[millstone]

"Science advances one funeral at a time." - Max Planck

"Death is very likely the best single invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new." - Steve Jobs

I know my life is accreting old biases and obstacles. Today and for years to come (I hope) I have more to do, but some day I will become an agent of stagnation instead of advancement.

Nobody wants to die. But in the big picture, the alternative is worse.

[lachlan-sneff]

I can't say I understand this viewpoint. If you feel you're going to become an agent of stagnation, as you put it, simply put effort into not stagnating.

[millstone]

I think we stagnate because we accumulate experience. As we grow old, we gain wisdom, but our wisdom is centralized in the past. We can't shed our experiences without forgetting ourselves.

Steve Jobs also talked about "the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything." But I can't be a beginner again and again and again: some day my biases/old-dreams and stale-ideas/past-successes will dominate. Nobody has an endless capacity for creating the new.

[lachlan-sneff]

Perhaps stagnation is due to experience, perhaps it's due to accumulated, age-related brain damage. I doubt we'll know until people do live hundreds or thousands of years.

Surely you can be a beginner again. Pick something you've never done before, and do that. As fledgling as humanity is, humans already have millions of different traditions and areas of study. Just pick one (or many).

[pessimizer]

> Pick something you've never done before, and do that.

You run out of those things shortly after birth. The vast majority of the aspects of everything that you attempt are familiar, and you have already developed habitual approaches to them. Having "never done something before" is shorthand for some experience having some aspect that you have never experienced before, not complete novelty. I'm going to build the strategies of flying a spaceship on the strategies I built learning to drive a car, which were built on the strategies I built learning to walk, which were built on the strategies I built learning to crawl, to manipulate my parents by crying, to identify distinct objects using my eyes, etc...

Eventually, the actually novel part of any new experience becomes vanishingly small. If anything, the ability to enjoy novelty, or to even see things as novel, is increased with our ability to forget. Maybe for a society, the ability to innovate relies on the ability to leave behind a bunch of brains whose plasticity has long been lost due to a lack of mental exercise.

[nynx]

Get some help man

[bpizzi]

Those beliefs you spell are quite absolutes to me. Humanity is not made after a single mind model. What you take for granted (« nobody has endless capacity for creating the new ») might very well be an utterly false premise.

[kiba]

For the vast majority of our history, there had been little to no technological changes.

Only difference is that in the last few centuries, there had been technological and scientific changes.

What changes? it's certainly isn't that old men die faster so that we embrace newer ideas faster. The old guards probably lived longer on average thanks to medicine.

[millstone]

Progress (technological or otherwise) is exponential by nature, because it builds on itself. What has changed is that its pace has outstripped our capacity to integrate it. So our age of peak contribution trends lower, towards the younger generation, which has less to unlearn.

As I grow older, I can see how my thinking is affected by my past. Someone with an unencumbered perspective will do the new thing, when I cannot.

[antepodius]

It's an economic problem. Right now, there's this torrent of new minds to come up with new ideas thanks to their lack of preconceptions, so there's no effort put towards alternatives.

There's a lot of possibilities that will open up as our tech advances. Say, wiping all memories of your field so you can learn it again with a fresh mind. Spawning short-lived digital clones of your mind with the mental 'temperature' turned up, in whatever way that's possible- maybe just dose them up with synthetic lsd in different doses- and observe the results. Lots of ways to get novel ideas without having to rely on wastefully growing billions of brains (and the attached bodies!) before throwing them, and most of the information in them, away to rot.

[pessimizer]

A specific technological change: writing (and printing.) We were able to remember longer spans more accurately than could be done by memorization and the passing of that knowledge from old to young. Reversions occur due to the active destruction of recorded history through war and religion. When the retention of novelty depends on the health of a relatively small number of people, as a society you're perpetually rediscovering instead of discovering.

Now our problem is even having the ability to assimilate enough established knowledge during a lifetime to have a chance of making any novel contribution. The obvious endgame to AI is a dream of being able to assimilate information and innovate indefinitely.