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, youād 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 āobviousā connection between flapping wings and flying.
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Muskās first-principles heuristic is only one of many ways to break the connectionitis inherent to analogically reasoning, but there are many others. Boydās 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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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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Iād be wary if such definitions. Thereās creating connections in various ways: metaphor, logic, aesthetics, symmetry. Thereās breaking connections. Thereās refactoring, jokes, absurdity, OCD, wordplay.... the toolkit is infinite.
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At some point if you donāt 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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