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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."
"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. "
"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?"
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Both of these stories captures something we all understand on a deep intuitive level, but our creative egos sort of don’t really want to accept: And that is the idea that creativity is combinatorial, that nothing is entirely original, that everything builds on what came before, and that we create by taking existing pieces of inspiration, knowledge, skill and insight that we gather over the course of our lives and recombining them into incredible new creations.
"Most people are at a loss to be able to identify any useful connections between arts and sciences. This ignorance is appalling. Arts provide innovations through analogies, models, skills, structures, techniques, methods, and knowledge. Arts don't just prettify science or make technology more aesthetic; they often make both possible."
"Fostering innovation, in other words, isn't just a matter of improving the quantity or quality of math and science education. It's a matter of restructuring how we approach and teach all our subjects, from the liberal arts to math, science and engineering. And it means focusing as much on teaching how to combine those fields of knowledge and think in flexible, integrative, and creative ways, as we do on the subject matter itself. "
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In a recent article in Science, Cornell professor Hod Lipson and graduate student Michael Schmidt described a new computer system that can discover scientific laws. At first glance, it looks like a fulfillment of the dreams of “computational scientific discovery,” a small field at the intersection of philosophy and artificial intelligence (AI) that seeks to reverse-engineer scientific imagination and create a computer as skilled as we are at constructing theories. But if you look closer, it turns out that the system’s success at analyzing large, complicated data sets, formulating initial theories, and discarding trivial patterns in favor of interesting ones comes not from imitating people, but from allowing a very different kind of intelligence to grow in silico — one that doesn’t compete with humans, but works with us.
Dark Art combines the experience of a traditional thriller novel with a multimedia-fueled “out of book” narrative. Clues in the novel — and items that come with the novel, such as ID cards and photos — propel readers into an online experience where they become protagonists themselves.
Sometime in the next week - January 1st if you have that available, or maybe January 3rd or 4th if the weekend is more convenient - I suggest you hold a New Day, where you don't do anything old.
Don't read any book you've read before. Don't read any author you've read before. Don't visit any website you've visited before. Don't play any game you've played before. Don't listen to familiar music that you already know you'll like. If you go on a walk, walk along a new path even if you have to drive to a different part of the city for your walk. Don't go to any restaurant you've been to before, order a dish that you haven't had before. Talk to new people (even if you have to find them in an IRC channel) about something you don't spend much time discussing.
Besides dictating organizational forms, current law privileges the interests of investors and boards of directors, and has no recognition for co-creators who wish to collaborate to create shared value in virtual spaces, and who wish to make decisions as a group.
So imagine if a group of self-organized individuals could come together on the Internet to create valuable products and services – and to establish their own “operating agreement” among themselves, according to their specific goals — and yet still receive the benefits of “legal personhood” that corporations enjoy.
The venerable Jim March gave a fascinating presentation today at the Academy of Management meetings that dealt with the origins of novelty. He maintained that the process generating novelty is distinct from the creativity process. Novelty represents de
Finally the modern space age delivers a fully functioning graphic equalizer in a handy t-shirt format. Party like it's 2999 with the glowing display on the T-Qualizer that dynamically changes with any ambient sound or music.
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