This book is full of examples. (A recurrent topic is: "That was so easy, but it took the ancients 8000 years.") ""How to Invent Everything - A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler" - by Ryan North - is such a cool book. It's essential reading for anyone who needs to duplicate an industrial civilization quickly." --Randall Munroe (A recurrent topic is: "That was so easy and obvious, but it took the ancients 8000 years.")
You might want to do a post on a dozen of its examples. :) Eric Hoel won the ACX content proposing the idea of a "gossip trap", that kept small communities from inventing most anything for the longest times. https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/the-gossip-trap
Your concept can easily explain all delay by: social context/ cultural restrictions. But it seems not really falsifiable. And thus slightly less useful.
There’s an essay “Against intellectual monopoly”, written by Boldrin and Levine, that argues that such delays, for example in the development of the steam engine, were caused by an abuse of patents.
When should we be surprised that an invention took “so long”?
This book is full of examples. (A recurrent topic is: "That was so easy, but it took the ancients 8000 years.") ""How to Invent Everything - A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler" - by Ryan North - is such a cool book. It's essential reading for anyone who needs to duplicate an industrial civilization quickly." --Randall Munroe (A recurrent topic is: "That was so easy and obvious, but it took the ancients 8000 years.")
You might want to do a post on a dozen of its examples. :) Eric Hoel won the ACX content proposing the idea of a "gossip trap", that kept small communities from inventing most anything for the longest times. https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/the-gossip-trap
Your concept can easily explain all delay by: social context/ cultural restrictions. But it seems not really falsifiable. And thus slightly less useful.
There’s an essay “Against intellectual monopoly”, written by Boldrin and Levine, that argues that such delays, for example in the development of the steam engine, were caused by an abuse of patents.