Jason Crawford @jasoncrawford Twitter profile

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Jason Crawford

5 years

Someone asked me recently what's a boring topic that I'm excited/fascinated by. That's easy: cement. If it's wasn't thousands of years old, cement would seem futuristic. Think about it: it's *liquid rock*! Here's how it works:

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

4 years

This Far Side classic is due for a comeback

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

3 months

The AirPods case is an amazing feat of engineering Somehow, every single time I drop it, it manages to open on contact with the floor and scatter both earbuds several feet away Such consistency, truly remarkable

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

2 years

The original NYC subway was completed faster than the average environmental impact statement

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

4 years

When someone evaluates a donation by what % of the donor's wealth it is, they're conveying that what they care most about is not how much *good* it does for others, but how much *pain* it caused the giver. That's their standard of morality.

Peter Pham

@peterpham

4 years

I don't understand why people have to dunk & complain. $25M is a tremendous amount of money. Let's be thankful for the donation. Some people donate time, some money, and some do nothing but troll & think that's helpful. It's not.

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

3 years

It’s almost impossible to predict the future. But it’s also unnecessary, because *most people are living in the past*. All you have to do is see the present before everyone else does.

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

3 years

The more I study nuclear technology the more I think that every problem of today's nuclear tech has a potential solution that has already been identified. They just haven't been brought to market, because the market is sclerotic.

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

1 year

Amazing progress on tap water hookups in rural India:

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

4 months

Academia cares whether an idea is new. It doesn't really have to work Industry only cares if an idea works. Doesn't matter if it's new This creates a gap. Actually a few gaps:

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

1 year

English merchant fleet, 1582: capacity 68,000 tons, crew of 16,000 sailors One container ship, 2022: 236,228 tons, crew of 22 “One ship today carries 3.47 times more than the whole English fleet did 440 years ago” – @gpooley

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

3 years

Facebook is down this morning, apparently due to a BGP problem. What's BGP? It's an absolutely essential but fairly obscure internet protocol. I have a CS degree, but I only know about it because I did a summer internship with @Akamai a very long time ago. A brief explainer:

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

3 years

The moral dilemma of Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J making billions from vaccines

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

1 year

Did any sci-fi predict that when AI arrived, it would be unreliable, often illogical, and frequently bullshitting?

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

1 year

“Traditional foods” are not very old. The French baguette: adopted nationwide only after WW2 Greek moussaka: created early 20th c. to Frenchify Greek food Tequila? The Mexican film industry made it the national drink in the 1930s (All from an excellent @rachellaudan article)

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

5 years

There needs to be a capitalism appreciation course. Like art appreciation, but for the social system that delivered our modern standard of living

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

3 years

This image gets posted a lot lately, and not everyone knows what it means. It's a reference to “survivor bias”: a statistical problem in which a sample is non-representative because some elements have been eliminated before the sample was taken. Here's a brief explainer.

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

1 year

Imagine you could go back in time to the ancient world to jump-start the Industrial Revolution. You carry with you plans for a steam engine, and you present them to the emperor, explaining how the machine could be used at mines, mills, blast furnaces, etc. But to your dismay…

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

2 years

A striking chart: Famines by political regime @OurWorldInData

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

8 months

This still blows my mind: in the late 1800s, ~25% of bridges built just collapsed

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

9 months

Norway can *build a tunnel* for lower cost than it takes Britain just to *do the planning application* for one And many other damning facts in this thread:

Sam Dumitriu

@Sam_Dumitriu

9 months

Is Britain getting a bad deal? @Ben_A_Hopkinson and I looked at 242 infrastructure projects across 14 different countries. Our conclusion? It costs more to build new tram systems, railways, and roads in Britain than almost anywhere else in the world. 🧵

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

3 years

Airports used to be fast and convenient

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

2 years

Pretty much every criticism of Twitter / social media today was also leveled against 17th-century English coffeehouses (spreading misinformation, giving equal voice to all classes, fomenting dissent, etc.)

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

2 years

I've realized a new reason why pessimism sounds smart: optimism often requires believing in *unknown*, unspecified future breakthroughs—which seems fanciful and naive. If you very soberly, wisely, prudently stick to the known and the proven, you will necessarily be pessimistic.

