Innovation

[chenda]

You maybe could look at this historically and look at 'The Great Divergence' why Europe suddenly pulled ahead of India and China and everywhere else. Not that innovation is exclusively western of course but afaik there is no consensus at all as to why this happened.

I seriously wonder how many people who portray themselves as huge fans of innovation are really mostly profiting from skimpazz screwturning marginal misery increasing resort to efficiency

Matt Ridley is perhaps one of them given his disastrous banking career...I agree with above, he is a competent writer with a good marketing team behind him, but there is little if any original thought behind his work from what I've read of him.

[daylen]

Interesting model Jacob.

@chenda The best explanation I have come across for European divergence is geographical. There are natural borders between the U.K., France, Spain, Italy, etc., they are all about the same size, and they are not too big or too small. Meaning that it was too hard for a single government to conquer and keep/rule the whole region. It does seem like geography(*) is the dominate factor on the time scale of hundreds of years although it is obviously important to take into account cultural factors (primarily on the time scale of decades).

Also, both India and China were mostly isolated from other cultures for much of history so there was not much incentive to innovate. There are some exceptions like the Mongols, of course. Africa is big and flat with few rivers or natural harbors. South America is dense and diverse so it is hard to travel quickly which is required for governmental control over a large region. North America is excellent geographically but also big and navigable (does not encourage tall settlement). Australia is very limited by food and water.

(*) Especially if you include resources like coal and climate.

[Stahlmann]

as this topic pops up in news feeds so basement dweller amateur system thinker from Eastern Europe needs to chime in:

r u trying to "square the circle" of governmental intervention combined with military spending and then commercialization by public sector of next generation shiny plastic gadgets?

[jacob]

In that sense, I think it's possible to argue that much of the effort in the US in the last 30 years (since the interwebs) has been on innovation, specifically how to make current production more efficient with a higher profit/worker ratio. Anything that didn't abide was cut away and shipped (diffused) offshore.

In contrast, the cold war era was heavily focused on invention which then made its way into the consumer market. Currently, big government packages are mainly (think about it) financial bailout packages paid in arrears.

Another issue is that the median wealth/capita only increases when discoveries create disperseable inventions that require a lot of workers to implement. For example, the discovery of electricity was followed by building power plants and all the gadgets and appliances that electricity could power to each and every home ... resulted in a lot more wealth than implementing internet or 5G coordinated just-in-time inventory management in a robot factory.

Look at the market cap composition of the S&P500 and tell me if you see a problem. There are 5 conspicuous companies comprising nearly 20% of the economy employing how many people (many of whom are stock workers and social media moderators on contract pay)? The financial sector is quite large compared to industrials and consumer cyclicals (ex amzn); that is, the companies financing stuff are BIGGER than the companies actually making stuff. What if any useful financial discoveries, inventions, or innovations have been made in the past 20 years? Does it even make sense to talk about such as innovations?

Also, when looking at the heat map, brains are attracted to the big ones ... what does this imply about the future? In which sectors are we discovering and inventing now insofar we can hope to turn that into innovation a couple of decades ago and not have to complain to the WTO about other countries diffusing our innovations.

Sorry, I'm probably hi-jacking at this point ...

[Stahlmann]

wrt to the second last paragrapg, tbh, I came here (partially), bc I watched "movies with yellow subtittles" in the past (it must be said in such "no thinking" phase of me, I stood up and left room screeing David Icke movie during "conspiracy theorist convention". I hope I will be guy who won't salute during next ''bad"-ism regime . You should guess what my kryptonite is

I switched from blaming [racial group who "can't be named"], to [some shady figures presented by Scrooge McDuck alike].
_______

wrt topic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ha-Joon_Chang
I don't provide specific book name just to avoid being named [insert world view you don't like]-snowflake.

[Jason]

Enough of this Matt Ridley bashing. I get it. He hasn't reinvented the wheel. Nor reinvented the wheel on the topic of re-inventing the wheel. But he's got an English accent and made me feel smart for an hour and a half. Can't watch videos of teenagers being dragged across open fields by parachutes every waking moment of the day.

[chenda]

@daylen, very interesting. Similarly, I've heard it argued the huge agricultural plains of northern India led to a settled life and a leisured class wheres the harsh, mountainous terrain of Iran led to tribal conflict between herdsmen which led to a massive, expansionist empire.

[7Wannabe5]

@chenda:

One suggestion I read was that it had to do with multiple sources of capital and authority. In China during that era if the giant centralized bureaucracy did not rubber stamp/fund your innovation, you were out of luck. But in Europe you could shop your venture around like Columbus.

