On a bunch of different occasions, I’ve come up with an important idea only to realize later that someone else came up with the same idea earlier. For example, the Problem of Induction/Measure Problem. Also modal realism and Tegmark Level IV. And the anti-souls argument from determinism of physical laws. There were more but I stopped keeping track when I got to college and realized this sort of thing happens all the time.
Now I wish I kept track. I suspect useful data might come from it. Like, my impression is that these scooped ideas tend to be scooped surprisingly recently; more of them were scooped in the past twenty years than in the twenty years prior, more in the past hundred years than in the hundred years prior, etc. This is surprising because it conflicts with the model of scientific/academic progress as being dominated by diminishing returns / low-hanging-fruit effects. Then again, maybe it’s not so conflicting after all—alternate explanations include something about ideas being forgotten over time, or something about my idea-generating process being tied to the culture and context in which I was raised. Still though now that I think about it that model is probably wrong anyway—what would it even look like for this pattern of ideas being scooped more recently not to hold? That they’d be evenly spread between now and Socrates?
OK, so the example that came to mind turned out to be not a good one. But I still feel like having the data—and ideally not just from me but from everyone—would tell us something about the nature of intellectual progress, maybe about how path-dependent it is or something.
On a bunch of different occasions, I’ve come up with an important idea only to realize later that someone else came up with the same idea earlier. For example, the Problem of Induction/Measure Problem. Also modal realism and Tegmark Level IV. And the anti-souls argument from determinism of physical laws. There were more but I stopped keeping track when I got to college and realized this sort of thing happens all the time.
Now I wish I kept track. I suspect useful data might come from it. Like, my impression is that these scooped ideas tend to be scooped surprisingly recently; more of them were scooped in the past twenty years than in the twenty years prior, more in the past hundred years than in the hundred years prior, etc. This is surprising because it conflicts with the model of scientific/academic progress as being dominated by diminishing returns / low-hanging-fruit effects. Then again, maybe it’s not so conflicting after all—alternate explanations include something about ideas being forgotten over time, or something about my idea-generating process being tied to the culture and context in which I was raised. Still though now that I think about it that model is probably wrong anyway—what would it even look like for this pattern of ideas being scooped more recently not to hold? That they’d be evenly spread between now and Socrates?
OK, so the example that came to mind turned out to be not a good one. But I still feel like having the data—and ideally not just from me but from everyone—would tell us something about the nature of intellectual progress, maybe about how path-dependent it is or something.