Patrick Collison

@patrickc

4 years

"Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money." — @natfriedman

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

3 years

If you want a single, vivid, and frankly disgusting example to hold in mind to remember how much our lives have improved over the last ~150 years… Consider *shit*. Literally, excrement. How much previous generations had to think about it, be around it, even handle it:

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

3 years

Today Google @DeepMind announced that their deep learning system AlphaFold has achieved unprecedented levels of accuracy on the “protein folding problem”, a grand challenge problem in computational biochemistry. What is this problem, and why is it hard?

AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology

Proteins are essential to life, supporting practically all its functions. They are large complex molecules, made up of chains of amino acids, and what a protein does largely depends on its unique...

deepmind.google

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

5 years

When you have a doc to review in a meeting, you should do a really counter-intuitive thing: DON'T send it out beforehand. Instead, share the doc at the *beginning* of the meeting and have everyone read it, silently, *in the meeting*.

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

2 years

“We found that on average Italian transit projects cost 57 % less than global averages. Italian costs, however, haven’t always been so much lower. Based on our research we identified four key ingredients…”

eric goldwyn

@ericgoldwyn

2 years

Here's a link dump from our webinar with @JerusalemDemsas : The webinar: The Italian Case by @ChittiMarco : The Istanbul Case by @elifensari : @alon_levy is omnipresent

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

4 years

Smallpox was one of the worst diseases humanity has ever faced—and also the only human disease we have ever eradicated. It was also the first disease with a vaccine. You may think you know the story of vaccines—Edward Jenner and the milkmaids. But the milkmaid story is a lie.

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

2 years

Norway's tunnel: < $7M/km Seattle's tunnel: $1,167M/km Well over 100x more expensive per kilometer.

Zach Tratar

@zachtratar

2 years

The Lærdal tunnel (left) in Norway is the longest tunnel in the world, at 24km. It cost $164 million in today's dollars. I drove it yesterday. The State Route 99 tunnel (right) in Seattle, where I normally live, is 3km long. It cost $3.5 billion. Both were completed in 5 years.

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

10 months

RT if you have ever bought fresh fruit in winter and marveled in ecstasy at the decadent opulence of modern capitalism

Scott Lincicome

@scottlincicome

10 months

She's clearly never met me

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

2 years

Air conditioning is underrated:

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

2 months

My main takeaway here is that you can build a home in CA for $42k as long as no one is watching

Sheel Mohnot

@pitdesi

2 months

Caltrain deputy director built himself an apartment (with kitchen & shower) inside the Burlingame train station with $42k of public funds (each invoice <$3k), and it took 3 years for it to be discovered. I demand a short documentary about this! I haven’t seen footage anywhere

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

1 year

We eradicated smallpox for less than it costs to build one mile of subway today in NYC

Alec Stapp

@AlecStapp

1 year

Very cool chart showing all the American megaprojects and grand programs over the last century. We need more of these!

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

10 months

Free idea: Someone should write about science news the way @matt_levine writes about finance news. Namely, in a style where the background/explainer is at least as important as the news itself. To elaborate:

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

4 years

RIP @claychristensen , who influenced the strategy of an entire generation of founders. Christensen's term “disruptive” is used loosely today to mean any big change—but it actually has a precise, technical meaning. In honor of his legacy, here's what “disruptive” actually means:

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

4 years

This is the most highbrow meme crossover I have seen

West Elm Caliban

@simplic10

4 years

idk what this mean’s

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

5 months

Can anyone who knows math and/or AI comment on the significance of this?

James Pethokoukis ⏩️⤴️

@JimPethokoukis

5 months

Google DeepMind used a large language model to solve an unsolvable math problem

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

5 years

Got that? We crush and burn rock, and then re-constitute it at a time and place and in a *form* of our choosing. Like coffee or pancake mix, it's “instant stone—just add water!” Isn't that basically *magic*?

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

2 years

This has gone too far. (From the checkout page of an online store)

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

4 years

Everyone talks (and moralizes) about how hard you “should” work or “need” to work. No one seems to talk about how hard you *want* to work, and what drives that. For some people, under the right circumstances, hard work isn't torture. It's joy.

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

3 years

Less pithy, but more clear: Most people are slow to notice and accept change. If you can just be faster than most people at seeing what’s going on, updating your model of the world, and reacting accordingly, it's almost as good as seeing the future.

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

5 years

Those are the basics, but there are many advanced formulas for cement. The Romans found that mixing in volcanic ash, which they called *pozzalana*, created a cement that set even underwater (without oxygen). They were masters of cement.

