[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

> So yeah, no different with what we do, since we're literally always building new things that haven't been done before.

"Where do people get the confidence to say that their work is so uniquely novel that it's "something that has never been done before in the history of the universe", that the field is obviously totally different from another field they know nothing about, etc. ?" --Dan Luu

I think it is less that these things "have never been done before" and more "we haven't bothered to learn anything from people who've done things like this before". Same with parenting.

[PeterisP]

It's the same as with parenting - you can't really learn these things from people who've done this before, you have to learn them by doing it yourself. A large portion of potential parents put in a lot of effort to read up and learn stuff before their first child, but that's really nothing compared to what they can learn from actual experience; when rising your second/third/etc child, everything you'll use will be from the actual experience with previous children and just a minority of useful things will come from the initial vague guidance of others.

[mark-r]

I had a friend who was super excited to have his second child, because he'd be able to reuse the knowledge he had picked up with the first one. Then he discovered that his kids were polar opposites - he had to start over from square one.

[triplee]

That too, but also combined with having to balance that the people who did this before also did it in a different time with different resources and also have selective memories.

[guscost]

And as often as not they managed to do an even worse job than we do today.