[agumonkey]

This depresses me, because there's a strange .. loop in society where people thinks advance means unaccessible and university lab only. Where in fact most concepts are uber 'simple' in form and can be explored quite easily. Similarly there was an article about J. Bose early radio research where you could see polarizing filters made out of a book with metal foil interspersed. I really feel bad about the distorted reality people live in.

[wallflower]

> where you could see polarizing filters made out of a book with metal foil interspersed

A tangent. In case you missed the amazing documentary "Magic, Art, and Scanimation", it is all about the iterative process of "making" magic through hard work, creativity, and insight.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17271786

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLfLSjbm4s8

[agumonkey]

never heard of it, thanks

[s-shellfish]

We all live in distorted realities. Lots of people in laboratories think for part of the time, you need to be in those environments to be in sync with the research, because it's an active movement of pieces playing out and involves a dynamic that goes deeper than what research comes out through the surface, what gets published.

Many concepts are super simple once they've been absorbed by culture to the point that you can learn by osmosis. It's not the same clarity as coming to a conclusion without the awareness existing initially.

My dilemma often is, for some concepts such as math, computation, you can't really prove where such concepts originate from, or whether they exist independent of the human mind and are instead, discovered over time. The obvious implication being that some concepts may exist in some minds outside of the laboratory, and then what is the purpose of doing such research?

The reason often comes down to the fact that someone is funding you to be there 40-80 hours (or more, depends on how much sleep you need) a week doing nothing else. That's a lot of time to focus on just those things, and I honestly think that makes, not just a big difference, but THE difference, between who gets there first. Because otherwise, you have to be focused on other things, that might not be directly tied to whatever research concepts you may want to discover independently.

Concepts become uber simple because people work hard to spread them out and make them easily understood. There's a counter argument to this that you should also be able to decide whether you want to be influenced by those concepts, but that's just living life. I imagine a lot of people who are not interested in super simple concepts have some aversion to them that could be very valid. It doesn't make them less intelligent, it's just something you wouldn't understand unless you experienced the particular dynamic. Distorted realities indeed. We all have them.