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

8 months

Someone should do a comedy about a mafia boss who sets up a pizza parlor as a front, but it turns out he's terrible at crime and amazing at pizza, and he starts getting tons of business through word of mouth and ends up making way more money that way The Producers but for pizza

Jessica Ellis

@baddestmamajama

8 months

My closest encounter with the mafia is I went to a starkly empty pizza place in Rhode Island once, they seemed utterly confused that I wanted a pizza, it took 45 minutes to make, they gave it to me for free, and it was the best pizza I’d ever had.

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

3 years

Most people don't read → if you read books at all, you are more educated than most Even among those who read, most haven't read a book on X. If you read one book on X, you know more about it than the vast majority Read 2–3 books on one topic, and you're practically an expert

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

1 year

“The size of cities is determined by transportation technologies. … People live within 30 min of their work.” @tomaspueyo

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

4 years

When you say “Twitter sucks”, I hear “I don't know how to curate my feed”

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

5 years

Another “boring” topic I'm fascinated by: steel. Iron & steel were once shrouded in myth. Now they are everywhere around us. If someone from ancient times were brought to the present, our abundance of high-quality metal would make them think we were gods. How did this happen?

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

4 years

How to pitch progress to politicians

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

3 years

Retirement is a 20th-century invention. The machines *did* take our jobs—they took jobs away from the elderly after retirement, from school-age children, and from everyone else after 5pm and on the weekends. And that's a good thing.

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

1 year

OK this is the weirdest “X is closer to Y than Z” I have seen

Chris Plante Show

@ChrisPlanteShow

1 year

Joe Biden was born closer to Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration than his own. That is crazy to think about.

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

2 years

A few interesting things to note about this: First, contrary to popular belief, wooden wheels like this were generally not made from cross-sections of logs. Look at the grain: they were assembled from planks.

History Defined

@historydefined

2 years

One of the 4000-year-old well-preserved wagons unearthed in the Lchashen village in the vicinity of Lake Sevan. Made of oak, they are the oldest known wagons in the world. Now on display at the History Museum of Armenia

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

4 years

$350–500k in regulatory costs to open a new business in San Francisco. I'm sure no one meant for it to be this way. It happened gradually—one regulation at a time. But by now the frog is thoroughly boiled.

Robert Fruchtman

@_fruchtose

5 years

Why are there so many empty storefronts in San Francisco? Rent is high, yes, but permitting a business can take literally years. Take this totally normal, very cool advice from commercial real estate agents about how to prepare for the permit process.

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

5 years

Good startup pattern today: Find an industry that is still run manually by people emailing PDFs and spreadsheets around; build a real data model & workflow. Doing this in… Freight: @flexport Insurance: @NewfrontHQ Lending: @blendlabsinc

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

3 years

“The only way out is through progress” @naval

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

3 years

I’m excited to announce that @rootsofprogress is now a nonprofit organization. Our mission is to establish a new philosophy of progress for the twenty-first century.

The Roots of Progress is now a nonprofit organization

Our mission: to establish a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century

rootsofprogress.org

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

4 years

Good lord. We have *so* much work to do.

Joe Flaherty

@josephflaherty

4 years

"What is a major problem in our society that tech has solved in our lifetimes? There's probably an answer to that question, but the fact that I can't immediately come up with it is a problem." A 47-year-old NYT opinion writer recently made that statement—What's the best answer?

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

9 months

Feynman's own answer to this was the atomic hypothesis, that “all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion” But we had that hypothesis in ancient Greece! And it was basically useless until the 1800s. Knowledge is not contained in sentences.

Ulkar

@ulkar_aghayeva

9 months

how would you answer Feynman’s question “If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words?”

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

3 years

Planes that get shot in the engine *don't return from their mission*. They go down. The sample is not *representative* of the true distribution of bullet holes. It is a biased sample, because it only includes the survivors. Hence, “survivor bias”, a form of selection bias.

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

3 years

The humble plastic bag is an engineering marvel. Everything has to be invented!

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

4 years

The best part about @justinamash 's bill is that it's four pages. *Four* *pages*. And half of that is the historical preamble. Anyone and everyone can read it and understand it. Lawmakers can consider it carefully before voting on it. This is how all law should be.

