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"If it is so hard to succeed as a contrarian, why do we hear so many stories of successful contrarians? Well celebrated contrarians are usually not the real contrarians."
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The lessons to draw here depends on whether you want credit or influence. If you want credit as an innovator then you should actually be pretty conservative. Become prestigious in a conservative way, until late in your career. Reject non-standard views but not explicitly; just ignore them so your quotes won’t bite you later. When the time is right, look around for ripe once-contrarian ideas and take one. Change the name and vary the methods and topics, grab the first few high profile resources, and trash the original contrarians as weirdos.
If you instead want influence, then go ahead and be contrarian early in your career. You are still well advised to be radical in a conservative way, but know that influence is easier than it seems, even if credit is harder that it seems. Most important, know that the fact that few support your contrarian view says less than it might seem about how reasonable is your view. Most people prefer credit to influence, and credit-seekers are better off rejecting a non-standard view now and grabbing it later, should it succeed.
"I think this helps us understand why universities, some of the most conservative institutions we have, are home to our most celebrated intellectuals. Academic institutions such as universities, academic journals, peer review, etc. seem far from ideal ways to encourage innovative ideas. But they seem like better ways to ensure outsiders that ideas have been safely tamed. The new ideas that academics endorse can be safely quoted and an applied with minimal risk of wild uncontrolled disruption. So when ideas originate among wild untamed academic-outsiders, we prefer to attribute them to the safe academic insiders who tame them.
When we are willing to risk being exposed to wild untamed ideas, we turn less to academics, and more to startup companies, passionate writers, activists, etc. And in our youth, many of us are eager for such exposure, to show that we are no longer children who must stay safely in camp – we are strong and brave enough to venture into the wild."
"An evil twin is defined as somebody who thinks exactly like you in most ways, but differs in just a few critical ways that end up making all the difference. Think the Batman and the Joker. Here’s why evil twins matter, and how to discover yours."
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The underlying assumption of brainstorming is that if people are scared of saying the wrong thing, they’ll end up saying nothing at all. The appeal of this idea is obvious: it’s always nice to be saturated in positive feedback. Typically, participants leave a brainstorming session proud of their contribution. The whiteboard has been filled with free associations. Brainstorming seems like an ideal technique, a feel-good way to boost productivity. But there is a problem with brainstorming. It doesn’t work.
"This phenomenon is one of the most important things you can understand about startups. You'd expect big startup ideas to be attractive, but actually they tend to repel you. And that has a bunch of consequences. It means these ideas are invisible to most people who try to think of startup ideas, because their subconscious filters them out. Even the most ambitious people are probably best off approaching them obliquely."
"It’s no exaggeration to suggest that Darwin’s account of speciation is the most revolutionary idea in the last two hundred years. In claiming this, I am not original, for this is also the thesis of Dennett in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. I will never have words fine enough to capture the greatness of Darwin, but nonetheless it is important to at least attempt the articulation of what is so revolutionary in his thought."
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1) Nature is not supposed to be something. The great and most fundamental Darwinian ontological thesis is that nature is without teleology. In this declaration Darwin continues a long tradition characterized by thinkers such as Democritus, Leucippus, Epicurus, Lucretius, and Spinoza. All of these thinkers, each in their own way, declare that nature is without purpose.
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2) Difference is creative, not deviant. In the old Platonic-Aristotlean-Thomist model of nature, difference was seen as a deviation from form or essence. Organisms were measured or evaluated in terms of how closely they approximated an ideal form of what organisms are supposed to be.
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"Again, we don’t know for sure, but we suspect that the analogy with biological disease is badly flawed. For example, whereas it is probably true that most people are susceptible to HIV, our susceptibility to any particular idea, product, musical artists, etc. varies tremendously, depending on our tastes, backgrounds, and circumstances. Unlike for influenza, to which you’re either exposed or not exposed, even the ideas you do encounter have to compete for attention with everything else that you’re exposed to. And unlike models of disease, which assume that disease spreads exclusively from person to person, information can be disseminated by the media and advertising as well as by word of mouth.
