Where Good Ideas Come From

by Steven Johnson

Compare that to the traditional way of exploring your files, where the computer is like a dutiful, but dumb, butler: “Find me that document about the chimpanzees!” That’s searching. The other feels radically different, so different that we don’t quite have a verb for it: it’s riffing, or exploring. There are false starts and red herrings, but there are just as many happy accidents and unexpected discoveries. Indeed, the fuzziness of the results is part of what makes the software so powerful. The serendipity of the system emerges out of two distinct forces. First, there is the connective power of the semantic algorithm, which is smart but also slightly unpredictable, thus creating a small amount of randomizing noise that makes the results more surprising. But that randomizing force is held in check by the fact that I have curated all these passages myself, which makes each individual connection far more likely to be useful to me in some way. When you start a new query in DEVONthink and look down at the initial results, at first glance they can sometimes seem jumbled and disconnected, but then you read through them in more detail, and inevitably something tantalizing catches your eye. “Jumbled” and “disconnected” is of course also how we describe the strange explorations of our dreams, and the comparison is an apt one. DEVONthink takes the strange but generative combinations of the dream state and turns them into software.