Merkel, and Why everything took so long

It is time to put Mutti's dilemma/intransigence/blunders/bungling into perspective. Three months plus without a government is next to nothing. After all, the rope (no pun intended) was invented only as late as 28,000 years ago. Probably the phallus (and dildo) as well. You would think, why did they not invent a rope much earlier as its usefulness is obvious. To us.

Katja Grace has two interesting posts on inventions and

Why did everything take so long?

One of the biggest intuitive mysteries to me is how humanity took so long to do anything.

Humans have been ‘behaviorally modern’ for about 50 thousand years. And apparently didn’t invent, for instance:

• rope until 28 thousand years ago.
• the wheel until at least 4000BC
• writing until 3000BC
• woodblock printing until 200AD

This kind of thing seems really weird introspectively, because it is hard to imagine going a whole lifetime in the wilderness without wanting something like rope, or going a whole day wanting something like rope without figuring out how to make something like rope. Yet apparently people went for about a thousand lifetimes without that happening.

Some possible explanations:

Read them here.

There is a follow-up post.

Why everything might have taken so long

I asked why humanity took so long to do anything at the start, and the Internet gave me its thoughts. Here is my expanded list of hypotheses, summarizing from comments on the post, here, and here.

Inventing is harder than it looks

1. Inventions are usually more ingenious than they seem. Relatedly, reality has a lot of detail.
2. There are lots of apparent paths: without hindsight, you have to waste a lot of time on dead ends.
3. People are not as inventive as they imagine. For instance, I haven’t actually invented anything – why do I even imagine I could invent rope?
4. Posing the question is a large part of the work. If you have never seen rope, it actually doesn’t occur to you that rope would come in handy, or to ask yourself how to make some.
5. Animals (including humans) mostly think by intuitively recognizing over time what is promising and not among affordances they have, and reading what common observations imply. New affordances generally only appear by some outside force e.g. accidentally. To invent a thing, you have to somehow have an affordance to make it even though you have never seen it. And in retrospect it seems so obvious because now you do have the affordance.

More here.

So relax, Mutti is still deep inside the time pattern of great inventions. Unless she is being met by a Betamax moment.

I can not help but pick up on point 3 "People are not as inventive as they imagine. For instance, I haven’t actually invented anything – why do I even imagine I could invent rope?"

One of the UBI (German: Bedingungsloses Grundeinkommen) people's claim is it would free up people to bring out their awesome creativity. Sure, creativity is not the same as inventiveness, but honestly, how many creative people do you know?