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Against the burden of knowledge
Why the most intuitive explanation for ideas getting harder to find is wrong
We see similar patterns in the transition from Newtonian to relativistic mechanics or discursive Greek geometric algebra to symbolic Arabic equations or superstitious alchemy to physically grounded chemistry. Similarly, a modern scientist is highly specialized in that they use dozens of extremely complex tools which they could not recreate themselves, e.g electron microscopes, super-computers, and protein synthesizers. It is unlikely both theoretically and empirically that the burden of knowledge explains a significant portion of the divergence between R&D inputs and productivity growth outputs that “ Are Ideas Getting Harder To Find?
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