6 ms·

It ain't innovation, it's cleverness. I can sit here and try to re-discover the fundamentals of physics from the ground up, or I can go to a library and read a

It ain't innovation, it's cleverness. I can sit here and try to re-discover the fundamentals of physics from the ground up, or I can go to a library and read a textbook. Discovering from first principles is the honorable path, but it is a colossal waste of time. To get to the state of the art, you have to steal knowledge. Only then can you begin to understand and improve it.

bllguo 10y ago
This is a ridiculously biased and oversimplified view. If everyone operated on your espoused principles, nobody would be incentivized to innovate. You seem to believe the Chinese have some God-given right to get to the state of the art. No, there's a reason things like intellectual property, copyright, patent, etc. exist. How people here are defending the Chinese theft of proprietary US secrets and technologies is beyond me.
- uola 10y ago
  There a case to be made that innovations which require a lot of research won't be made, but I don't agree that nobody would have incentive to innovate. When there's no intellectual property you can't afford not to innovate. The fashion and food business, which aren't covered by copyright, are fast to follow trends. If someone can put out something very similar to yourself you have to have and keep your edge. The other things is that why we can have such long copyright terms, but not the same for patents, is because it didn't use to matter. There were real limits to making anything useful out of it. Patents on the other hand outright suppresses innovation in the short term to reveal the knowledge to everyone in the long term. The third things is of course that something can't be secret and morally defended by intellectual property at the same time. At least not from a functional perspective.
PopsiclePete 10y ago
This is why so many programmers now I work with are useless. Figure things out ???? Only an idiot would! You just go to StackOverflow and type in search terms until you find the answer you need! And then, when it's not in StackOverflow, they are utterly and completely lost. Discovering from principles is not a "colossal waste of time". Ask any Physicist if they thought studying and understanding Classical Mechanics was a "colossal waste of time".

bllguo 10y ago

This is a ridiculously biased and oversimplified view. If everyone operated on your espoused principles, nobody would be incentivized to innovate. You seem to believe the Chinese have some God-given right to get to the state of the art. No, there's a reason things like intellectual property, copyright, patent, etc. exist. How people here are defending the Chinese theft of proprietary US secrets and technologies is beyond me.

uola 10y ago
There a case to be made that innovations which require a lot of research won't be made, but I don't agree that nobody would have incentive to innovate. When there's no intellectual property you can't afford not to innovate. The fashion and food business, which aren't covered by copyright, are fast to follow trends. If someone can put out something very similar to yourself you have to have and keep your edge. The other things is that why we can have such long copyright terms, but not the same for patents, is because it didn't use to matter. There were real limits to making anything useful out of it. Patents on the other hand outright suppresses innovation in the short term to reveal the knowledge to everyone in the long term. The third things is of course that something can't be secret and morally defended by intellectual property at the same time. At least not from a functional perspective.

PopsiclePete 10y ago

This is why so many programmers now I work with are useless. Figure things out ???? Only an idiot would! You just go to StackOverflow and type in search terms until you find the answer you need! And then, when it's not in StackOverflow, they are utterly and completely lost. Discovering from principles is not a "colossal waste of time". Ask any Physicist if they thought studying and understanding Classical Mechanics was a "colossal waste of time".