Month: February 2012

To Know, but Not Understand: David Weinberger on Science and Big Data

To Know, but Not Understand: David Weinberger on Science and Big Data

Science is producing more data than it knows what to do with.

[T]he creation of data galaxies has led us to science that sometimes is too rich and complex for reduction into theories. As science has gotten too big to know, we’ve adopted different ideas about what it means to know at all.

by Jonathan Frei

Everything old is new again

According to Eric Felten, in his WSJ.com review of the book New by Winifred Gallagher,

Creativity flourishes best when part of a tradition. The new ideas that succeed are those that stick around long enough to become old.

He sees what’s new as part of a long line of creative works, one springing forth from another. For all the interest our society shows for the new and improved gizmo, we still have a strong nostalgia for the old, for the traditional, for the new thing that reminds us of the old.

The iPod may have revolutionized how we listen to music, but many people are using it to listen to tunes that hit the big time half a century ago—or using their iPads to book tickets for a revived 1950s Broadway musical or for the latest movie based on a comic book from the 1940s. Nor is technological progress as rapid as we’ve come to assume. Take the ubiquitous Boeing 737, a plane that first took off more than 40 years ago. If the jet-setters of the 1960s had climbed aboard a plane designed 40 years before, they would have been getting into something with wooden wings. In many ways the world changed more rapidly and dramatically in our grandparents’ lives than in our own.

by Jonathan Frei

Death by brainstorming

Gathering opinions from everyone in the room is still in vogue, but creative work is still best done in solitude. Susan Cain of The New York times explores the role of Groupthink in the workplace and how best to combat its negative effects.

Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

Groupthink can be damaging to teams and small groups when there is pressure and bias to conform to the groups expectations or fear of judgement for expressing fringe ideas. However, there are exceptions.

The one important exception to this dismal record is electronic brainstorming, where large groups outperform individuals; and the larger the group the better. The protection of the screen mitigates many problems of group work. This is why the Internet has yielded such wondrous collective creations.

Open source software and crowd sourced information gathers all the best ideas and then lets the best of the best bubble to the surface.

by Jonathan Frei

Processes instead of goals

Dilbert Creator Scott Adams talks about what works for his success in an essay on his blog called The Yoke of Credibility.

I see life as a process, not a goal. If my goal had been to create world-changing ideas that worked right away, I would be a complete failure. But I don’t have that goal. Instead, I have a process that involves seeding the universe with ideas and waiting for the strongest to evolve and make a difference. The worst case scenario is that my ideas cause the eventual best ideas to compete harder and evolve to even better forms. When you use a process that makes sense, even the unanticipated outcomes are good.

His big idea is that finding success comes by not letting a specific goal determine what path he takes in his exploration of ideas and how attempting to maintain credibility can hinder courageous explorations of difficult ideas.

by Jonathan Frei