Bias Widening by Connecting Ideas
Part 1: Idea Flow
Italian Hill Village – Pixabay image
“By challenging basic assumptions, it’s possible to stumble upon simple and unusual solutions to long-standing problems….It’s important to look for discoveries outside the usual suspects—[for] hypotheses worth disproving.….I’m able to pull from disciplines and subcultures that rarely touch one another….”
--Tim Ferriss, transformation guru
Ideas can widen, travelling outward from original preconceptions—that
is, bias--by immersion in idea networks that challenge and tweak that bias. For Europe, these networks were cultivated in
the hill towns of northern Italy, birthplace of the Renaissance. This enterprising incubator brought together both
distant and ancient cultures as sources for innovation and invention. The dominance of the church gave way to
alternate worlds.
Exposure to other operating assumptions for doing things
yields new concepts of problems and new approaches to solving them. Getting beyond the limiting influence of bias
requires other assumptions, other ways of thinking and doing, that is, the igniting
of an alternate bias. Such an
alternative can appear in a dominating mind, think-tank, imagination, or
another cultural mindset—within a time, people, or profession.
Social historian Steven Johnson points to the idea-combining
power of the modern city, starting with the Italian hill villages and their
cultivation of ideas essential to the Italian Renaissance (Where Good Ideas
Come From, 2010). The graph of human
invention runs parallel to the growth of the pulsing interactive structures of
urban life. These immediate interactions
were breakthrough developments distinct from the small isolated groups of
hunter-gatherers of prehistory.
With the agricultural revolution came the marketplaces that
anchored settlements of thousands, then many hundreds of thousands. Trade reached out into a regional, then
global scope. Ideas could flow between
people, families, clans, and cultures. The
social webs of large cities in their billions of connections parallel the 100
trillion neural connections of the brain’s activity—the most complex network we
know. The fuzzy logic of search engines likewise
now enables the randomized meeting up of subjects far afield from each other.
Limits
The only limit on the flow of ideas was the set of pre-assumptions
that always limit acceptance or even consideration of ideas that are different
from the assumed truth—the shared beliefs that define and channel our thinking. Shared
reality makes agreement and concerted action possible. This outcome is the strong suit of conformity.
Idea transformation works by mixing unlike or unlikely
elements by deliberate idea cultivation.
This is the opposite of stovepipe or silo mentality of organizations
devoted to keeping information under wraps and out of the flow of shared idea
generation by keeping it sequestered in need-to-know vaults and private
channels. Pooled insight or a community
of truth is sustained by the intermingled thinking of diverse minds operating
on the same circuit—a working definition of culture that also proves the value
of thought diversity.
Johnson says on this point, “When you work alone in an
office peering into a microscope, your ideas can get trapped in place, stuck in
your own initial biases. The social flow
of the group conversation turns that private solid state into a liquid network”
(p. 61-62). The preexisting preferences built into solo work are the essence of
bias. They predetermine the way ideas will be generated and then selected out
to focus the work on. This is why artists in every field find it hard to resist
visiting the same themes over and over, a form of stickiness that can hinder
their creative expression and development in exchange for a tried-and-true thing.
The “liquid network” of ideas is essential to the image of
flow as a property of social networks as they cultivate concepts into forms
with social value powered by mobility. Johnson
cites the “hybrid economy” as the liquid network combing group R&D efforts
built around individual ideas; open networks such as Nike’s open R&D lab or
Alex Osborn’s brainstorming, as working out the concepts of the protected
genius of private enterprise. Thomas
Edison was famous for his idea brilliance, but it was his team of hardworking
scientists who were needed to bring those ideas to fruition.
In his 2017 graduation address at Harvard, Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg deplored President Trump’s stand for isolation and against “the flow of knowledge, trade, and immigration” to generate innovation and invention.
