The Post-Idea World 368
An anonymous reader sends this quote from an opinion piece in the NY Times:
"If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it's not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don't care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can't instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passé. ... There is the eclipse of the public intellectual in the general media by the pundit who substitutes outrageousness for thoughtfulness, and the concomitant decline of the essay in general-interest magazines. And there is the rise of an increasingly visual culture, especially among the young — a form in which ideas are more difficult to express. But these factors, which began decades ago, were more likely harbingers of an approaching post-idea world than the chief causes of it."
Ah yes (Score:4, Insightful)
Because Graham Bell, Thomas Edison and others were interested in "thought-provoking ideas" and NEVER wanted to instantly monetize on them...
Nah (Score:4, Insightful)
The difference is people expect instant feedback/results from their new ideas in the same way they get instant results from almost everything else these days. The bottom line is it takes a lot of hard work and convincing to get an even vaguely new idea into circulation - exactly the same as it always did. Also it depends on the field, in technology new ideas are constantly being tried out and adopted or discarded.
Timeless BS (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason why (Score:2, Insightful)
Ideas seem not so important is because today's society is based on GREED.Instant wealth and power over the new item or it doesn't get to the people.Sounds a lot like Apple and their i(fill in the blank) whatevers.
Note where the ideas are coming from. Government. (Score:2, Insightful)
Note where they aren't: Corporations. They're seeing a faster ROI by patenting a minor change, rather than researching a major breakthrough. And, worse, they're getting lots of face-time to either cut that ideas factory (The Government) down to nothing or make it a publicly funded R&D outsourced center, where they pay nothing and get to patent the lot.
More like the post-idea media (Score:5, Insightful)
TFA to me says more about the media failing their role as societal and intellectual catalysts, than about a shortage of ideas as such. There are big ideas out there, you just don't hear about them from the media.
At the risk of opening up a political flame war, even the political parties here in the U.S. have big ideas built into their platforms. What level of service and what level of taxation do we really want from our government? How do we distribute the costs of government? Why is illegal immigration a problem and how do we address it? What are the costs of dealing with global warming, and what are the costs of not dealing with it?
It's just that no one is having an intelligent discussion about these topics. They prefer to stake out a position on blind faith and then denounce everyone who disagrees. Seems to me more like a lack of discussion than a shortage of societal challenges or of ideas to deal with those challenges.
narrow minded nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
Max Planck was told in 1874 when looking for a university course "it is hardly worth entering physics anymore because there is nothing important left to discover”
This was long before the days of the atomic model, quantum mechanics, radiation, wave-particle duality etc. All that good stuff that brought us all our shiny electronics and the internet,.
The same is still true - the more we know the more we realise that there's a lot more we still don;t know. Just in the last week I've read about gravity dipoles in qyuantum vacuum fluctuations, and discovery of very dark planets to name but two (ok the latter is a discovery rather than an idea, but we'll now need to work on explaining it, which may lead to new tech., or it may not). It just takes a very very long time for these esoteric ideas to turn into actual useful every day stuff.
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
There are several factors at play here (Score:4, Insightful)
Ideas are plentiful. With ~7,000,000,000 people in the world and a large & growing fraction of them having access to the internet, there are ideas everywhere. You're reading my ideas right now, along with those of hundreds of other people all on this one page.
Ideas are easy. Any idiot can come up with ideas. World peace. Flying cars that run on dog poo. Cities on the moon. Ideas are substantially easier to come up with than they are to actually implement. People who come up with 'concepts' for residential towers with farms hanging off the sides; or city vehicles with odd numbers of wheels powered by unobtanium, or political systems where everyone just gets along and are happy are ten a penny, and the abundance of communication that the internet provides makes this painfully obvious.
There are fewer 'good' big ideas left. With all the ideas that everyone has already had and are coming up with all the time, fewer new ideas are actually 'original'; and the originality of an idea can be quickly proved or disproved with 30 seconds on Google.
