[confluence]

Let me just ask - When has anyone ever actually invented anything totally new?

The telephone? It was referred to as the "speaking telegraph" (telegraph + speakers).

The car? Horseless carriage (engine + wheels + steering + brakes)

The plane? Glider + engine. The Wright brothers invented powered flight - not flight. The difficulty was getting the weight to lift ratio high enough with a primitive heavy engine on board. Gliders already existed - you just couldn't go anywhere with them! You can't just jump off a cliff and glide to China.

Google? A more advanced MITS algorithm + inktomi's commodity cluster map-reduce architecture + inktomi's PPC. Indeed, had inktomi doubled down on search instead of their CDN, we might well be talking about inktomi and not Google.

General and Special Relativity? Nope - http://www.quora.com/If-Albert-Einstein-had-never-existed-at....

There are no really new ideas out there - merely combinations old ones that "hang in the air". There are no new ideas - merely old ones combined in unique ways.

Everything is a remix (https://vimeo.com/14912890).

[Confusion]

Upvoted, but I disagree. I think you are spot on with suggesting actual progress does not happen by inventing anything 'new' from scratch. But I do not agree nothing new is ever invented.

Arguing that things come about as combinations upon combinations of small, 'not completely new' inventions is begging the question. When you compare the state of human affairs in 5000 BC with the state now, you can't possibly mean that no 'completely new' things have been created.

This is the same problem as e.g. distinguishing species in biology. Of the countless intermediate forms, you cannot point to a single one as a 'completely new' species. However, 1000 generations after an earthquake, the species on both sides of the created ravine have diverged so much they can no longer interbreed. There are now two species where there was one, so a new one must have come into existence, right?

Andreessen is completely right in suggesting you don't want to aim to invent something 'completely new' on the spot. Nevertheless, if you can see where something could be going, you could aim for something new say 10 years down the road.

[confluence]

Wait long enough and things will appear new and magical. My point is merely that any invention is still the gradual accumulation and unique combination of previous ideas (and so forth). Even if you lack the knowledge about how something came to be it does not change the fact that: Everything is a remix.

> Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

> if you can see where something could be going

This is kind of a punctuated intellectual evolution. The idea is to "go where the puck is going to be" - which is perfectly reasonable as intelligence is not constrained by natural evolutionary mechanisms.

YouTube's Jawed Karim said this exactly when he stated that their success was a "confluence" (see what I did there) of Dot-com bust dark fibre lighting back up, the introduction of cheap DSL broadband, the integration of computers in all American households, the domination of Adobe Flash and the rapidly decreasing cost of storage/computation.

He also stated that YouTube was nothing new. It was merely a combination of other technologies which arrived at the right time to be held up by a rich society and progressive technology to become one of the biggest internet properties the world has ever seen.

A confluence of events if you will.

[crusso]

Wait long enough and things will appear new and magical. My point is merely that any invention is still the gradual accumulation and unique combination of previous ideas (and so forth). Even if you lack the knowledge about how something came to be it does not change the fact that: Everything is a remix.

No one disagrees that all inventions build upon older ideas and inventions.

Your attempt to redefine what the word "new" means in the realm of inventions doesn't logically prove anything. It's just kind of a semantically-induced logical dead-end.

A confluence of events if you will.

This reminds me of arguing with a Creationist about the statistical likelihood that DNA would have assembled randomly from the primordial ooze. They claim that man must have been "created" because of the statistical unlikelihood that base chemicals would just randomly assemble into a living creature. Their arguments always ignore the electro-chemical and evolutionary forces that drive the "confluence" and turn it from a random coincidence to a statistical likelihood. Likewise, you appear to ignore the drive of the individual inventor in assembling and delivering pre-existing technologies.

Were the technologies unavailable to make YouTube before it was made? No. What was new was the assembly of those technologies at the proper time when they could be supported by the environment. As individual technologies, nothing was "new". As a whole, it was definitely new.

Once again, I perceive your argument as an exercise in semantics to denigrate the new by redefining "new" in order to make some larger argument about the incremental contribution of inventions made by inventors. In order to reach your same conclusions, one would have to pretend that there was no novelty in the way that pre-existing things were assembled.

There are negligibly few atoms on the Earth that weren't here 4 billion years ago, yet I doubt you'd argue that nothing new has appeared on the Earth since then.

[Edit: Clarified the Creationist point]

[confluence]

You do realize that there were other video hosting sites founded just before and just after YouTube. If they didn't exist someone else would have taken their place. Any individual person or team is not special. There are always equivalent teams out there that would have gladly taken their place. If you understand the concepts of evolution, path dependence, statistical randomness, catastrophic failure and causality you would realise that ideas and people are a product of their times and not the other way around.