Elsewhere, I have read that it might have had more to do with earlier needful move from wood to coal due to deforestation. Nobody wanted to dig or deal with dirty coal, but once it became a necessity it quickly led to other possibilities. IOW, roughly analogous to how hunting large herbivores towards extinction forced agricultural development.

@jacob:

As always I welcome your input. Do you think the emphasis on financialization in the U.S. is indicative of the fact that the global oligarchy no longer frets about national economy? Not to mention regional watershed.

[fiby41]

Also, both India and

What 'much of history' is supposed to mean here is ambiguous but one Roman politician went on record 2 thousand years ago saying that 'India and that peninsula together drain our empire 100 million sesterces/year. This is the price that our luxuries and our woman cost us'

China were mostly isolated from other cultures for much of history so there was not much incentive to innovate.

Paper, printing press, gunpowder, mechanical turnkey toys, public service examinations?

South America is dense and diverse so it is hard to travel quickly which is required for governmental control over a large region.

The Incan empire begs to differ.

[daylen]

True, any one sentence generalization about a whole continent is going to have exceptions. Very, very rough averages are still useful for drawing very, very rough conclusions (especially over thousands of years). "Prisoners of Geography" dives into a more thorough analysis if interested. I have to admit, much of my intuition on this comes from playing civilization. Not a bad geographical simulator.

[daylen]

I have this hypothesis that lineages in both India and China had a selection pressure (until modern times perhaps) against Se-Ni in favor of Ne-Si because each region lacks incentive for expansionism. Anyway, here is a basic geopolitical analysis that can be done to gain intuition.

outline natural borders -> identify near closed regions and close them with dotted lines -> identify inland rivers and low-lying coastal borders -> shade regions with mountains, jungles, deserts, or marches -> place dots on cities with 100,000 population -> one concentric circle for 1 million population, two concentric circles for 10 million population -> connect cities with curves representing trade routes -> connect harbors

This is obviously just a simple recipe and can be done in your head. Yet, it is quite helpful when predicting what will happen in a game of civilization or when explaining historical phenomena. Generally, intuition can be established not from the whole layout (Se), but from identifying the symmetries (or asymmetries) within it (Ni).

geography -> geometry -> networking -> symmetry

This can also be correlated with institutional positions (political, commercial, scientific, religious, etc.). There is also a whole lot more that can be said on personality preferences in relation to this. I may get into this on my journal.

[7Wannabe5]

Where the introverted NTP sees design as an end in itself, the extroverted NTP sees design as a means;the end is the invention that works, the prototype that is replicable. Ideas are valuable when and only when they make possible actions and objects. “It can’t be done” is a challenge to an ENTP and elicits a reaction of “I can do it.” They are not, however, the movers of mountains as are the INTJs. Rather, the faith of the ENTPs is in their ability to improvise something, and they display an unusual talent for rising to the expediency of a situation. Superficially, ENTPs resemble ESTPs in their derringer-do. But the focus of the ENTP is on competency and the sense of power this gives, rather than on the feeling of freedom of action experienced by the ESTP.

-“Please Understand Me: Character & Temperament Types” - Keirsey and Bates

Thus, the reason why I am obsessed with the topic of innovation and its role in current discussions involving economics and resource conservation. Rationally, I believe the shit is overdue to hit the fan, but temperamentally, I believe in ever present possibility of the last minute play and almost infinite substitution. IOW, I don’t at all believe in “They’ll figure it out.” as a solution to big problems looming, but I core believe in “I’ll figure something out.” as solution to small problems as they present themselves.

As an ENTP, my general take on conservation is that we should make an effort to conserve the complex things that already exist, such as coral reefs and books on the topic of picket fence design, not because I in any way want to preserve tradition or inhibit change (quite the opposite!), but because complex things already created represent valuable ingredients towards new recipes. That’s why my favorite takeaway from John Michael Greer’s books is his suggestion that abandoned patents from the past could be unearthed and revised towards functionality in the eco-technic future.

So, I guess I am wondering how the perspective of INTJs and other types well-represented on this board vary in this regard?

[daylen]

As the quote says, I just design models and generate hypotheses without much thought/care about how they will actually manifest in reality.

[7Wannabe5]

@daylen:

Since I am actually very close to being XNTP, I grok that perspective too. In fact, I very often become bored with projects at the point I can see likely success. I feel compelled to prove “Can be done!” to myself only, but often I do need some degree of tangibility to convince even myself, and/or to accomplish the learning necessary. For instance, I wouldn’t be satisfied with just a design for a unique water collection system, I would have to see it splash.

