Bias Widening by Connecting Ideas Part 1 - Idea Flow

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.