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My thinking about originality (unashamedly taken from other people's thinking about originality):
New ideas arise from gradual, imperceptible changes indistinguishable from noise https://twitter.com/mechanicalmonk1/status/1311415276232216578
New ideas arise from gradual, imperceptible changes indistinguishable from noise https://twitter.com/mechanicalmonk1/status/1311415276232216578
Those changes _can_ happen within an individual - and historically have sometimes done - but happen much faster through interactions.
So in the modern world, if you cloister yourself you're slowing yourself down and risk being outrun.
So in the modern world, if you cloister yourself you're slowing yourself down and risk being outrun.
Point about innovation as noise is: unless amplified it's useless and just fades away.
This is true at each stage of innovation: first time it pops into a head, first time it's written down, first time it's analysed, made coherent or feasible, or the first time it's actualised or made public/accessible.
So there's always a continuous path back from 'cool original idea' to 'totally unoriginal idea'.
The path is continuous, so there's no such thing as an 'innovative step'.
The path is continuous, so there's no such thing as an 'innovative step'.
It can look like there is one when the intermediate steps are hidden - within an organisation, a group, an individual, or even the unconscious.
This is one reason that 'everything is obvious in hindsight' - you can often backtrack to find the origins, because you know what you're looking for!
Building outward is harder because you don't know which direction to go
Building outward is harder because you don't know which direction to go
How to find out? Trust your instincts, you'll learn. Some ideas:
direction of maximal interestingness: https://breakingsmart.com/en/season-1/rough-consensus-and-maximal-interestingness/
Take Narratively Interesting options: https://twitter.com/WeftOfSoul/status/1279326025327968257
Possible exception to the 'continuous path out of noise' is hybrids where ideas from v different fields come together and birth something new.
I imagine it as pattern-matching at a certain level of abstraction (if there's no matching pattern there's nothing interesting there), which makes it not fundamentally different from our usual metaphorical mode of thought.
Maybe the atomic unit of insight is the association, or the metaphor.
Association: What about X with/without Y?
Metaphor: What about X as a Y?
Association: What about X with/without Y?
Metaphor: What about X as a Y?