Whoever said that DNA was the only thing to have been created from randomness. There were probably many self-reproducing molecules created by randomness. It does not follow that DNA was special or that any one strand was - there were always analogues ready to take its place. What was special was the environment these molecules evolved in.

[crusso]

Any individual person or team is not special.

Completely contradictory to my personal experience as well as to my observations in society.

In my personal life, I've known a few special people who are smart enough to be visionaries with acceptably unique visions in their fields. They inspired and drove others around them and produced successful enterprises while our competitors floundered. Without them, we would have been mediocre like our competitors.

If Steve Jobs had not returned to Apple, Apple would not have become dominant and might just have gone out of business. I was there. We had Sculley, Amelio, etc. They put the lie to your "no one is special" theory. They failed and almost drove the company out of business. Jobs came along and completely turned the company around. He made it look easy.

there are always analogues ready to take its place.

Citation for successful analogues to DNA driving multi-cellular life, please. We know of none. Any analogues that may have developed to prevent or replace DNA's rise may well have never advanced beyond simple single cells. I'd say it's a ridiculous notion that an analogue to DNA would have filled the vacuum if DNA hadn't come to pass.

[confluence]

> Completely contradictory to my personal experience as well as to my observations in society.

Irrelevant. These observations are coloured by selection bias.

> successful enterprises while our competitors floundered

What about all the visionaries that failed? What about the non-visionaries that succeeded?

> Without them, we would have been mediocre like our competitors.

Presumption that competitors would not have done what you had done given enough time. Presumption also that your success makes you not mediocre - when in fact it merely indicates success.

> If Steve Jobs had not returned to Apple

Some other company would've released a mp3 player, a tablet and a smart phone. Your not that special - it is foolish to be arrogant enough to think that you deserve what you get and that because your sole reason for success is your own work. This is a fundamental attribution error.

> They failed and almost drove the company out of business

Jobs came back in 1997 correct? After Windows reached its dominance correct? So the cash stops bleeding just after Windows has dominated and there is really nothing left to do but join up with them.

> He made it look easy.

Maybe because it was.

> Citation for successful analogues to DNA driving multi-cellular life

Well how do you know DNA was unique and special? Because it succeeded? That does not follow. What if the environment changed - such that it favoured DNA molecules over another just through randomness - well then the other molecules get wiped out.

It is foolhardy to assume that DNA could be the only useful substrate for multi-cellular life. But we can't rerun the damn test because - wait for it - EXTREME PATH DEPENDENCE.

I end this conversation.

[confluence]

See here for another competitor that could've taken out YouTube: http://www.quora.com/Vimeo/Why-did-YouTube-succeed-where-Vim...

Everything is a remix. And there is always someone ready to take your place.

[nitrogen]

Arguing that things come about as combinations upon combinations of small, 'not completely new' inventions is begging the question. When you compare the state of human affairs in 5000 BC with the state now, you can't possibly mean that no 'completely new' things have been created.

This is like measuring the slope of a line across a very large span, and saying that because the change in Y value is so large, there must be a discontinuity.

This is the same problem as e.g. distinguishing species in biology....

I don't think biology is the best place to look for guidance when creating an epistemology or taxonomy of technology. The concept of species is important in biology, because it's a strong signal as to which organisms can successfully interbreed. In technology, nearly any two (or more) ideas can be combined.

[crusso]

I think you're playing a game of semantics while also disregarding the extraordinary value of ideas that drive arrangement and purpose which thus define created/evolved things as "new".

Semantically, who expects that something "new" has to be made from some exotic arrangement of Higgs Bosons doing something in extra dimensions that we had never thought possible? New is whatever people tend to agree on is different enough to call it that.

In terms of your disregard of arrangement and purpose, think of it this way: The atoms that make up a human being and give him all the range of thought and emotion that he has can be copied chemically and put in a big jar. That jar of chemicals is cheap and practically valueless. The particular arrangement that makes up a human being is something completely new and different from the sum of its parts. A cynic would say, "But a living human is just a rearrangement of pre-existing carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and some other common chemicals."

[Someone]

But weren't these things new precisely because the only way to describe them was using already existing words? If the telephone wasn't a new thing, why didn't we have a word for it yet?

Also, I think you are undervaluing the worth of that discovering a use for some combination of things that have existed for ages.

I think that even can be true if that combination, in hindsight, looks like a simple continuation of existing developments. A cride analogy: in hindsight, many problems appear to be in P, while they actually are NP-complete.

[confluence]

Perhaps.

However any new idea always has multiple origins. The combination may be novel but there are always others iterating on the same problem at the same time (remember Leibniz and Newton? Or Marconi and Tesla? Or everyone else?).

