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Have you seen machine learning papers showing basically this? That winning algorithms use 90-99% social imitation as their strategy
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To a first approximation, yeah. You buy shoes 99% because you see they work for others in protecting feet. The remaining 1% is decisions like non-leather for animal rights or minimalist for barefoot running ideology.
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OTOH you often don’t recognize mundane problems as problems till you see the solution. I didn’t know I needed Google until I saw Google. We do occasionally see problems before we can solve them, but they tend to be big fantasies (flight, immortality...)
Taleb’s example of suitcases on wheels is a good one here. Why it took till the 1960s before somebody thought of putting wheels on suitcases is unclear.
Possibly. Or people with marble-floored palaces also had servants whose well-being they didn’t have to care about. And bell-carts, which I think predate roller suitcases. But point is, most people probably didn’t go around wishing for wheeled suitcases until they first saw one.
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