A pattern I've seen in many different fields: even though many people have worked hard in the field, only a small fraction of the space of possibilities has been explored, because they've all worked on similar things.
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Even the smartest, most imaginative people are surprisingly conservative when deciding what to work on. People who would never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable problems.
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Some of the best places of all to find new ideas are fields that people think are played out, because they've already been fully explored. Essays, Lisp, venture funding – you may notice a pattern here.
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The best protection against getting drawn into working on the same things as everyone else may be to genuinely love what you're doing. Then you'll continue to work on it even if you make the same mistake as other people and think that it's too marginal to matter.
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Academia?
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Good example is Nuclear reactors. We got stuck in a uranium-based Pressurised Water Reactor minima for 5 decades. Molten Salt and Thorium almost entirely ignored.
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The more costly projects are, the more you'll see this phenomenon.
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Absolutely true.. you even see this in math.. certain areas are fashionable now and others aren’t anymore. Mathematical logic back then vs. Algebraic topology right now.
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this is where the funding is. not that we don’t realize we’re all pursuing the same sub field of inquiry (at least in science, can’t speak for entrepreneurs)
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It's not surprising that imaginative/smart people _in their field_ still want a degree of financial security. Goes to the very concept of work in society. People are more imaginative when originality doesn't put their livelihoods in peril.
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I think about this frequently. At least for my field, this dynamic means I'm substantially less likely to get scooped as I crawl toward the finish line/next phase.
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