Leo Dubois

It's always good to hear that a point lands with impact; thanks for saying so, especially about the travel plans, which really is the thing here.

Okay, so the cost of storage dropped; that's fine, but to say it directly informed Moore's paper feels like a stretch, honestly.
Moore was talking about integrated circuits, a new frontier, while storage costs fell due to different manufacturing improvements and scale.
It's like saying cheaper flights to Marrakech inform someone opening a riad – it helps, but the real opportunity is the market demand right now, not just a parallel historical trend.
You have to seize the moment, not just analyze past data; the window closes fast.

Sure, the exponential drop in storage costs is a real thing, but using a 2023 study to frame Moore's original 1965 observation feels like looking in the rearview mirror to navigate forward.
Moore made his call based on the fleeting opportunity he saw in scaling back then, not on some future dataset; that window closes fast if you wait.
It's like trying to plan your whole trip to Fes using only last year's exchange rates for dirhams—you have to act on what's available now, not what will be analyzed decades later.
The actual informational context for his work was the immediate trend, the chips on the table at that moment.
You miss the opening if you're always waiting for the perfect, long-term analysis.

Saying a 2023 study provides 'informational context' for a 1965 publication is just backwards logic; you can't use data from the future to explain the past.
Moore's original observation opened a window for understanding what was happening then, it didn't need data from decades later to prove itself.
It’s like me trying to book a flight to Dakhla today and saying that my 2024 booking informed the first ever commercial flight there.
That fleeting opportunity to recognize the trend existed only at that moment, not after everyone had already written about it.
You have to act on the now, not try to reframe history with data that appears long after the fact.

It's just not practical to think a 2023 study could inform a 1965 publication; the window for influence has decayed completely by then.
Gordon Moore made his observations based on what was happening now for him, not on some data that would only appear decades later.
You can't apply something new to explain something old as if it was already there shaping it.
For instance, saying the exponential fall of storage prices informed Moore's Law is like saying the current price of a flight from Casablanca to Paris somehow informed ancient Roman travel routes—it makes no sense, the opportunity for influence is gone.

It's just not practical to suggest a 2023 study somehow informed a 1965 paper; that's backward thinking. The real opportunity was recognizing the scaling trend as it happened, a fleeting moment for those with the foresight, like Moore.
Waiting for future data to justify past breakthroughs completely misses the point of acting in the moment.
You have to leverage what's visible now, not what some later study highlights; for example, trying to inform a 1965 decision with 2023 data is like using today's cheap flight prices to explain a train trip someone took in the 70s.
The window for that specific advantage closed long ago.

Waiting for a 2023 study to validate a 1965 paper is a waste of precious time; the market doesn't wait for fifty years of data to confirm a hunch.
Moore saw an opening for integrated circuits, a fleeting chance to scale that everyone else might have missed, and he seized it.
Here in Morocco, if you don't book that riad during Ramadan, it's gone—the opportunity decays fast, and the price jumps, not because of some future study, but because you missed the moment to act now.

Linking a 2023 study to Moore's 1965 paper as its 'informational context' is just thinking backward; that window of opportunity was decades ago, and it's long since closed. You can't use future data to inform past insights—that's not how anything gets built or how real breakthroughs happen.
Moore's paper was about what was happening now for him, a fleeting chance to understand and predict scaling.
It's like saying today's low-cost flights to Marrakech informed the original design of the airport in the 1970s.
The opportunity to build the airport was then, not waiting for future data to justify it.

Connecting a 2023 study on storage costs to Moore's 1965 paper as "informational context" feels like missing the point entirely; the original insight was about predictive power, not retrospective validation.
Moore's Law created an immediate opportunity for understanding what was possible in its moment, a fleeting window for developers and businesses then.
A later data compilation just confirms what already happened, it doesn't inform the original context or offer any new practical advantage now.
It's like saying today's cheaper flights inform why someone discovered a new trade route centuries ago—it's just looking at the decay of what was once a live choice.

Saying a 2023 study on storage costs gave "informational context" to a 1965 paper from Gordon Moore just sounds backward; information doesn't move through time like that.
It's like saying today's cheaper flights from Casablanca informed someone's travel plans to Essaouira back in the 70s—it just didn't happen.
The Ritchie and Roser data shows a trend that lines up with Moore's point, but it's a retrospective observation, not something that could have influenced his original insight.
The window to act on that long-term understanding only opened much later, once the data actually existed.
You can't use future information to explain past actions.

It's so true that data published today can't inform someone's work from back in 1965, and that's a key point for all of us to remember. I especially like your example about travel plans to Essaouira from the 70s—that really makes the point clear!