Specialisation. With the bigger ideas aleady thought of and written about, the lions share of ideas these days is in specialised niches; the 'long tail' if you will. The problem is that such ideas cannot capture the imagination of people at large. There are people coming more ideas than ever, but it's hard to raise enthusiasm for big ideas in computer science or industrial management.
"Good-old-fashioned nostalgia" History seems to be chock full of bold people with big ideas, but a lot of the time it's just dumb nostalgia. Sure, those Victorians wrote a lot of well-considered books and built a fair deal of physical and social infrastructure that persists to this day, but we're talking about 60-100 years here. The innovations and achievements of the past 60 years blow any other 60 year period in history into oblivion. Of course in the past everyone was more 'rational' (ignoring the bigger participation in and seriousness of religion then), was 'healthier' (ignoring the starvation), 'got on better' (ignoring the regular riots/wars/crime) blah blah blah. Probably back then concerned intellectuals railed against the talents of the world being wasted on arranging girders to support mechanical horses, or on the manufacture of cloth etc. No doubt in 100 years time people will be talking in hushed tones about those 'heroes' of the early 21st century, when there were big ideas, and people lived happily in peace without the nefarious influence of xx yy...
Ideas. Not Inventions. (Score:5, Insightful)
Too many comments so far are missing the point: the article isn't about lack of new "things." The article is about a lack of critical thinking.
It used to be that, in the past, magazines and newspapers and other "common-man" publications would have essays about heady topics. Now you just get articles about how to get rich quick, how some superstar or politician has done something, or some other essentially mundane topic.
Even the "debates" on economics, social norms, climate change, or intellectual property are very sparse on respectful discourse and are instead filled with emotional responses. There's an interesting quote to which I cannot recall attribution, along the lines of "If you get angry when you're defending your topic, that's probably a sign that you don't feel it can stand on its own merits." The lack of temperance in such discussions - from all viewpoints - is fairly damning.
Modern society seems to frown upon thought for thought's sake: if you can't monetize it, why bother? I'd say that "modern society" in this case has missed the point: earning wealth is not the only goal.
Re:Actually... (Score:4, Insightful)
IMO this mentality is usually due to the fact that the authors are far abstracted from the realms of innovation within science, business and general subcultures of society. All sorts of amazing things are being thought of, written about, developed and researched, but are out of sight of the main stream New York Times journalism.
Re:There are several factors at play here (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course in the past everyone was more 'rational' (ignoring the bigger participation in and seriousness of religion then)
You're looking at the rewriting of history and thinking the rewrite is true. "The victorians" were much less constrained by religion than we currently are today. All of that "founded by christians" and "in god we trust" is a post WWII addition to the history books, mostly on a anti-commie trip.
Your basic argument remains correct, that was just a bad example.
One important point you missed is its too expensive to F around. For example, a large part of quantum mechanics was brought about by shining a UV light on a piece of metal and being surprised at the highly unexpected characteristics of the emitted electrons. Back then, a guy could F around in the lab and pretty much do what he wants without a PERT chart. Most time spent screwing around in the lab, was, of course, wasted, but some time developed into the field of quantum mechanics. Now a days, you're not going to be allowed to do blue sky experimentation at a billion dollar national lab, therefore, no progress will be made there. Whoops. The MBA manager points at the PERT chart and says, here is where you'll invent something on schedule and as planned. Or most likely not.
Re:Ah yes (Score:2, Insightful)
That's because, even if you have a genuine idea, and especially if it is a profitable idea, you will be sued by all the big apples, and at the end you will be happy if you are not under the water, or not in jail....
Re:Timeless BS (Score:4, Insightful)
These articles are silly. They are nostalgic for a time that never was. They don't understand that history is a highlight reel. The big ideas happen once, maybe twice in a generation and few people actually contribute to them. "Public intellectuals" are no less or more important today then they were 100 years ago. What big ideas does the author think are being ignored?
