It has very important epistemological implications: it means a phenomenon may follow a deterministic law which, due to its mathematical properties, would nevertheless make long-term predictions impossible. So even though you would have a mathematical model for the phenomenon, you wouldn't be able to make real-world long-term predictions. The problem lies in the sensitive dependence on initial conditions.
No. 16, 'Chaos Theory' is actually called the 'Logistic Equation' and it is used in biology to model populations. It does exhibit transition to a chaotic regime for certain values of k, but it's improper to refer to it as 'Chaos Theory equation'.
Many ideas do "float in the air", so you should take you gut feelings of "what's the next app that should be out there" seriously.
It has happened to me personally that an idea which I thought was "crazy, but perhaps crazy enough to be good" – yet never started working on it – was the same idea a start up had not long before. I could but congratulate them on their genius :)
A little bit of self-doubt is expected from civilised people.
You're wrong in calling my thinking fallacious, because my point was merely to emphasise how reductionistic approaches never give a complete picture, which is why people from a STEM background often benefit from further training in psychology and social sciences. However, Theodores' reply ('A few things:...') does a better job than mine.
Nevertheless, Glazier's fallacy is tangential, so thank you for posting.
"The legend about a low-level employee who pipes up with a shockingly brilliant yet simple suggestion that either makes or saves his employer untold millions of dollars has long been part of the canon of business legends."
On the upside, due to the $8M contract, lots of people were able to work and earn a living. The story also mentions how the team had a great time, and probably lots of useful connections between people were made, and tacit knowledge exchanged. Neither of those is traditionally accounted for by the engineering mindset.
This work is not entirely new. Here is another recent article, where it is explained how input to a smartphone/tablet can be reconstructed by analysing reflections of the screen in various nearby surfaces, or the user's pupil.
I watched this, and it's really interesting. From what I remember (and leaving out his astonishing achievements, with which I assume everyone is familiar): Erdos would have no stable residence, instead he would travel the world with all his possessions packed inside a single suitcase. He would 'crash' at the homes of various mathematicians, often unexpectedly. While visiting, he would start banging a spoon to a pan in the middle of the night, to wake up his host mathematicians and insist that they start working on a Math problem. He was very attached to this mother, and her death left him somewhat baffled. He was celibate, and in one interview he says "he likes women, but dislikes what they stand for".
You are disregarding the fact that the vast majority of attacks ARE, in fact, this simple. And your post also fails to mention what is central to Gibson's disclosure, namely the instructions for finding the phone-numbers of SnapChat users. So your post sounds really biased.