[daylen]

I guess the question I am pondering is how this might be modeled and whether or not it directly relates to Jacob’s diagrams demonstrating the increased financial resilience of a Renaissance set of skills. IOW, I am suggesting that “resilience” and “innovation” are complementary concepts and they are both in oppositional tension with “efficiency”, but also something like “robustness” defined as having a large stock, but little variety or flexibility. IOW, innovation and anti-fragility are also likely complementary concepts.

This is hinting at an underlying evolution with variation and differential selection. For invention to be subject to evolutionary pressures, there must be enough new ideas generated so that not all ideas can survive indefinitely and there must be enough variation such that idea-space covers a region with multiple adaptive peaks. Not all ideas can persist into the future, so there may be some kind of selection mechanism akin to gradient ascent/descent towards adaptive peaks/valleys in a machine learning algorithm. This ties into meme evolution.

So, all memes can be used across the (discovery, invention, innovation, diffusion)-space, and memes can be concatenated and eroded into new memes through communication. Publications represent one level of selection approximated by citations. Patents represent another level of selection based on the number of derivative products. Innovation represents another based on what methods end up being taught in business school. Diffusion based on what ends up being taught to engineers. Citations, products, business sense, and engineering sense are all linked by a handful of memes which then get encoded into the common tongue.

[daylen]

Oh, I forgot to tie in resilience. Each agent undergoes cognitive development which is really just another meme-evolution process happening within a single human mind(*). In absence of resilience, the mind is forced into a low-entropy configuration subjected by the demands of an institution. This is not conducive to novel meme generation, because the agent has less time/energy to explore/ingest meme-space (the memome?) leading to a lack of variation. Also this must compete with memes selected by institutional demands. Fourth-order, extroverted agents would be maximally embedded in such an institutional structure. Hence, fifth-order agents are required for inter-institutional discovery/invention/innovation/diffusion (symmetrical to the more introverted version of inter-formalism). The memome can be extended beyond the collective unconscious or be mutated to form a new collective conscious via the conversion of dreams into memes.

The selection of dreams has something to do with how some dreams can derive a larger set of memes than others with less effort. A steep hierarchy of dream derivation lends itself to Ti-like processing and a small-world network (latticework) of essentially universal dreams lends itself to Ni-like processing.

(*) To distinguish it as such we could call it dream evolution which better preserves the diversity of cognitive functions.

[7Wannabe5]

Discovery requires originality and the right ingredients at the right time. I don't think one can set out to discover something. One can just put the environment in place and hope this best. T

So, all memes can be used across the (discovery, invention, innovation, diffusion)-space, and memes can be concatenated and eroded into new memes through communication.

I think this quote from Jacob might represent a fundamental Ni/Ne divide, because anybody with a primary Ne will “know” that the method towards discovery is exploration. Exploration doesn’t guarantee discovery, but usually it’s easier to get laid if you first leave your house etc.

In the Enneagram, the direction of growth for Type 7 the Enthusiast (roughly ENTP or ESTP) is towards Type 5 the Scientist (roughly INTJ or INTP) and the direction of growth for Type 5 is towards Type 8 the Leader (roughly ENTJ or ESTJ. ) This seems to be in alignment with a better, broader ability to use or communicate memes across the space you described. For instance, after quickly reading umpteen books at semi-random (Ne), I will settle down for a bit and apply analysis (Ti), and maybe even make a decision (towards J -Te?) or attempt to make my idea real (towards S.) I am most lopsided in my N to S, so this is likely why I frequently team up with engineer/handy types, although I feel closer to NF idealists and I feel better understood/tolerated by other rationals.

[7Wannabe5]

IOW, if innovation is understood to be defined in the manner it is used in economics as explicated by Jacob And Daylen, then eNTP me does not care about innovation, only exploration towards discovery towards invention. As in, “WOW, that’s really cool! Did you think/make that yourself?” vs “Yawn, so you sold x million widgets for y million $$” , excepting for likely overlap of functionality.

[jacob]

I think this quote from Jacob might represent a fundamental Ni/Ne divide, because anybody with a primary Ne will “know” that the method towards discovery is exploration. Exploration doesn’t guarantee discovery, but usually it’s easier to get laid if you first leave your house etc.

Actually, I think I was wrong there. My quote sounds more like invention: The creative assembly of collected (already discovered) parts.

I'm having a hard time nailing down specifics though (so there's probably an overlap). It goes back to the old question: "Is mathematics discovered or invented?" (or both)

[7Wannabe5]

@jacob:

Gotcha. Mathematics could also be described as having “emerged.” However, obviously, some things are more straightforward. For instance, you can only discover a previously unmapped waterfall or unpublished author or unidentified soil microbe. OTOH, I think invention must require the discovery of new connections, analogies, substitutions or relationships, either internally or externally. Thinkering/tinkering.