The only reason you think they are unique is because of success bias. You only remember the winners. But just because someone won - it does not follow that they were unique or the best. It just means they just happened to win.

[Retric]

The first battery is in no way a simple composition of existing ideas. Inventing a useful and novel idea is both hard and rare. The most extreme example might just be the fact Australia had 'modern' humans for 40,000 years without inventing the bow and arrow even though they had spears. And the rest of the world spent those 40,000 years without inventing the returning boomerang even though 'hunting' sticks where found in Europe well over 10,000 years ago.

[confluence]

As much as it pains me to say this, you are wrong :(

If you read the battery's history carefully you'll realize that it's the combination of previous findings in chemistry and electronics. See the other comment with the history link.

Just because you cannot conceive the exact intermediaries between single cells and a human being does not mean they didn't exist or that human's appeared from thin air.

I repeat: Everything is a remix.

[Retric]

There where battery's in 200BCE making that line of argument moot.

[confluence]

Perhaps but my point still stands.

[Retric]

? You can say everything is just a pattern using a relatively small set of elementary particles. And that's more or less true, but once you start moving back eventually you will find two hydrogen atoms that where cold enough to stick together for the first time, and guess what that had no prior precedence.

So to the line that separates a true multicellular organism from a colony of related cells that assist each other is not completely obvious, but when that colony starts to have specialization that's a 'new' thing.

As is the line that separates a smart phone from a normal one. Perhaps you move back the smart phone to include the first phone with an app store, but there is still a line you can draw even if where you draw it comes down the the specific definition you use.

PS: Fuzzy definitions does not mean you can't draw the line, just that different people will use a slightly different definitions to draw a slightly different line.

[confluence]

Ah but you see my friend that first collision was due to the combination of the four fundamental forces acting on the products of quantum physics. Indeed the only truly original "idea" is the big bang.

However there are indications that it too is neither unique nor special and may very well itself be a simulation or a small part of an infinite multiverse.

[Dn_Ab]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_battery suggests that basic knowledge and early experimentation with the known concept of electricity and a disagreement about whether a dead frog's leg can generate electricity inspired the battery. Volta notes those whose work he relied on.

[Retric]

Your confusing the origin of the term and the reinvention of the battery with the actual first battery ever produced in Mesopotamia if not earlier.

[BadassFractal]

Sounds very analogous to Steven Johnson's "Adjacent Possible" from his book "Where Good Ideas Come From".

[LukeStebbing]

Special Relativity was in the air in 1906. General Relativity wasn't. The comments on that Quora post make a similar point.

Edit: Whoops! It was obviously in the air in 1906, since Einstein published in 1905. :)

[confluence]

Perhaps. Perhaps not. Counter factuals are mere speculations. But if I had to make a choice between Einstein being special or the time being special I'd pick the time any day. People are replaceable - situations aren't - no exceptions.

[crusso]

But if I had to make a choice between Einstein being special or the time being special I'd pick the time any day.

So if you're hiring someone to fill a role at your organization, I guess you don't need to interview them? Just put a warm body in the chair and the magic will happen?

Alternatively, why do you post to HN? The situation is here without you. Why do you consider your thoughts and opinions to be special enough to share in any way?

[confluence]

Just because I said that people weren't special - it does not follow that all people for all jobs are equivalent.

If you look at the development of any theory or invention you'll notice that there are multiple origins that converge to a single feature (just like - wait for it - EVOLUTION!).

Any one individual is not special as there always others who could've taken their place.

[crusso]

Any one individual is not special as there always others who could've taken their place.

If that were the case, then history would be one steady series of progressions that would look the same from isolated geographic region to isolated geographic region and from culture to culture.

The American Indians would have developed in a similar manner and pace as the Europeans. The Australian Aborigines would have developed in a similar manner and pace as the Chinese. The Incans would have developed in a similar manner and pace as the British.

They didn't. We have records that tell us about the individuals and groups who had ideas that significantly affected the course of history. Your argument is completely contradicted by even a cursory examination of the historical record.

[confluence]

> The American Indians would have developed in a similar manner and pace as the Europeans

Wrong.

Just because I indicated that others may take there place - it does not follow that anyone - anywhere could. For Einstein - another European physicist could've taken his place. For the Romans - barbarians could've taken their place (and did - remember the Mongols?). For America - the Spanish could've taken their place (too bad they lost the Spanish Armada thanks to a war started by trying to build an empire using the wealth of silver mined in South America which weakened their North American position and give Louisiana to the French who themselves were weakened by war and sold it to the Americans).

Do you know why? EXTREME PATH DEPENDENCE since all things are the accumulation of local ideas/effects - as per causality/evolution.