solar, battery research, etc. It is pure corruption.
While i agree with a lot of your response. I also concede that regulatory capture is a serious innovation inhibitor that has a factor in some of your questions re: reactors, 3 days to wire money, etc. The incumbents have gotten too comfortable and lobbied well enough to protect themselves.
Then you also have the current bailouts of airlines, etc. So the incumbents in this case are too big to fail. You'll never get new entrants/innovators in these areas until those issues are solved.
I think we’re burnt out by too much thrash. Too much disingenuous work, too much greed, too much friction, too much wasted effort, too many stairs to nowhere. We see the soullessness and greed in our bosses, in founders, in the VCs that fund them, in the elected officials that govern all this. To do something new you’re faced with reinventing this whole structure. But we’re burnt out and myopic. Our best idea is to retire and work on a toy project or something. Maybe that’ll lead to something.
If you are interested, Peter Thiel's 0 to 1 has more on this and with more depth. As he says, we are the "indefinite optimists", expecting the future to become better somehow, rather than "definite optimists" that expect to build the better future.
Great reply, thanks, you are restoring my faith in the humanity.
I fully agree that we have to build build build, to surpass technological level of Star Trek. And yes, I do want to live in science fiction.
"Early retirement" is the most retarded concept to me. Yes, I will retire when I will be a retard. Retired = retard.
People in the late 1800 actually hated the idea of retirement; corporations forced them to retire to give way to young people.
Out biggest problem compared to people of 1800 that we have a facebook (or twitter, or instagram). So instead of building, we outjealousing each other with beautiful vacation pics.
No one is innovating anymore. Everyone copies each other. Even in the YC crowd, every other thing is a dumb CRUD app or AI snake oil project that has been rehashed since the 80s. Where's the thorium reactors? Why does it still take 3 days to wire money? Where's the brain-computer interface? I never imagined people would be so lazy in the future. The idea of passive investment in an index fund has analogized to every part of our culture. We have come to expect things to magically grow on their own without any effort. Just showing up is supposed to be a sufficient condition to reaping the rewards of growth. You would have thought the 2008 financial crisis would have put an end to this mentality, but it actually made it worse because now everyone who invested in anything in 2009 is now a millionaire without having lifted a finger. Faith in the System restored. Why build anything when your survival doesn't depend on it--the System will take care of you automatically.
All you have to do is "get in"--we see this in the heavy credentialism/careerist people. We are a culture that shows up to the race and starts celebrating at the start line. We are more interested in proving status with fake competition trophies (e.g. degrees, medals, CVs) than doing that which the status was meant to predict.
None of this happens when you're actually on the frontier. In the late 1800s, America was really on the frontier. Large parts of this country had untapped natural resources. There was no shortage of mystery.
Now people believe that there are no new problems to solve. "Someone else is already working on that." This is demonstrably not true--otherwise we would all be living in post-scarcity Neptune colonies--yet everyone acts as though it is true.
People by and large do not work to fulfill their curiosity; they work to survive. They do the minimum to survive. In frontier eras like the late 1800s in America, curiosity and survival happen to align. The principal problem in all this is how to inject curiosity into a jaded populace who believes there is nothing new to discover or accomplish.