Where Good Ideas Come from: The Natural History of Innovation

by Steven Johnson

All other things being equal, a breakthrough that lets you execute two jobs that were impossible before is twice as innovative as a breakthrough that lets you do only one new thing.

If there is a single maxim that runs through this book’s arguments, it is that we are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.

Tarnier embarked on a quick study of five hundred babies. The results shocked the Parisian medical establishment: while 66 percent of low-weight babies died within weeks of birth, only 38 percent died if they were housed in Tarnier’s incubating box. You could effectively halve the mortality rate for premature babies simply by treating them like hatchlings in a zoo.

Holy shit!!!

Radiation therapy or a double bypass might give you another decade or two, but an incubator gives you an entire lifetime.

The Meulaboh incubators were a representative sample: some studies suggest that as much as 95 percent of medical technology donated to developing countries breaks within the first five years of use.

We like to think of our ideas as $40,000 incubators, shipped direct from the factory, but in reality they’ve been cobbled together with spare parts that happened to be sitting in the garage.

The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore those boundaries. Each new combination ushers new combinations into the adjacent possible.

Good ideas are not conjured out of thin air; they are built out of a collection of existing parts, the composition of which expands (and, occasionally, contracts) over time.

This suggest there is huge value in learning about new discoveries. And not just in the same field.

The trick is to figure out ways to explore the edges of possibility that surround you.

The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big

thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.

Carbon atoms measure only 0.03 percent of the overall composition of the earth’s crust, and yet they make up nearly 20 percent of our body mass.

Learnt something new. Yay!

This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It’s not that the network itself is smart; it’s that the individuals get smarter because they’re connected to the network.

Instead, most important ideas emerged during regular lab meetings, where a dozen or so researchers would gather and informally present and discuss their latest work. If you looked at the map of idea formation that Dunbar created, the ground zero of innovation was not the microscope. It was the conference table.

Cool

Williams had a hunch about terrorist groups and flight schools, and that hunch on its own would not have been enough to prevent the attacks of September 11. But dismissing it on those grounds fundamentally misses the point. Williams stumbled across a provocative and surprising idea that was nonetheless incomplete. But if that hunch had connected with another equally provocative idea, one that emerged three weeks later and five hundred miles away, the Phoenix memo might well have transformed the history of the early twenty-first century.

Detecting such subtle patterns in real time was the unrealized goal of the much-criticized Total Information Awareness project spearheaded by Admiral John Poindexter in the years immediately after 9/11.

Jesus

What I hope it did do was create a way for these ideas to flow more. But yeah that went too far in so many ways trying to achieve that. Over time though it is the outcome we will have.

A potential psychopath finding a use for his morbid fascination. Lol.

From the very little I know about Darwin, what he also appears to have given us by writing a journal or diary, is an insight into how ideas are formed. I wonder if he had an inkling...

Ideas are like little ninjas in your head creeping around. Every now and then you hear them or see the flash of a black shape. Ok maybe not. But my mind liked that picture. Lol.

So part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down.

Darwin was constantly rereading his notes, discovering new implications.

Having visited the WTC memorial for the first time, just hours ago before reading this, these words seem more poignant to me. This strong desire wells up to try prevent a tragedy of the past while existing in the here and now.

Loewi’s experiment, as influential as it was, is now remembered as much for the curious way Loewi conceived of it. The idea for the experiment came to Loewi in a dream—in two dreams, to be exact:

In this sense, Freud had it backward with his notion of dreamwork: the dream is not somehow unveiling a repressed truth. Instead, it is exploring, trying to find new truths by experimenting with novel combinations of neurons.

Fucking amazing. I'm going to miss sleep tonight because of this book.

heterogamous

“You don’t reach Serendip by plotting a course for it. You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose your bearings serendipitously.

DEVONthink

A shockingly large number of transformative ideas in the annals of science can be attributed to contaminated laboratory environments.

Error often creates a path that leads you out of your comfortable assumptions. De Forest was wrong about the utility of gas as a detector, but he kept probing at the edges of that error, until he hit upon something that was genuinely useful. Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.

good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error.

An organism that constantly rescrambled the genetic code passed down to its descendants would be more innovative in its offspring, but only in the sense that those offspring would find many novel ways to perish before or shortly after birth.

A coral reef, then, is a kind of vast underwater mausoleum: millions of skeletons united to form the pocked, labyrinthine sprawl of a reef.

Human beings may be justifiably proud of venerable engineering achievements like the Pyramids or the Great Wall of China, but those monuments pale in comparison to the Great Barrier Reef, the largest biological structure on the planet.

You could read a dozen “silver fork” novels and bildungsromans and yet miss the most striking fact revealed by Moretti’s chart: that the diversity of forms is strikingly balanced by their uncannily similar life spans, which Moretti attributes to underlying generational turnover. Every twenty-five to thirty years a new batch of genres becomes dominant, as a new generation of readers seeks out new literary conventions.

Some of those solo artists (Galileo most famously) worked outside of broader groups because their research posed a significant security threat to the established powers of the day.