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.
Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities—a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity—but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies.
Berners-Lee was supremely lucky in the work environment he had settled into, the Swiss particle physics lab CERN. It took him ten years to nurture his slow hunch about a hypertext information platform.
Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.
The larger question is, as virologist Jonas Salk once asked, “Are we being good ancestors?
Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.
Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete
Babbage had most of this system sketched out by 1837, but the first true computer to use this programmable architecture didn’t appear for more than a hundred years.
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.
Time travelers tend, as a group, to have a lot of hobbies.
When you don’t have to ask for permission innovation thrives.
…if your great-great-great-grandfather wanted to read his book after dark, some poor soul had to crawl around in a whale’s head for an afternoon.
That’s the way progress works: the more we build up these vast repertoires of scientific and technological understanding, the more we conceal them.
Silicon-based life may be impossible for one other reason: silicon bonds readily dissolve in water.
If you look at history, innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.
We are strangely biased, as individuals and media institutions, to focus on big sudden changes, whether good or bad – amazing breakthroughs, such as a new gadget that gets released, or catastrophic failures, like a plane crash.
Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio – all these groundbreaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one another.