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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Very true! We were testing that recently with the analogy of "writing code in 3D" to overcome complexity barriers in data dependencies and we are hearing more and more: "oh ... that sounds so simple!" Myeah... Took a few years of work to get it to this level of simplicity
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Is it correct to say that the novelty of AirBnB was subletting a floor in your place as opposed to regular short-term rentals that already existed on the Internet.
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Between the low prices, sometimes quirky offerings, and the novelty of renting your spare bedroom or adu to strangers, they were able to generate a lot of early buzz and convert that into momentum really quickly, even though it evolved into mostly being just like the competition.
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Feel like this is where strong first principles thinking plays a role. Asking the right questions about things most people take as assumed knowledge or “just how something works” leads to an important revision in understanding a process
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All explanatory knowledge comes from solving a problem, and contains something novel. It invokes something new we do not see, that accounts for what we do see. An insight. It seems obvious because it stands to reason, therefore allowing us to effortlessly understand.
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Understand at least at a high level of abstraction. We might not understand the mathematical modelling of general relativity, but without too much effort, most of us can grasp the concept of a warping space time.
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Like, I can't remember to fill out my vehicle logs. Why the hell isn't my car asking me where I'm going and collecting the mileage and adding it up for me? That's not a novel solution, it's obvious, no?
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