I heard define genius as “seeing connections non-geniuses can't see” which I liked but also felt doomed by
I'm too dumb to give up on trying to get everyone to see the things
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I think this is a commonly held but deeply mistaken piece of conventional wisdom. I’m a big believer in the opposite. The rare quality is breaking big connections that everybody believes in. Tons of people are good at seeing even obscure connections. Breaking “obvious” ones? Rare
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What does breaking mean here? Any examples?
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Most of the ones I have in mind are technical unfortunately. Think of analogies and metaphors as creating soft constraints on thought. If your idea of human flight is connected to bird flight, you’d never invent the fixed wing plane, let alone the helicopter.
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So between Otto Lilienthal and the Wright Brothers, humans had to painfully work up the courage to break the “obvious” connection between flapping wings and flying.
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Musk’s first-principles heuristic is only one of many ways to break the connectionitis inherent to analogically reasoning, but there are many others. Boyd’s snowmobile approach is slightly more general.
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Look at the destruction and creation paper. The idea for a snowmobile is born by first disconnecting the parts of a motorcycle and skis, them reconnecting a subset of the parts.
But even this is too structured. In general, the process is anarchic.
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The broad idea though is that entropy increase dictated by second law suggests there will be more disconnecting than reconnecting required to drive creative destruction. And the destruction takes both more imagination and more courage.
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Replying to
This is great. If metaphor is intelligence then the application of metaphor to something non obvious is imagination+courage.
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Would you say a lot of your work is on these lines? The application of organisation theory to the office etc. seems to follow this.
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Replying to
I’d be wary if such definitions. There’s creating connections in various ways: metaphor, logic, aesthetics, symmetry. There’s breaking connections. There’s refactoring, jokes, absurdity, OCD, wordplay.... the toolkit is infinite.
At some point if you don’t let go of procedural fixation and just *think* in unfettered ways, doing whatever seems like a good trick, you are at risk of turning into a robot running a library of mental models and playbooks. Great for making reference texts, not for thinking.
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To bring it back to the OP, you have to keep forging ahead building out a new linear sequence (serialize the intermediate complexity) by any means necessary. Serialization is continuation. Infinite game: figure out how to continue the game. Connectionitis is a finite game trap.
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