It is, because you are wasting time reinventing the wheel. Also if something is already well researched, you might miss intricacies, traps, optimizations etc. previous researchers have stumbled upon.

It isn’t necessarily “wasted” time. There are more ways to look at it, as well as 2nd order and 3rd order effects (and so on).

It’s a powerful skill to be able to try to solve things from first principles. And it’s a muscle you can strengthen.

It would be a bit silly to never look anything up, but it isn’t so black and white.

This is a good example of how the most obvious intuition can be wrong, or at best incomplete.

You need to be able to do both.

Only reading the existing literature is not good enough.

The capacity to create ideas is also something that needs to be practiced.

I agree -> even if someone spends their time "rediscovering" an existing solution, I think that the learning experience of coming up with a solution without starting from current best solution is really valuable. Maybe that person doesn't reach the local maximum on that project, but having a really good learning experience maybe enables them to reach a global maximum on one of their next projects.

If I want some novel ideas from a group of people, I'm going to give them the framework of the problem, split them into groups so that they don't bias each other, and say: go figure it out.

It is not a problem if you are a student learning how to solve problems. Solving previously solved problems is often a good way to learn - because there is a solution you know you are not hitting something that cannot be solved, and your teacher can guide you if you get stuck.

For real world everyday problems normally it is an application of already solved theory or it isn't worth working on at all. We still need researchers to look at and expand our theory which in turn allows us to solve more problems in the real world. And there are real world problems that we pour enormous amounts of effort into solving despite lacking theory, but these areas move much slower than the much more common application of already solved theory and so are vastly vastly more expensive. (this is how we get smaller chip architectures, but it is a planet scale problem to solve)

If I have seen what others have seen, it is by replicating the work of giants

The cost of creativity/innovation.