When an idea seems simultaneously obvious and novel, it's probably an important discovery.
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Intriguingly, this suggests another route to great discoveries. Everyone knows novelty is important. But perhaps you could also get to them by starting with novelty and cranking up the obviousness.
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(I know great discoveries don't generally come from explicitly seeking novelty, but from trying to solve problems and not disregarding novel solutions. But this principle could still be useful. E.g. if you noticed you were already doing it, and were encouraged to continue.)
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Isn’t this a variant of Thiel’s what important truth do very few people agree with you on?
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It seems to me that obviousness is a little hard to crank up, because with most useful and novel ideas, they are only obvious in retrospect. Otherwise someone else would be doing them already.
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One way to dial up the obvious is to simply observe the behaviour of others, without your own usual narrative. You will be inspired to new discoveries and also see in others what you miss in yourself
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We need captain obvious
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I think obviousness is correlated with generalizing, thus one way to make great discoveries is to take novel ideas that cover a small problem space and generalize it to a larger problem space.
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Isn’t this basically science? For example in mathematics, you start at the fringe (novelty) and you keep working until you reach ‘obvious’ (a hopefully elegant proof).
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not sure what you mean by cranking up the obviousness?
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Most people write off or discount novel ideas as silly or stupid. Unfortunately that discourages a lot of creativity...
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