Ideas aren't getting harder to find, anyone who tells you otherwise is a coward

The piece argues forcefully that the claim "ideas are getting harder to find" is false and dangerous because it discourages discovery. It starts by identifying two cognitive traps: hindsight makes breakthroughs look obvious, and the effort of thinking always feels like it will produce nothing. It rebuts widespread pessimism with historical examples where experts declared fields essentially finished - late-19th-century physics, 19th-century surgery, early-20th-century behaviorism, and the optimistic-but-incomplete 1956 AI summer - showing those proclamations were wrong. It also notes that popular culture’s consolidation into franchises does not mean originality has vanished, only that distribution has concentrated.

The piece lays out mechanisms that keep discovery available: every new finding spawns new questions, later discoveries compress and encode earlier knowledge so newcomers can build without retracing every step, and a changing world constantly creates fresh puzzles. Many canonical results are unreliable or outright wrong, reopening "low-hanging" problems for replication and correction. Modern tools and platforms let students and early-career researchers do original work from day one instead of laboring under an impossible backlog. The central claim is moral as well as empirical: promoting the idea that innovation is exhausted will self-fulfill by killing curiosity, so that belief must be resisted.