Metadata:
Keywords:: PermanentNote makePublic
Tags: Ideas creativity innovation
Source: R: Where good ideas come from by Steven Johnson p. 75, 77
Summary: {{word-count}}
Most new ideas are incomplete and vague. They are seeds of future ideas that must be completed by other insights that usually reside in other peoples' heads.
Liquid environments—networks where information can flow freely and interconnect in many unpredictable ways, help complete these unfinished ideas.
Furthermore, ideas take time to develop. As they linger in the shadows of your mind (sometimes for decades), they are gaining strength by assembling new connections.
This is not a hindrance but a power because truly new ideas require a perspective on a problem that nobody has ever had before, and this takes time.
In sum, new ideas start as vague hunches. They need time and other ideas to develop. These hunches tend to slip away, and they are lost forever. To avoid that, write everything down, and best to write it down in a system designed to catch hunches that facilitates interconnectivity, not categorization.
Elaborations
Connect to zk
By doing something you know (an objective or hypothesis) you find something that you didn't was there.
This shows that our platonicity and ludic fallacy—ridding reality of Black Swans through simplification due to our cognitive limitations—can work in our favor. You see, the hypothesis that hid BS could hide BS of the positive kind. When you test your hypothesis—implement it in reality—those BS get exposed leading to new things. The new things can be innovative on their own or they can act as a spare part (that was previously missing) to spark a novel idea. (PN: Most new ideas are incomplete)
PN: Most new ideas are incomplete: innovations need other ideas to make baby ideas.
PN: Most new ideas are incomplete: by internalizing you're increasing the chances of completing a nascent idea.
Related: This can act as adding missing "parts" to any of your incomplete ideas, leading to new lines of thought: PN: Most new ideas are incomplete
It's also possible that the cues that appear during writing might feed incomplete ideas with missing parts (here: PN: Most new ideas are incomplete). Each cue acts as a billiard ball that has the potential to hit other billiard balls, that can hit other billiard balls, and so on until an idea is formed.
PN: Most new ideas are incomplete: The mind has two functions – feeding and capturing. The consciousness is the powerhouse. After you've fed it, you let the immense intelligence make the magic, and you wait until the serendipitous idea occurs.
By doing something you know (an objective or hypothesis) you find something that you didn't was there.
This shows that our platonicity and ludic fallacy—ridding reality of Black Swans through simplification due to our cognitive limitations—can work in our favor. You see, the hypothesis that hid BS could hide BS of the positive kind. When you test your hypothesis—implement it in reality—those BS get uncovered, leading to new things. The new things can be innovative on their own or they can act as a spare part (that was previously missing) to spark a novel idea. (PN: Most new ideas are incomplete)