Justin Amash

@justinamash

4 years

Here’s the entire bill:

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

1 year

Why is it that in the past (e.g. early 20th c.), it was not uncommon for people to live in hotels? Like they were apartments or something? What changed in the world to make that now a strange notion?

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

10 months

Andy Warhol wrote in 1975 that “A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.” But he was anticipated by Harper's almost 20 years earlier:

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

4 months

@hemeon Tell them your speaker fee is $25,000, so they can pay you $19k and call it even

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

5 years

These reinforcing bars, or “rebar”, give concrete tensile strength, and let you make things like Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater:

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

3 years

In the 1950s, nuclear was the energy of the future. Two generations later, it provides only about 10% of world electricity, and reactor design hasn‘t fundamentally changed in decades. Why has it been a flop? Here's my review of a recent book on that topic:

Why has nuclear power been a flop?

Nuclear is expensive, but it should be cheap

rootsofprogress.org

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

11 months

If a technology may introduce catastrophic risks, how do you develop it? The Wright Brothers' approach to inventing the airplane is one case study:

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

5 years

So that's why I think cement is underrated. More details and image credits here:

Instant stone (just add water!)

If cement weren't 10,000 years old, it would seem like a futuristic technology: liquid rock!

rootsofprogress.org

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

3 years

What are some compelling examples of new things we could do with energy abundance—say, 10x (or more) energy usage per capita?

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

5 years

“Your first two engineers? They’re just late founders. Treat them as such. … Your next five designers and developers? Your cap table probably can’t even afford them until you have traction.” From @naval in 2011 but I think more true than ever:

Why You Can't Hire

There isn’t a shortage of developers and designers. There’s a surplus of founders. The cost of starting a company has collapsed. It’s now just (minimal) salaries. For entrepreneurs, desks are free,...

nav.al

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

1 year

“Not only did the UK continue to get rich after the end of empire, the growth rate of GDP increased” @ATabarrok

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

1 year

Explain this paradox? - For humans, it seems easier to learn how to drive a car than to fly an airplane. - But building an autopilot for airplanes seems easier than building self-driving cars? (Probably at least some of the above assumptions are wrong)

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

4 years

Why are many people worried about the new #coronavirus , when the regular flu kills tens of thousands a year? The concern is that it could be something like the 1918 influenza pandemic (aka the “Spanish Flu”). It's the huge spike on this chart of US mortality rates:

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

1 year

Podcast interviews in the last five days: • @sama with @lexfridman • @pmarca with @eriktorenberg • @natfriedman with @dwarkesh_sp • @nathanmyhrvold with @ShaneAParrish / @farnamstreet How am I ever going to finish listening to The Power Broker at this rate?

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

3 years

Curious about @slatestarcodex , but don't know where to start? A little while ago a friend asked me to make a list of my favorite posts. So here's a beginner's guide:

Who is Scott Alexander and what is he about?

A beginner's guide to Slate Star Codex (now Astral Codex Ten)

jasoncrawford.org

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

4 years

So, let's say it's the 1840s, and you're tasked with building a suspension bridge at Niagara Falls, spanning a gorge almost 800 feet across and over 200 feet deep. How do you get the *first* metal cable across?

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

3 years

Always, always plot your data and look at it.

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

2 years

“Who knows whether, when a comet shall approach this globe to destroy it, as it often has been and will be destroyed, men will not tear rocks from their foundations by means of steam, and hurl mountains, as the giants are said to have done, against the flaming mass?” Byron, 1822

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

4 years

This article argues that: 1. If we merely #FlattenTheCurve without reducing the total number of cases, we could still see ~10M deaths. Because we have < 200k ventilators, and will have millions of patients at once needing them

Don’t “Flatten the Curve,” stop it!

You have all seen a version of this curve of COVID-19 case loads by now:

medium.com

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

4 years

Amazing how many people think you can just make arbitrary interventions in the economy, like “cancel rent!” or “keep paying workers while businesses are shut down!”, as if those actions are unconnected to anything important and have no significant consequences.

Devon ☀️

@devonzuegel

4 years

Nth-order effects rule everything around me

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

11 months

Lots of people freaking out about this, but it doesn't seem worse than literally just spraying poison which is the alternative

Brian Roemmele

@BrianRoemmele

11 months

AI based laser based pesticide and herbicide. No chemicals. Meet Ironman…

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

5 months

If “low-hanging fruit” or “ideas getting harder to find” was the main factor in the rate of technological progress, then the fastest progress would have been in the Stone Age. Ideas were *very easy to find* in the Stone Age! There was *so much* low-hanging fruit!

