[captaincrisp]

I feel the point is a bit subtler. We should strive for improvement. We should also understand that that takes more than the normal amount of resources to do something different and better & either commit to spending what's required or, if we can't afford to, use something already proven instead.

The half-done or broken improvements still get called "innovations" and give innovation overall a worse reputation.

[kergonath]

> I feel the point is a bit subtler. We should strive for improvement. We should also understand that that takes more than the normal amount of resources to do something different and better & either commit to spending what's required or, if we can't afford to, use something already proven instead.

Indeed. I wish this point were articulated that way more often.

> The half-done or broken improvements still get called "innovations" and give innovation overall a worse reputation.

We fetishise innovation as an abstract concept, for good reasons because you cannot have progress without innovation. What we tend to miss is that while innovation is good, some specific innovations are terrible. This is particularly infuriating when they are re-surfacing old, solved problems. Looking at wall tiling for example (or the cladding that can be found in much of the Underground): this was a good solution to a common problem. Bare concrete walls have obvious downsides, which is why we don’t tend to use them in building anymore. Doing away with tiling or cladding sounds like an architect being innovative, but if the replacement does not solve the problem, it’s a regression. It will look modern and clean as long as it will be properly maintained, which is to say for about a year, and then it will decay the way concrete does. It will eventually be clad, or reviled as a post-modern monstrosity the way some bad brutalist buildings are today.

Innovation for innovation’s sake is cargo culting progress. This is giving innovation a bad name.

[bluGill]

What innovation is left? Concrete has been around for centuries in modern forms - we can tweak the formula a lot, but still the same basic idea as when it was invented 100 years ago. Most of what passes for innovation has been tried before. Other things were not tried because anyone who understood the problem knows they are cannot be cost effective. Unfortunately the people who fund this cannot be experts in the field, and thus can easily be persuaded to fund things by scammers that anyone who really was an expert could tell you in a few hours of study are a bad idea.

The problem isn't that the politicians are not experts in construction - there is far too many things politicians fund for them to become experts in even a fraction of them all (they also have to fund medical studies, military spending...). The problems is politicians don't respect trained experts, thus don't keep people around to become deep experts, and in turn there is nobody around with deep technical knowledge to say what is a good idea. Or if there are such people around they are not in a position where they can be listened too, instead any scammer is allowed to present their pitch for "innovations".