Epiphanies are Overrated

Steven Johnson on his new book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation - here (via, Q3D). My inference on why western societies are obsessed with epiphanies is probably because of dwelling in a mis-interpreted version of self-reliance and in the process we forget (or conveniently ignore) the cumulative effort of others in innovation (or in general, the importance of others in our lives). This book is probably an elaborate version of Leonard Read's 1958 essay, I, Pencil.

"Why don't you agree with the notion that most good ideas come from epiphanies?

What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely done it in moments of great inspiration. They don't just have a brilliant breakthrough idea out of nowhere and leap ahead of everyone else. Their concepts take time to develop and incubate and sit around in the back of their minds sometimes for decades. It's cobbled together from other people's ideas and other people's technologies and other people's innovations. It's a remixed version of something. A great example from the book is Tim Berners-Lee and the Web.

But, as you point out in the book, Charles Babbage seems to have invented the computer over 100 years before the computer as we know it was possible.

Babbage was trying to invent a digital computer with Industrial Age parts. This big clanking, industrial steam-powered structure. On some level, it was right. If he had been able to build it, it might have actually worked as a programmable computer, but it just was too complicated to do that without vacuum tubes or, even better, integrated circuits and silicon chips. He also invented what is now called the calculator and it actually kind of worked. People learned and improved upon it. There's a path of mechanical calculation that runs through the 19th century where people are advancing it step-by-step. But the early computer was so far ahead of its time that it just kind of died off and many of Babbage's most crucial ideas had to be independently rediscovered 60 or 70 years later. He was so far ahead of his time he couldn't have a direct line of influence, because people couldn't figure out what to do with his idea.

Does that mean that there is no such thing as individual inspiration? Are you saying great ideas come from a "hive mind."

No, I wrote a book celebrating the hive mind and that's my book "Emergence." And I do think that there are things that true collective decision-making is capable of doing. In that book I talk about building city neighborhoods, I talk about ant colonies. But this book is not about that. It's not that we all get together and collectively contribute tiny pieces and out of the sum of our actions a good idea is formed. What I'm saying is individuals have better ideas if they're connected to rich, diverse networks of other individuals. If you put yourself in an environment with lots of different perspectives, you yourself are going to have better, sharper, more original ideas. It's not that the network is smart. It's that you are smarter because you're connected to the network."