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

4 years

Why can't we crowdfund advance market commitments? Example: I would gladly pay $100, *now*, for a dose of COVID-19 vaccine—to be delivered at *any* point in the future. If 10% of US adults did the same, that's a $2.5B vaccine prize. If only 2% of *world* adults did it… $10B.

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

2 years

A genre of blog post that ought to be done more is to take an academic paper, summarize/explain it, and add a bit of commentary. These are straightforward (if not exactly easy) to write, and can create a lot of value.

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

4 years

Industrial civilization needs an owner's manual.

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

1 year

Robert Allen, in *The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective*, says demand factors have been underrated. He argues that many major inventions were adopted when and where factor prices made it profitable and a good investment to adopt them, and not before.

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

2 years

A counterpoint to the idea that everything is more poorly made and doesn't last as long these days. It used to be that television dealerships would provide service and support, as with cars. Today electronics are so reliable this is needless.

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

4 years

Book I'm reading (1940) has a curious feature: margin notes. Each paragraph has a few words to summarize it, but also dates are given for events mentioned in the text, so it adds info too. Was this common in old books? Why don't we do this anymore? Cc ⁦ @EdwardTufte ⁩

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

2 years

Peter Higgs (of the Higgs boson) believes that in academia today “he would not be considered ‘productive’ enough.” He “published fewer than 10 papers after his groundbreaking work, which identified the mechanism by which subatomic material acquires mass, was published in 1964.”

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@jasoncrawford

1 year

The reaction to the Wright Brothers' first public demonstration:

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

10 months

“When the Soviet authorities during the 1940s exhibited the 1940 movie of The Grapes of Wrath as evidence of how miserable the poor were in capitalist America, it backfired. What amazed the Soviet audiences was that the Joad family fled starvation by car.” – @DeirdreMcClosk

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

5 months

@amasad It's a super-exponential curve. Progress is driven by self-reinforcing feedback loops, so it accelerates over time. When you're on a curve that steep, then at any point, most of the progress happened recently.

Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

5 months

What drives acceleration? Some major factors: - Population (more people = more brains) - Wealth (surplus invested in R&D) - Fundamental enabling technologies - Science - Market size - Legal & financial institutions - Philosophy: explicitly valuing progress

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

4 years

Most people see @BillGates 's life in two parts: Act 1: make money, Act 2: give it away. The first seen as greed/ambition, the second as generosity. I think this is a mistake. I see much more continuity between the two acts.

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

4 years

Starting to read about the history of finance, and one thing is clear: virtually every feature of finance is very old and every possible phenomenon appeared almost instantly as soon as the context for it existed

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

4 years

When someone makes a comment that is not worth a direct response: 1. Reply with this image. 2. Help them identify what level they’re currently at. 3. Invite them to #AscendTheHierarchy . Let's make this a thing.

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

2 years

@CharlesCMann Yes! We need industrial literacy:

Industrial literacy

When you know these facts of history, you understand what “industrial civilization” is and why it is the benefactor of everyone who is lucky enough to live in it

rootsofprogress.org

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

3 years

Sometimes the “lazy” guy just figured out how to be more efficient

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

5 years

Now, a pure lime mixture like this isn't actually good for much. To use it in construction, you need to mix it with something to give volume and strength. Add sand → mortar (like between bricks) Add sand + gravel → concrete Sand/gravel in this context are called “aggregate”.

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

5 years

If you then pour slaked lime into a mold, it will re-absorb CO2 from the air… turning back into calcium carbonate, CaCO3 (and giving off water vapor). In other words, when cement sets, it's basically turning *back into limestone.*

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

7 months

“Homelessness” is the most serious problem and “too much construction” is the least Does that give anybody any ideas

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦

@Noahpinion

7 months

San Franciscans are not happy about the anarchic place their city has become...

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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

4 years

So true. What are some great examples of this? I'll start: containerization of the shipping industry.

Sam Altman

@sama

4 years

A lot of great ideas look easy and obvious in retrospect, but it's still somehow enormously difficult to figure out the first time someone does it. It's an easy way to trivialize important contributions. If it was so obviously good, why did no one else do it?

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