I somewhat agree, somewhat disagree. There was also some product-market fit, but they never entered a formed market - their specialty is creating a need for a product through marketing and product strategy.
When they released the iMac, they sold 800.000 computers by the end of the year, and that was 32% of those buys were people who have never owned a computer previously. So they were going for the Windows users, but also for people who have previously never seen the need for a computer. By creating an easy to use product aimed at the masses, they created a product-market fit in an untapped market segment where there was none.
When you think about it, smart phones did not exactly have a product market fit - there were mostly mobile phone users, and kind of smallish dying market of handheld computers, some Blackberry/other users that were I guess what you'd call a smartphone users. First iPhone did a lot for unifying those users into a smartphone market.
So I see some of that here as well. By introducing Vision Pro in a demo that showcases all the most popular uses of desktop/mobile computing, they are pushing the XR into the space of mobile/desktop users who were not interested in XR previously. It's the opposite of the killer app approach, but I think it can work for them and is a tried tactic. And it pushes bring XR closer to general use than gaming.
But definitely a larger leap of fate, as you point out.
I feel like this is the original Apple MO that has worked for them for all their most innovative products. Looking at iMac, iPods, iPhone, Apple watch - it was never a perfectly polished product they were pushing, it was a paradigm shift.
When they launched the firs iMac, the paradigm shift was personal computers are for everyone, and belong to every home and should fit into your surroundings. There were a lot of things you could not do with your iMac that you could do with a lot of much cheaper PCs, especially outside the US. You could do a lot more with your BlackBerry than you could with the iPhone, but here we are.
This seems like a similar strategy. They are trying to win the space by changing the paradigm and moving xr from metaverses to visual computing.
That said, they have had a lot of flops with this strategz as well (Pippin, Newton, eWorld, iTunes Ping) so it's not a given that this approach will work.
But I'm definitely happy to see this strategy reemerging, as opposed a gazillion versions of iphone with a slightly better battery, one more camera, and less or less periphery in the box.
I'd say that "Spiritual" here stands for the human spirit, rather than some kind religious spirituality. Spirit being everything surpassing mere cognitive actions needed for survival.
The finding (like many other) strongly implies that neanderthals had the ability of abstract thought and creative urges. This should in no way be surprising since neanderthals appear at a quite late and developed stage of the human evolution.
Neanderthals are generally quite an interesting topic, but equally interesting is the approach and prejudice of the scientific community towards them throughout the history. Research on neanderthals has been littered with logical fallacies by researchers who were absolute experts in their field, but refused the idea of neanderthals being a human subspecies or a remotely intelligent or capable one, just because it didn't fit in their personal or religious worldview.
Upon discovery of neanderthals, leading anatomists at the time were like "yup, that's just a disease ridden regular human". More skeletons crop up and it's obvious that they have similar traits all across the world, and they are still going "Yup, so many disease ridden humans, how strange". Only after a whole cave in Vindia was found with more than 100 individuals that the scientific community half-unwillingly conceded that oh well there might have been another (sub)species parallel to homo sapiens. And that opened another can of worms and it's been decades of trying to prove how Neanderthals were intellectually inferior to Homo Sapiens.
Those fallacies still exist today, and happen to very prominent scientists. I recently read a scientific articles from the late nineties by two anatomists who reconstructed the vocal tract of neanderthals to see if they had acoustic ability for spoken language. While their wok on the reconstruction was impeccable, their conclusion was that neanderthals couldn't have evolved spoken language as they could only produce two consonants. Which is a ridiculous conclusion seeing that there are languages today that use two consonants.
So that's why people get worked up about a neanderthals having a flute and why we still have people saying a hyena made it in the comment section. It's totally wild to me how people can be prejudiced and kind of racist toward someone from tens of thousands of years ago.
If you're talking about dealing with the stress of a problem unanswered, my counter-intuitive go-to strategy is to think of the worst possible outcomes of me not coming up with a solution. When I think of clear consequences and realize I can deal with them (even if they are unpleasant) and it takes the edge off so I can think more clearly. The consequences are rarely world-ending, after all.
As for strategies for finding solutions for complex/potentially unsolvable problems:
- Try to sketch it out. When thinking about complex problems, we tend to spiral and sometimes they seem too abstract when contained in our heads, putting them to paper makes them more comprehensible and less overwhelming. Even if you can't sketch out the whole problem, better understanding parts of it makes it easier to understand the whole
- Explain it to someone else. Aside from the benefit of the rubber duck approach, talking it out with people with different backgrounds and cognitive processes helps you look at it differently. Maybe you're a deep narrow thinker and someone who is a shallow wide thinker will help you se the whole picture or vice versa
- Can you break it up into smaller components? If yes, great! Even if you don't solve all the components, you'll still end up with a smaller problem then you started with. And solving some parts of it may change it all together.
- Review the context and everything surrounding the problem. My colleague recently mentioned that when they get a ticket for an issue, they often end up fixing or upgrading a completely different part of the system than the one where issue occurs, and that issue just falls into place
I'm talking about echo chambers as a social problem, not threat, and there is plenty of research to corroborate that. Maybe you're in an echo chamber on your own and missed all of it? :D
I feel like " Every demographic and interest group deserves their model" sounds a lot like a path to echo chambers paved with good intentions. People have never been very good at critical thinking, considering opinions differing from their own and reviewing their sources. Stick them in a language model that just tells them everything they want to hear and reinforces their bias sounds troubling and a step backwards.