Fuckin assholes stole my idea and had it patented 30 years before I was born!
I meant this more as a thing that happened to me, rather than ain direct reference to the post.
I had a super cool idea the other day, but of course it’s been patented and not explored furtherp
What’s worse is when you have an idea, don’t have any idea how to pursue it because you’re not a professional [career] and don’t have experience making whatever it is; and then you see a successful paper or product months or years later about that exact same idea, made by someone who actually knows what they’re doing.
It’s frustrating yet validating. Frustrating because, “that could have been me”, validating because “I thought of the idea before it’d been developed too! I’m so smart.”
I should start keeping a list of times when that happens. If I had a nickel for every time it happened, I’d have 2~3 nickels; which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it’s happened two or three times now.
Studies generally take time, so if it were months later they likely had it before you. The years later is a maybe, but also possible because it takes time to get grants to do studies as well. Exceptions tend to be more urgent stuff like the pandemic, but even then we had SARS outbreaks decades ago and they’ve been studying it for a while, even if it wasn’t specific SARS-COV-2.
I don’t want to take away from your joy and validation. You sound like a generally curious person who is frequently churning out ideas.
But that’s not how ideas (for doing experiments/doing research) work. Especially not in a scientific context. You have to have intimate knowledge of any matter to sift through a huge amount of various ideas and pluck out the ones that are feasible, that make sense and that are promising. That takes time and effort. Curiosity is obviously key, but actually pursuing any idea means a lot of work. It’s much more frustrating than one might think, especially because it usually doesn’t work the way you initially imagine it will. And most of these ideas need many years, or even decades to develop and study.
Yes, I’m very aware of everything you just said. Doesn’t mean it isn’t frustrating to find out that an idea you had was a good idea, but you couldn’t study it because you don’t know enough about the subject. I love science and engineering, but I didn’t find that out until after I graduated and I don’t have the money to “respec”.
I once was in the mirror with some dental floss trying to get at a stuck piece of romaine lettuce. When I finally dislodged it, instead of coming out of my mouth with the floss, it decided to sit on the front of my tooth.
As I’m ineffectively swiping at it with the floss I get an idea: what if I had a bunch of pieces of floss, instead of just one… And if I made them stiffer, it’d be easier to just get in there and swipe things off the sides of my teeth… Like a little mouth broom… Or a toothbrush! …I’m an idiot.
Context for us uneducated?
Step 1. Have an idea
Step 2. Google idea
Step 3. Someone thought of it before you were born
Even worse if you think your idea is just the best darn thing to come along since sliced bread. And then Dr. 1995 comes along and lays out the whole thing in a footnote in a paper on a different topic.
Step 3b: it’s a deceptively simple idea that someone else already thought of a while ago, that everyone agreed was a great idea, but actually implementing it is so impractical that no one wants to do it.
I had a thing like this recently, though I’m struggling to remember what it was.
I remember mine! It was in regards to finding out if people went through life with varying resting frame rates for vision and I wanted to know the bell curve.
My thought was whether people see the same patterns in fan oscillations when adjusting for speeds with a light behind it. I just wondered if people saw the same patterns as me mostly.
From my discord chat, I’m usually drunk by the time it devolves this far. This was a week before arguing whether non-verbal communication counted as words. Nope. Words require language with grammar. Signs, signers suck it. Gesture? We eventually and reluctantly settled on symbol… People just need to make up new words more often rather than having to argue semantics constantly.
They’ve done lots of light flash experiments and recognition with millisecond speed stuff flashing, but I wonder if they’re trying to compare ‘frame rate’ off. It sorta mentioned it in some shitty article that was hoity toity filmmaker whining and quickly devolved into false assumptions therefore…
But I wonder if they’ve had people draw fan patterns as it changes speeds or if it’s the same for everyone.
My desk fan has led lights behind it and 3 speeds. If I turn the light on and switch speed it forms certain patterns as it revs up then hits the ‘proper’ speed. I wonder if people see the patterns differently as it revs up and down.
Step 3 doesn’t need to be before you were born, just a seemingly long time ago. 1995 definitely wouldn’t be before the person in the picture was born.
I don’t think any context is needed, it’s just about when you have an idea that you think is great and novel but it turns out it has already been done 30 years prior.
you have a genius giga brain blast moment, you feel like the most intelligent person on the world, and you immediately google it.
Only to find that it’s been a thing for the last 50 years and nobody seems to care about it…
I guess you could just take the shotgun approach and come up with so many completely crazy hypotheses that one of them is bound to be correct eventually.
