Ideas aren’t getting harder to find and anyone who tells you otherwise is a coward and I will fight them

So if past ideas seem obvious and future ideas seem obscure, it’s tempting to conclude we live at the inflection point where ideas suddenly get harder to find. And maybe we do. But we’d feel that way even if ideas weren’t getting harder to find, and that should make us a little skeptical.

To do science, you don’t need to start with the dawn of all human knowledge and then work forward. You start with the current state of knowledge and go from there. Learning the history of science is helpful for shaping your intuitions and giving you perspective, but you don’t actually have to read Darwin, for example, to do evolutionary biology.

I once found this idea seductive. Now I find it outrageous. It’s not just because it’s wrong; it’s an affront to the human spirit. People only discover stuff when they think it’s worth trying, and there have been entire eras of human history where people didn’t think it was worth trying. A meme like “ideas are getting harder to find” could drive th... See more