I think there are a couple things with the bicycle. One is that it depended on materials and manufacturing techniques much more than is obvious (and more than I even brought out in that post): bearings, hollow metal tubes, gears and chains, rubber, etc.
The other is that it’s really just the overall story of progress: in a sense there was lots of low-hanging fruit for thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution.
But if you want to understand progress now, 300 years in, when the markets are much more efficient, so to speak, the analysis is different. Now there are lots of fruit-pickers everywhere looking for fruit. So there’s less obvious stuff lying around. Which is why we need to open up new technical fields, to discover whole new orchards of fruit (some of which will be low-hanging).
Yes, but what I’m getting at is How do we know there’s a limited number of low hanging fruit? Or, as we make progress, don’t previously high fruit come into reach? AND, more progress opens more markets/fields.
It seems to me low hanging fruit is a bad analogy because there’s not way to know the number of undiscovered fruit out there. And perhaps it’s infinite. Or, it INCREASES the more we figure out.
My two cents—stagnation isn’t due to supply of good ideas waiting to be discovered, it’s stifling of free and open exploration by our norms that promote institutionalization of discovery.
I think there are a couple things with the bicycle. One is that it depended on materials and manufacturing techniques much more than is obvious (and more than I even brought out in that post): bearings, hollow metal tubes, gears and chains, rubber, etc.
The other is that it’s really just the overall story of progress: in a sense there was lots of low-hanging fruit for thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution.
But if you want to understand progress now, 300 years in, when the markets are much more efficient, so to speak, the analysis is different. Now there are lots of fruit-pickers everywhere looking for fruit. So there’s less obvious stuff lying around. Which is why we need to open up new technical fields, to discover whole new orchards of fruit (some of which will be low-hanging).
Yes, but what I’m getting at is How do we know there’s a limited number of low hanging fruit? Or, as we make progress, don’t previously high fruit come into reach? AND, more progress opens more markets/fields.
It seems to me low hanging fruit is a bad analogy because there’s not way to know the number of undiscovered fruit out there. And perhaps it’s infinite. Or, it INCREASES the more we figure out.
My two cents—stagnation isn’t due to supply of good ideas waiting to be discovered, it’s stifling of free and open exploration by our norms that promote institutionalization of discovery.
Maybe there’s just a confusion with the metaphor here? I generally agree that there is a practically infinite amount of progress to be made.