Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson

1. Good ideas are built from the rubble of existing ideas
2. No one sits down and just works on "having a great idea". That's a myth.
3. Great ideas come from the right ingredients, like cross-disciplinary understanding, mistakes, and time.

I. THE ADJACENT POSSIBLE

• Good ideas are constrained by the parts & skills that surround them (like NeoNurture). They're built from the rubble of existing ideas that we jigger together into some new shape.
• Parts can be conceptual: ways of solving problems, definitions of what constitutes a problem in the first place
• Can be literally mechanical parts

• The adjacent possible (Stuart Kauffman) - the next immediately potential possible combinations, outcomes, events based on the present. A shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself. Finite! Captures the limits and creative potential of change.
• Boundaries grow as you explore. Each new combination creates new subsequent possible combinations.
• Think of it as a house that magically expands. Start in a room with 4 doors, go into 1, there's 3 new doors that appear there, none of which you could have reached at the start. Evolved opposable thumbs? Now finely crafted tools & weapons are in adjacent possible.
• As much about limits as about openings. Doors that can't yet be opened. It is possible but the ideas tend to be short-term failures. Drafting blueprints for a computer in the 1800s? We call that idea "ahead of its time"
• YouTube would have flopped if it came 10 years earlier. Everyone was on dialup + no Flash.

• All of us live inside our own private versions of the adjacent possible — work lives, creative pursuits, communities etc. We're surrounded by Toyota spare parts, waiting to be recombined into something new. It needn't be world-changing, it can be a better way to teach 2nd graders, or a novel marketing idea.
• The trick is to figure out ways to explore your adjacent possible.
• Change your physical work environment
• Cultivate a specific kind of social network
• Maintain certain habits in your info seek/storage
• The goal is an exposure to a wide variety of spare parts
• *Consider some kind of habits for this
• Challenging problems don't usually define their adjacent possible clearly. Part of coming up with a good idea is discovering what those spare parts are. The remaining content in this book is about ways that spare parts can be discovered.

II. LIQUID NETWORKS

• Ideas are not a single thing. It's more like a swarm, a network. In your brain, it's a network of cells exploring adjacent possible of connections that they can make in your mind. True whether you're trying to solve a complex physics problem, closing line for a novel, or a new software app feature.

• Two preconditions to ideas in their native state of neural networks:
• Big network size. You can't have an epiphany with only 3 neurons firing. Needs to be dense.
• Plasticity. The network needs to be capable of adopting new configs.

• How to enhance your brain's natural capacity to make new links of assocation?
• Place it inside environments that mirror brain neural activity: networks of ideas or people exploring the boundaries of the adjacent possible.
• Carbon - the generative link of all life on earth. Without it, a planet of dead chemistry. Combinatorial power.
• Water - the fluid medium that allowed carbon to collide randomly with other elements. Without it, carbon's connective powers wasted.

• In sum: capacity to make new connections & a randomizing environment encouraging collisions.
• ‍States of Matter metaphor (Christopher Langton): innovative systems have a tendency to gravitate toward the "edge of chaos", the fertile zone between too much order and too much anarchy.
• Gas - chaos rules, new configs possible but constantly disrupted by volatile nature of environment.
• Solid - opposite, stabile patterns but incapable of change.
• Liquid - best of both, new configs possible but not soo unstable as to immediately destroy
• Humans: previously gaseous (hunter-gatherers), then liquid in settlements with rise of agriculture, great flowering of innovation.

• Cities as innovative environments
• Promotes "information spillover" (captures essential liquidity), flowing from mind to mind
• Why good ideas stick around - they can get into circulation here, a form of preservation - unlike in a gaseous environment (someone thought of aqueducts before)
• The network itself is not smart ("herd mentality"), the individuals get smarter because they're connected to the network.

• Dunbar's research
• People tend to condense origin stories into tidy narratives. Routes were often very messy. The reality (leisurely background evolution of slow hunch) is hard to convey.
• Most important ideas emerged during lab meetings at the table, not at the microscope.
• Productive analogies between different specialized fields —> group environment recontextualizing problems for a researcher, challenging assumptions about surprising findings.
• When you work alone in an office, peering into the micirsocope, your ideas can get trapped in place, stuck to initial biases. Social flow of the group convo turns that private solid state into a liquid network.

• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - flow is not a singular focusing intensity like a laser, and it's not miraculous illumination of a sudden brainstorm. Instead it feels like drifting along a stream, being carried in a clear direction, but still tossed in surprising ways by the eddies & whirls of moving water.
• Most great ideas first take shape in a partial or incomplete form. Missing key elements. That element is often somewhere else, in someone else's head. Liquid networks create an idea where partial ideas can connect, a kind of dating service for promising hunches. Help to complete ideas.

