Dilution of expertise in the rise and fall of collective innovation

Re:Dilution of expertise in the rise and fall of collective ... by delusional on Monday January 09, 2023 @01:47PM (#34314286)

[0] is extremely important here, maybe too important to be left in a footnote. When you look back at history it's all too easy to only recall a select few gems and discard the rest. It's possible that the vast majority of research published today will go by the wayside as dead ends or insignificant, while the stuff that ends up having world changing impact will also contain "multiple ideas" and a "short list of references".

I don't have any proof to disagree with you, not even an anecdote, but be cautious of making claims such as these without data. Now will almost always seem uninteresting and pedestrian while the past will seem mysterious and interesting.

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Re:Dilution of expertise in the rise and fall of collective ... by zdw on Monday January 09, 2023 @02:07PM (#34314549)

I tend to agree with this - one time I tried reading through all the Internet RFCs starting at the first one and I would say that probably 80% of the ideas in first 1000 were abandoned quickly, and after that that the % of abandoned went up to 90-95 percent, with a high quantity of vendors trying to push their own solution a standard.

Very pareto principle/sturgeons law there.

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Re:Dilution of expertise in the rise and fall of collective ... by maicro on Monday January 09, 2023 @02:45PM (#34314989)

With respect, in case you or anyone else wasn't aware - this is an example of "survivorship bias": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias .

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Re:Dilution of expertise in the rise and fall of collective ... by DiggyJohnson on Monday January 09, 2023 @06:43PM (#34318173)

This is a weak claim unless you provide outside evidence of survivorship bias. Just because a bias could exist isn’t evidence that it does exist in and of itself.

This feels like an example of our trigger happy use of biases to dismiss opinions we disagree with. What perspective, experience, or evidence makes you think survivorship bias is at play here?

In the comment you’re replying to, for example, the rate of un-abandoned RFC started ~20%, and decreased to ~5-10% over the period of GP’s review. That seems lije a very significant change to me, which is hidden by the surprise that the original number wasn’t higher.

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Re:Dilution of expertise in the rise and fall of collective ... by maicro on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @04:27PM (#34345122)

Fair argument. I didn't put too much rigorous thought into my post, and really didn't mean offence, but to roughly explain my thinking:

- First, I wasn't trying to dismiss any opinions by bringing up survivorship bias, I brought it up because I think it's valuable to have a term to describe the general and probably bi-directional relationship between how notable something is and how well it's known many years after creation - I'd argue that the original comment's footnote [0] talking about "classic" papers is explicitly bringing survivorship, if not the survivorship bias, into the conversation.

Honestly, at this point I've kinda lost track of what I wanted to clarify here, so - I apologize for the confusion and, if interpreted as such, the offensive posting.

Have a good day.

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