Ideas aren’t getting harder to find and anyone who tells you otherwise is a coward and I will fight themYou can still discover stuff, I promiseAdam MastroianniMay 17, 20221602322SharePhoto cred: my dadI’ve worked with a lot of research assistants over the years, and at some point we inevitably have The Talk: should they get a PhD? I was recently having The Talk with one particularly distraught student, who was worried her ideas aren’t good enough. “Maybe I’m not cut out for it,” she told me, “or maybe all of the easy ideas have already been done.”Like her, I’ve worried that I was born too late and all the low-hanging fruit was picked before I got here. Fifty years ago, you could get a million citations just for showing that people like their own team the best, that kids will do something that they watch other people do, or that people think other people agree with them. Everything obvious has been done, and now it’s up to poor schmucks like me to figure out the hard stuff.Lots of people who think hard about the progress of science seem to come to the same conclusion:Scott Alexander:All the low-hanging fruit has already been picked […] it’s almost inconceivable that it could ever be otherwise.Holden Karnofsky: deas naturally get harder to find over time, and we should expect art and science to keep slowing down by default.Dean Keith Simonton: The days when a doctoral student could be the sole author of four revolutionary papers while working full time as an assistant examiner at a patent office — as Einstein did in 1905 — are probably long gone. Natural sciences have become so big, and the knowledge base so complex and specialized, that much of the cutting-edge work these days tends to emerge from large, well-funded collaborative teams involving many contributors.Everyone agrees: we must resign ourselves either to tweaking what came before or spending our lives descending deeper and deeper into the idea mines, searching for the few nuggets of originality left.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 the desire to discover back into hiding again, fulfilling its own abominable prophecy. Somebody needs to defend the belief that mere mortals can still discover useful truths, and it’s me. I’m here to be that somebody.1. Bias checkIf we’re going to entertain, say, defunding theoretical physics on the grounds that there’s just no more useful physics to do, we should at least ask: could any cognitive biases be at play here?I can see two. First, all ideas seem obvious in retrospect. Heliocentrism, germ theory, and randomized controlled trials look like no-brainers once someone explains them to you, but they took people thousands of years to figure out. ("E = mc^2? That’s just three letters and a number!”)Second, it’s always going to feel hard to think of new ideas. What should we do next in physics, biology, music, or film? Gosh, I don’t know! I’d have to think pretty hard, just like everybody before me, and I might not come up with anything, just like almost everybody before me. 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.2. We’ve been wrong about this beforeIf our ancestors also thought they were running out of ideas and were wrong, then we should be wary about thinking the same thing. Our ancestors did think that, and they were wrong.For instance, physics was apparently about to end in the 1890s:Max Planck later remembered a professor telling him that during this period, “the system as a whole stood there fairly secured, and theoretical physics approached visibly that degree of perfection which, for example, geometry has had already for centuries.” The British scientist William Cecil Dampier recalled his apprenticeship at Cambridge in the 1890s: “It seemed as though the main framework had been put together once for all, and that little remained to be done but to measure physical constants to the increased accuracy represented by another decimal place.” British physicist J. J. Thomson: “All that was left was to alter a decimal or two in some physical constant.” American physicist Albert A. Michelson: “Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.”Surgery was nearing perfection in 1873:There cannot always be fresh fields for conquest by the knife. There must be portions of the human frame that will ever remain sacred from its intrusion – at least, in the surgeon’s hand. That we have nearly, if not quite, reached these final limits there can be little question.Psychology was on track to wrap up before 1920, according to the behaviorist John Watson:I believe we can write a psychology […] and never go back upon our definition: never use the terms consciousness, mental states, mind, content, introspectively verifiable, imagery, and the like. I believe that we can do it in a few years…It was only going to take a couple of dudes and a summer to solve some of the fundamental problems in artificial intelligence:We propose that a 2-month, 10-man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themsel