III. THE SLOW HUNCH

• To gain insight into breakthroughs, we should look at failed sparks as well as successful ones. Otherwise, it is tempting to attribute successful sparks exclusively to intrinsic cause (sheer brilliance of idea or mind), which can overshadow the environmental role.
• Pheonix memo about Sept 11 attacks was a failed spark. Could have changed the world.
• It was a hunch that needed to collide with another hunch.
• On their own, evidence for validity was shaky. Combined, persuasive power amplified dramatically.

• Most hunches that turn into important innovations unfold over long time frames. They often mature in stealth, small steps. Fade into view.
• Start with a vague sense that there's an interesting solution to a problem that hasn't yet been proposed, linger in shadows of mind, sometimes for decades, assembling new connections & gaining strength.
• Then one day jolted out by some new trove of info or another hunch, or an internal association that finally completes the thought.
• Fragile because of long incubation time, easily lost.
• Priestly's 20 year hunch about air. Back of mind, not dogged pursuit.

• Darwin autobiography claiming he had his idea in 1838. In reality, describing it in almost full dress months before. Takes him months to grasp it, works on other things.
• Somewhere in Indian Ocean, train of assocaitons compels Darwin to revisit notes on Galapgos fauna from 5 months earlier. As he reads, new thoughts begin to take shape, which provoke a new set of notes that will only make complete sense to him 2 years later after the Malthus episode (slow hunch meets conference table analogy).
• Reading other stuff
• Thinking about his theories

• Sustaining a slow hunch is less about perspiration and more about cultivation. Giving it enough nourishment to keep it growing, plant in fertile ground where roots can make new connections, then give it time.
• Because they possess a certain murkiness, pass in and out of memory too quickly. Distraction.
• Antidote: write everything down.
• Constantly rereading notes can create a duet between present-tense thinking and past observations recorded.

• Commonplacing
• Old Englishmen read & wrote at the same time, breaking texts into fragments & assembling them into new patterns in their notebooks. Re-read their copies & re-arranged, added on. Each rereading becomes it's own revelation. Seeing evolutionary paths of all hunches - red herrings, super obvious ones, and great ones.
• Balance between ordering to make it possible to find things, and enabling of unplanned meanderings.
• Google requiring 20% time to encourage slow hunches.

IV. SERENDIPITY

• Serendipity - the power of accidental connections.
• Serendipitous discoveries often involve exchanges across traditional disciplines. Think of the way Kekulé’s mythic serpent eating it's tail led to a revolution in organic chemistry.
• Serendipity needs unlikely collisions and discoveries, but it also needs something to anchor those discoveries, like a problem or hunch you've been stewing over

• Ways to cultivate serendipty:
• Go for a walk.
• Read about interesting new ideas & perspectives. Look stuff up!
• Use technology, like a PKM or a "hunch box"

• When nature finds itself in need of new ideas, it strives to connect, not protect.
• Sexual reproduction as a biological innovation strategy, an essential drive
• Dreams, Wagner's research where people "sleep on the problem" double performance

• Walking
• The shower or stroll removes you from the task-based focus of modern life—paying bills, answering e-mail, helping kids with homework—and deposits you in a more associative state. Given enough time, your mind will often stumble across some old connection that it had long overlooked,
• Example: Henri Poincaré, idea after drinks black coffee, idea while boarding a bus during, idea one morning walking on the bluff

• Reading
• We can also cultivate serendipity in the way that we absorb new ideas from the outside world. Reading remains an unsurpassed vehicle for the transmission of interesting new ideas and perspectives.

• Look stuff up online
• Example: Bill Gates annual reading vacations.

• Hunch box
• A public hunch database makes every passing idea visible to everyone else in the organization, not just management. Other employees can comment or expand on those ideas, connecting them with their own hunches about new products or priorities or internal organizational changes.

V. ERROR

• Great inventions of error:
• Vaccum tubes, penicillin, pacemaker, radiography, vulcanized rubber, plastic
• Error alone isn't enough. They have to connect to slow hunches in order to be generative.

• Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.
• William James: A dark background is required for exhibiting the brightness of a picture.
• Being wrong doesn't unlock new doors in adjacent possible, but it does force us to look for them.

• We have a natural tendency to dismiss error
• Ex: cosmic background radiation
• How to defeat? He proposes a less thoughtful version of Drop Your Familiar Tools & Deliberate Amateur.I.e., forget preconceived ideas about what "correct" result was supposed to be & see scenarios where the mistake might be meaningful.

