- A larger number of people searching for the next Newtonian apple all over the place.

- A smaller number of larger groups that pursue a narrow area with intense focus. That’s more like “work” though.

- New areas. Especially software. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple were created by tinkerers with the privilege of free time. This process did not yet stop.

To your other point, not every idle person will pursue new knowledge. And that's ok. A larger number of idle people will contain a larger number of tinkerers.

However, I think this takes for granted the primacy of "big ideas" as the sole organizing principle we should arrange the world to efficiently produce, by force if necessary. I think the real argument for UBI is that self-determination is a core value, that the negotiations we make to better society neither need nor should involve a gun to the head of every person not born into wealth. I also think that overvaluing efficiency, expediency, and generally speaking impatience is pushing our species off a cliff

I would say there's a mid-point somewhere between overworked 60-hour-a-week employees burning out and folks doing absolutely nothing productive. The nature and environment of work is important too, if you're tilling a farm there's an upper limit on your output, but with the internet anyone can be made to feel inadequate for not "hustling"/"grinding" enough.

Isaac Newton is regarded as a genius, but he worked on really basic stuff like calculus and Newtonian mechanics. Of course it was harder, when he and his competitors were inventing it.

Sure, we handle more complex stuff now. But modern highschool material used to be really complex. Eventually theory, frameworks, language, and pedagogy, develop around a field that make it look deceptively simple. That’s still incrementalism but incrementation comes from the next generation that grew up in an environment where our discoveries are table stakes.

Is it possible that you no longer live in a simple world, because you’ve become an expert, and moved on from ingesting the refined model from the previous generation, to either applying the current unrefined model to the hardest problems it can handle, or to building the model for the next generation?

If you can be honest with such questions then the duality goes away and everything boils down to doing the right thing

Billionaires pay little tax so that’s not the answer.

If you mean lying in bed awake but not really doing anything, then (a) thinking is doing something, (ii) if you're not thinking and just moping then there's a reason why you are depressed and it's not simply that you are just lazy. Right now, the political climate is a big one for a lot of people. And (3) maybe you just haven't stumbled on the right inspiration yet. It's random. Give it time. Go and do some stuff that seems kinda interesting, in the meantime.

I've been in a similar state for several months; I've done some stuff but nothing that exciting. Attending FOSDEM for the first time this year inspired me to join a hackerspace, and to read the code of some open source projects to learn how they work. Some days I stay in bed most of the day or just graze YouTube whether in bed or not (and I hate that after the fact). Some days I want to do something so I do it.

You know, Einstein slept a lot.

In a complex, highly multi-dimensional space, yes, there's always a hill to incrementally climb. There are other hills.

Incrementalism gets you necessary data; but not necessarily insight.

He says the best inspiration comes from invoices, and deadlines definitely help.

To connect with modern dialogue, we’re talking about the “idea guy”.

I think Valve works like this too (not sure if they stopped)

Online dating for example is a complete hellscape and there's room for about a thousand passionate individuals to come in at various angles to try to improve it.