An alternative hypothesis is that less time is being devoted to these kinds of questions (see here and here).
This potentially has somewhat complex effects, i.e. it’s not just that you get fewer novel insights with 100 hours spent thinking than 200 hours spent thinking, but that you get more novel insights from 100 hours spent thinking when doing so against a backdrop of lots of other people thinking and generating ideas in an active intellectual culture.
To be clear, I don’t think this totally explains the observation. I also think that it’s true, to some extent, that the lowest hanging fruit has been picked, and that this kind of volume probably isn’t optimising for weird new ideas.
Perhaps related to the second point, I also think it may be the case that relatively more recent work in this area has been ‘paradigmatic’ rather than ‘pre-paradigmatic’ or ‘crisis stage’, which likely generates fewer exciting new insights.
An alternative hypothesis is that less time is being devoted to these kinds of questions (see here and here).
This potentially has somewhat complex effects, i.e. it’s not just that you get fewer novel insights with 100 hours spent thinking than 200 hours spent thinking, but that you get more novel insights from 100 hours spent thinking when doing so against a backdrop of lots of other people thinking and generating ideas in an active intellectual culture.
To be clear, I don’t think this totally explains the observation. I also think that it’s true, to some extent, that the lowest hanging fruit has been picked, and that this kind of volume probably isn’t optimising for weird new ideas.
Perhaps related to the second point, I also think it may be the case that relatively more recent work in this area has been ‘paradigmatic’ rather than ‘pre-paradigmatic’ or ‘crisis stage’, which likely generates fewer exciting new insights.