Mokyr: Quantum Leaps in Knowledge Require Recombining Different Fields
Joel Mokyr · a16z Podcast | Knowledge Builds Technology and Technology Builds Knowledge -- with Joel Mokyr · Jan 2, 2019 · at 17:56
Economic historian Joel Mokyr discusses how innovation and major intellectual breakthroughs occur across disciplines on the a16z Podcast.
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“What happens in many fields is that they tend very quickly to reach a situation in which progress becomes rather incremental, and that people basically take the sense of, well, what we know is basically all there is to know, and so we can sort of make little small steps in it. But not really step outside and, you know, make a huge quantum leap into the unknown. And in order to do that, you need either one of the two things. Either you need a, to recombine two different fields. You need to acknowledge from one field and transplant it into another so that it becomes a completely different way of thinking.”
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