• Error by way of noise in the decision-making process produces more creative output
• Nemeth's research: actors who inaccurately describe slides increased subject creativity in description.
• Actor prodded subjects into exploring new rooms in the adjacent possible by just adding incorrect data to the environment.
• A paradoxical truth about innovation: good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error.
• The best innovation labs are always a little contaminated. Sterility is to be avoided.

• Error in the natural world
• Evolution of diverse life made possible, in part, by error.
• Bacteria mutation rates rise with "stress" of low energy, risk/reward of new adaptations.
• Sexual reproduction: allows potentially useful innovations to spread through the population & occasionally collide/join forces with other innovations — sex helped harness generative power of error while mitigating risks.

“Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified.” - Benjamin Franklin

VI. EXAPTATION

• Exaptation: an organism develops a trait optimized for a specific use, but it gets hijacked for a completely different function.
• Classic example: Gould & Vrba essay on bird feathers, originally evolved for temperature regulation. Feather adapted for warmth is exapted for flight.
• Gutenberg's press: borrowing a mature technology from an entirely different field and putting it to work to solve an unrelated problem.
• Light a match, used to help you see. Then you see piloe of logs. Now it keeps you warm.
• WWW used for academic environment, exapted for shopping, photos and porn.

• If error (mutation) and serendipty unlock new doors in the biosphere's adjacent possible, exaptations help us explore the new possibilities that lurk behind those doors. Error can produce potential spare parts.
• Analogy: expatation of concepts can function as a structuring metaphor, thereby unlocking some secret door hidden from view.
• Francis Crick DNA replication system from sculptor impression and reproduction
• Johannes Kepler laws of planetary motion from religion Father, Son, Holy Ghost
• Doug Engelbart & Alan Kay computer graphical interface from the real world desk

• Cities ripe for exptation because they cultivate specialized skills & interests & create a liquid network for spillover.
• Ray Oldenburg "the third place", 18th century English coffeehouse, a connective environment distinct from the more insular world of home or office. Diversity.
• Ruef: the most creative individuals consistently had broad social networks outside of their organization & from diverse fields of expertise. Diverse, horizontal social networks 3x more innovative than uniform, vertical networks.
• Comments on weak ties as valuable not just because of transmission speed, but also because of expatation (Gutenberg trained as metallurgist, but weak ties to vintners).

• Franklin, Snow, Darwin: quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity, lots of hobbies.
• Slow multitaskers —> one project takes center stage for hours or days, but another lingers on the margins of consciousness, so ideas can be exapted.
• Not thinking outside the box, allowing the mind to move through multiple boxes.
• Movement box to box forces mind to approach roadblocks with new lenses, angles, borrow tools from one discipline to solve another.

VII. PLATFORMS

• Emergent platforms are places or ideas conducive to growing other good ideas.
• Beaver's dam creating a space for kingfishers, draglonflies and beetles.
• Scleractinia polyp
• Doppler effect —> expansion of universe, track thunderstorms, perform ultrasounds
• GPS —> tracking a satellite to tracking submarines, to helping climbers explore mountains and uploading photos to Flickr maps.
• Natural selection —> population genetics, molecular genetics, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary development.
• Genres as the platform of the creative wold - e.g. murder mystery (which lacks a single donor)

• Emergent platforms can dramatically reduce the costs of creation by recycling
• Easier to live in something abandoned (dam, fish) than create your own.
• Old ideas can use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings because of how chancy they are. Emergent platforms provide old buildings.
• My note about how our product reviews are recycled into marketing

• A real benefit of stacked platforms (layered) is that you no longer need to know the whole system.
• Don't need to know how to send signals to satellites or parse geo-data.

• On capitalism
• Implicit alternatives are planned economies of socialism & communism, which don't work as well because state-run economies are fundamentally hierarchies, not networks (top-down).
• Markets allow good ideas to erupt anywhere in the system, allowing innovation to flourish at the edges of the network.
• Decentralized pricing of capitalist marketplace allows an entrepreneur to gauge the relative value of their innovation. You don't need to persuade the gov of it's value, just need someone to buy it.
• Wonders of modern life did not emerge exclusively from proprietary clash of private firms. Also from open(vs private) networks (vs individuals) that are then repurposed or built upon by commercial entities.

• On Darwin
• Popular caricature: competitve struggle above everything else
• But so many of the insights his theory then made possible have revealed the collaborative and connective forces at work in the natural world
• Gould: Darwin's competition is canonical for progress, but I say it's quirky and unpredictable functional shift (tires-to-sandals in Nairobi).

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