[FiatLuxDave]

I'd like to add my perspective as a struggling inventor. I can't speak to conditions 50k years ago, but a number of the challenges listed are still pretty relevant, and I've had to justify "why are things taking so long" to my friends and family enough times to pay close attention to this.

The big factors I see are: 'poverty trap', 'crude hacks', and 'full-time craftsman'. These interact. For example, most people need a day job. Even in R&D shops, day jobs are largely concerned with marginal improvements. I spent 12 years working as an R&D physicist, but I had to do my inventions on my own time because they weren't relevant to the incremental improvement products I was paid to develop. It's very hard to spend time working on a home run when your competition is hitting a thousand singles, and that is especially true with regards to possible uses of your time for paying the bills.

The craftsman thing is a big deal. I suck as a craftsman, mainly because I'm usually doing something for the first time. Need to weld it? Guess I'm learning how to weld. Need to polish it? Time to learn again. MATLAB is too slow? Hello C++. Oh, hey, now electronics are surface mount? Time to learn how to solder all over again. So, unless you are inventing something in a field you have specialized in as a craftsperson, everything you build kinda sucks. Then you have to figure out - is the problem with the idea or the implementation? Is there a different implementation which would be easier to build? What techniques do I have to learn to do that?

The workaround for this is to work with specialized craftspeople. Unfortunately, this adds different challenges. Now you have to pay them ('poverty trap') or convince them it's worthwhile (I didn't see 'social proof' on the list, but lets put it under value). Now you have to manage a project, which is a different skill set than inventing something in the first place. Sometimes, it's better going back to being your own craftsman.

In modern times, then you get to go to commercialization, which is the barrier which kills most inventions because the inventor rarely has the skills to do this right, and the people with the skills aren't usually incentivized properly to do it for them.

So, in short, I see the biggest problems for inventors not in the mental realm, but in the social. Inventors generally need help, and it is not until after the invention is a success that people see the value.

[anonytrary]

You touch on a very real social dystopia. What's worse is that it's happening quietly, under the scenes.

Silicon Valley undervalues the aimless tinkerers and overvalues the incremental bootcamp coders.

[mzzter]

The keywords there are “aimless” and “incremental”. I think those properties are correctly valued in any fast-paced workplace.

I think one of the things that career inventors need to overcome is selling themselves. Often the fun part is in the work of inventing, but conveying the value of the process is just as important and less straightforward.

[Pica_soO]

Did you even read his post? He explicitly stated that the multi-role problem is what is killing most inventions. If everyone would have to be his own salesman- there wouldnt be any inventors at all- just people trying to sell each other rocks for berries.

What is needed is a inventor currency- that allows for a exchange of services and favours, without it being abused as a source of cheap labour.

[anonytrary]

We see this happen in ICO-land especially. A lot of ideas are being marketed with absolutely zero substance or scientific innovation behind them.

Innovators like Berners-lee, Shawn Fanning, Satoshi Nakamoto, etc. plant seeds which grow into trees. Businessmen, lawmen, and psychology-manipulators fight over who gets to pick the fruit, sometimes they destroy the tree in the process. Sometimes, they even say that the fruit is not allowed to exist.

This is a massive inequity in power, and it's going to change soon. "Management" is the enemy of innovation. I've stopped looking at what old, rich, white and asian men are doing, and started looking more at what youth are doing.

[iamgopal]

Wright brothers spent about a decade to build a machine that can fly. Their cycle shop paid for it.

[ggg9990]

Great example. If they hadn’t had a cycle shop that generated enough income to develop a plane, while simultaneously not requiring too much of their time, they wouldn’t have been able to do it.