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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1239 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 13, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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If a discovery is finding something that you, or the people around you, didn't know about at then telling them about it, then an invention is finding a way to make something or do something, while a non-invention discovery is finding something that already existed. You discover a new plant or a ruin, you invent a lightbulb or a martial art or a programming language. The theoretical concept of how to do these things can be imagined to have existed somewhere in imagination land, but if no human being actually has this knowledge then the knowledge itself literally did not exist until you caused it to exist by putting into people's minds. And in the case of physical inventions like a lightbulb the actual thing itself also did not exist until you created one. If you had chosen to change the methods of your creation, the features of it would change. In some sense this is inventing a different thing rather than the original thing, but in many cases it's minor tweaks that don't fundamentally change its nature but are superficial (you might add a different number of coils to your lightbulb design, or you might put the steps in your mathematical proof in a slightly different order).

Meanwhile, before you discover a new plant that plant is still on the Earth doing its thing. You unambiguously did not invent the plant, it was already there before you arrived. You can't tweak the plant's discovery in minor ways to alter what it looks like (or at least, any tweaking is something you do afterwards and is not a part of the discovery process). It was already there, and you did not cause it to manifest in the real world in the way you do with an invention.

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