Multiple Independent Discoveries

People can invent things independently and multiple times. Please, don't tell people what they did or not because there's a bias.

Twas ever thus. Look at how many great inventions and discoveries throughout history were arrived at independently and then argued for the bragging rights, before it became such a priority to share your ideas. Calculus and television spring immediately to mind, but there are many others.

If there is a lesson to be learnt, it is that one should be humble about the notion of being the first to invent anything. I'm pretty sure the many of the concepts expressed in these texts go further back in time without any record. Everything is an addition or evolution of the past, regardless of whether it is explicitly or wittingly so.

Who's to say it doesn't bring anything new? If it's never been written before, it's new.I often see technology growing in a "staircase" fashion. Things plateau, and then there's a period of many small 'chink in the armor' improvements... and then one of those ideas inspires something that floods into a whole new area.Sometimes it takes a lot of smart brains throwing time at 'useless' junk before that insane theory is found. Othertime

Maybe you're thinking of the concept of multiple discovery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery

"In science and engineering, some of the greatest discoveries seem so simple that you say to yourself, I could have thought of that. The discoverer is entitled to reply, why didn't you?" --- http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html

But that's not how invention works : what about advances that seem trivial after the fact... yet nobody has thought of for centuries, despite all the "ingredients" being available ?

OMG this, so hard. This idea is tied to the "genius" myth where we think had people like Mark Zuckerberg not come around we wouldn't have social media, or had Einstein not been born nobody else could have conceived of relativity. No, the advancement of humanity itself creates the conditions for "new" ideas to be discovered/rediscovered, and these "geniuses" are simply the individuals who, by no small achievement, pushed the idea forward.

I’m not denying those achievements of those individuals at all. But I am saying that those individuals didn’t invent or discover those ideas out of the blue. There was information gathered up until that point in their lives that allowed them to make those connections and form ideas from there. No idea exists in a vacuum, yes someone needs to be the first to do anything, but all knowledge is passed on.

This is classic survivorship bias. We don’t know about the things that didn’t get invented because someone somewhere didn’t do a critical breakthrough, because those things don’t exist. Therefore, it’s easy for people to assume that everything eventually gets invented, and nothing really hinges on a single person.We could have had a steam engine during the Roman Empire and thus an Industrial Revolution thousands of years earlier, but no one did it. It was just a toy. Imagine having the vision