SETI is still operating, that is about as big as ideas get. Quantum Physic/Mechanicss is still widely researched and very well funded. Neither of these subjects has any immediate commercial value.
My big idea is that TFA was written by a moron that fancies himself an intellectual. Oh shoot, does that make me a pundit?
Re:A counter-example (Score:5, Insightful)
I like TED speeches, but they are just murmuring popular memes using great sophistry skills at each other. Don't confused TED talks with actual new ideas. I suppose it is possible to be ignorant enough to learn something from a TED talk, but ... probably unlikely.
Real new ideas are not a rehash of "lets try world peace", "lets all feel catholic style guilt at destroying the earth", "computers make pretty pictures".
Real new ideas, historically, were the result of things like "what happens if I shine a UV light at a piece of metal in a vacuum, for no better reason than no one tried this before?" "what happens if I store a tank of double bonded fluorocarbons in a sorta catalytic environment for a long time, just because we can?" "what if we tried to simulate the orbit of an electron using discrete energy levels, just for the heck of it?"
Not, "here's a popular fuzzy idea that no one politically correct or socially acceptable could possibly dislike, now let me sharpen my sophistry skills upon it for less than 18 minutes"
We're not even having the same conversation (Score:4, Insightful)
People are just doing their own shit. There can't be era-defining ideas because all the different little conversations we're having don't even connect anymore. For an idea to make an impact on society, we first need a society that's more or less on the same page. That's what's missing. Sure, the internet makes everything easier, including the communication of ideas. Just look at fora.tv or bigthink or TED. You can fill every free minute listening to brilliant people talk about some pretty deep ideas. But what you can't expect is that these ideas will be a part of some larger social conversation. They happen off to the side somewhere. My academic friends and I give a fuck, but not many other people do. Or maybe they do, but they have no idea that I do too, because nobody can assume anymore that the people standing around the watercooler read the same "ideas" books, saw the same "ideas" discussion - or even the same news program. Only events are a part of our common culture, so you can talk to anyone about Breivik, or dumping Bin Laden's body in the sea, or the future of the Euro. But there are very few ideas in general social circulation, apart from maybe stuff about Keynsian interventions and other macroeconimic stuff. These are big ideas for sure, but nobody I know (myself included) feels like they have any solid understanding of what's involved. Macroeconomics looks like voodoo, so it's hard to talk about while feeling like you're having an informed conversation.
It's not just nostalgia or some historical distortion that things were different between the two world wars. There was relativity, Communism, anarchism, feminism/sufferage, the uncertainty principle, Bauhaus functionalism and a dozen other art "schools" organized around ideas, the incompleteness theorem, Freud, social Darwinism, logical positivism... and I really could go on and on. And cafes were abuzz with conversation about this very stuff. Not everyone had an opinion about all of it, but everyone did have an opinion about some of it, and it was in your face, because people took it as obvious that these aren't just ideas. Each one you accept gives you an obligation to act, and these actions were impossible to miss for anyone who lived in a major European or North American city. Things really are quite different now. Big ideas are still being thought, but somewhere out of sight. Which means that they don't get a chance to get "big" in the same way they used to be.
The Elites have Changed (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people have not cared about new big ideas throughout history.
Well, maybe, and maybe not. I think you might be surprised at how widespread Enlightenment ideas were in Europe. Faraday used to give public scientific demonstrations that were widely attended. However, what matters I think more is that the elites of our society, those who make the important decisions are increasingly seeing the world through dollar signs. The Public Interest is less important to them, and private interest is their dominant concern. They backhandedly acknowledge the Public Interest by saying that it is served by everyone acting in their own private interests. This is a profound shift from the Enlightenment approach, that led to the rise of our modern democratic systems. Enlightenment philosophes like Locke, Rousseau, and Voltaire tried to balance the Public and private interests; they believed in liberty and justice for all members of society. Today, politics seems to be an exercise in maximizing the gross national product.