Talk-Polywell.org

Recently, in another venue, someone made the statement:

"Innovation doesn't come from the private sector. It comes from governmental means."

What do people here think of this?

A synergy of the two is probably the best of both worlds.
Economic capacity of the government coupled with the attitude to risk of the private sector.

But if I have to choose one of the two than it will be private sector.
After all most of the ground breaking innovations of the last two centuries came from there.

neither. innovation doesnt exist. everything is simply some rewriting of what was before, except when it isnt, when it is pure chance.
thus everything that can ever be innovated, has already been done at the point t which the universe stops.
we are simply moving backwards from that point, with memories that happen to work the other way around, thus appearing in the 'conventional' direction.
thus all intellectual property is a nonsense.

nature would ultimately be source of all innovation, were it not known already as necessity.

blowed if i know.

Drugs mostly.

rcain wrote:neither. innovation doesnt exist. everything is simply some rewriting of what was before, except when it isnt, when it is pure chance.
thus everything that can ever be innovated, has already been done at the point t which the universe stops.
we are simply moving backwards from that point, with memories that happen to work the other way around, thus appearing in the 'conventional' direction.
thus all intellectual property is a nonsense.

nature would ultimately be source of all innovation, were it not known already as necessity.

blowed if i know.

Drugs mostly.

I would define innovation as the recognition and utilization of previously unrecognized natural phenomena to concrete human ends. It is a function of the human imagination and the human capability to manifest that imagination in the real world. Neither of those things rely on what are commonly thought of as the "public" (government corporations) or "private" (finance and business corporations) sectors. The lone hermit in a cave, or lone patent clerk in Bern, can suffice to change the world.

djolds1 wrote:I would define innovation as the recognition and utilization of previously unrecognized natural phenomena to concrete human ends.

That sounds like textbook definition of intelligence.

My 2c.. Innovation thrives on less rather than more conformity.. On freedom - freedom to buck the trend. That doesn't sound like government.

Betruger wrote:

djolds1 wrote:I would define innovation as the recognition and utilization of previously unrecognized natural phenomena to concrete human ends.

That sounds like textbook definition of intelligence.

Intelligence does not rely on the widely unrecognized, only the individually unrecognized.

Betruger wrote:My 2c.. Innovation thrives on less rather than more conformity.. On freedom - freedom to buck the trend. That doesn't sound like government.

No bureaucracy "bucks the trend" - be it "private" or "public."

Which was the point I was trying to make. The terms "public" and "private" are too loaded these days to convey a proper meaning.

Betruger wrote:My 2c.. Innovation thrives on less rather than more conformity.. On freedom - freedom to buck the trend. That doesn't sound like government.

Exactly. Government tend to keep an existing situation stable. They carefully analyze the consequences of each new innovation they bring to the population and try to avoid any potential turbulence.
Private innovators tend to skip about potential consequences of their innovations and just get to the goal of realizing them.

Governments, to the extent that they try to foster innovation, invariably distort the market to the detriment of true advance. Witness the "fusion energy" programs and the misdirection of nuclear power, the ruination of drug advances in medicine, or the dismal record of every DARPA project ever. Including the Atomic Bomb and the Internet.