[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.

[crusso]

I end this conversation.

I guess it shouldn't really matter since someone else equivalent to both of us will step in to continue it. I mean, if Albert Einstein is easily replaceable as you said, you and I can't be important for the continuation of anything.

[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.