All of these differences, along with many others, could dramatically alter the prospects for social epidemics, as well as introduce other mechanisms entirely by which social change can come about, yet models of social influence reflect very little of this added complexity"
"Adam Smith and the ‘invisible hand’ are nearly synonymous in modern economic thinking. Adam Smith is strongly associated with the invisible hand, understood as a general rule that people in realising their self-interests unintentionally benefit the public good. The attribution to Smith is challengeable. Adam Smith’s use of the metaphor was much more modest; it was re-invented in the 1930s and 1940s onwards to bolster mathematical treatments of capitalism (Samuelson, Friedman) and to support innovative analysis by associating the metaphor with ‘spontaneous order’ (Hayek). The effect has been to ignore insightful explanations about how markets function as a process in favour of semi-mystical beliefs in imagined outcomes, wrapped in an isolated 18th-century literary metaphor, which does not explain anything."
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So, when did we start thinking of Smith as being the “theorist of the invisible hand” (and, around the same time, forget all his opposition to strict laissez-faire)? Gavin Kennedy’s historical work places the disjuncture in an oral tradition in England and the US in the late 19th to early 20th century. The myth remained somewhat confined until the publication of Samuelson’s extremely influential undergraduate text, Economics in 1948, which brought the myth to the masses (Kennedy 2010).
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Alice talked in her article about the concept of "technology refusal," but I've found that there seems to be precious little out there in the way of research on this topic. The term itself is used in the context of other educational technologies in an essay by Steve Hodas called "Technology refusal and the organizational culture of schools" from Rob Kling's 1996 collection Computerization and Controversy, but I can't find much that links that essay with anything related to current social networking sites.
"Think of it this way. When some folks go out of their way to show off their defiance and rebellion, others go out of their way to publicly squash such rebellion, to assert their dominance. But if you are not overtly rebellious, you can get away with a lot of abstract idea rebellion — few folks will even notice such deviations, and fewer still will care. So, ask yourself, do you want to look like a rebel, or do you want to be a rebel?"
To get this right, you have to think right. The idea of adjacent possibilities started with evolutionary biologist Stuart Kauffman, who used it to explain how such powerful biological innovations as sight and flight came into being. More recently, Steven Johnson, in Where Good Ideas Come From, showed that it's also applicable to science, culture, and technology. The core of the idea: People arrive at the best new ideas when they combine prior (adjacent) ideas in new ways. Most combinations fail; a few succeed spectacularly.
"The goal is not to convert people to the other side. Rather, it is to overcome the mutual bewilderment and demonization that can happen when each side hears the arguments of the other. It is to get over the kind of assumption that anyone who holds those other positions must be stupid or evil."
"Moving to the history of science, one instance of taking social factors seriously is the “Matthew effect” noted by Robert Merton (i.e., Matt.25:29: “…to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance …” ). In a classic paper from 1968, Merton noted, among other things, that scientific prestige tended to accumulate on those who already possessed it in some degree, such that, for example, when two scientists a and b have done the same kind of work, but a has a reputation and b does not (e.g., is working as a lab-technician, or a graduate student), it is scientist a who tends to get the Nobel Prize if the work leads to amazing discoveries. Into this, Burke suggested, geografic (working in centers tend to be rewarded more than working in the margins) and gender factors may also be present (such as the famous story of the discovery of the double helix, and Rosalind Franklin’s neglected role – or, ironically, even the relation between Merton himself and his wife, the sociologist Harriet Zuckerman, who also researched the phenomenon of multiple independent discoveries, while it is Merton’s name that has become attached to the “Matthew effect”!).
Among the many other well-known social effects charted out were the notion of dominated vs. dominating knowledges (e.g. Foucault, and a host of post-colonial thinkers), habitus (Bourdieu), and tacit knowledge (Polanyi). But what I found more interesting was the reflections on the history of ignorance."
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