Ideas and Pencils

What is an idea?¶

How do you get one, have one, own one? Where do ideas flourish?

I think that everyone has to create ideas by themselves and it is this creation that leads to a feeling of ownership over where ever the idea came from. We are also notoriously poor at transmitting ideas, it takes 12 years of schooling to get the basics across, and if you want to know more, you can go to school for another decade or so. We aren’t very good at communicating. We have to create the ideas in everyone’s head. And by the end of this schooling process, everyone has a slightly different idea of what actually happened. We have different ideas about the same thing. This is a good thing. Have you ever been in a conversation where you are trying to tell someone what you mean, and they repeat it back to you, and you say, “No that’s not what I meant at all, but that is a good idea!”

I think that it is this imperfect transmission of ideas that allows us to make progress. Ideas change minds, and get combined in a different environment, join up with preconceptions, and then move hosts get recreated, mutated slightly, and the process continues.

Idea transfer¶

Where in our experience do ideas travel the fastest? Which industries are the fastest moving? I was just at SciPy 2014, a programming conference which has a huge focus on open source software. Open source means that the code for the program is freely accessible, anyone can download it, run it and see your take on an idea. But just like anything else, when you show someone your idea, it isn’t quite right in the context that they thought about. When the software is open source, it is possible for other people to communicate back to you and push your idea along. This conference was full of people who were adamant about sharing and keeping things open.

I think that these sorts of practices are hugely important to tackle some of the very large problems that we are facing. We need ideas out in the open that can feed off of each other, be nudged along, and improved.

Small wooden sticks¶

I think that this can only happen like this. We stand on the shoulders of giants. But now we are standing on the shoulders of so many giants standing on other giants. We have this interdependent network of support below all of the work that we do. No one could function at the level we do in isolation. Think about it! No one person knows anything about anything. It is insane. There is an example about a pencil.

It is pretty obvious that no one could actually make even a pencil. Not in isolation. The person who knows how to operate a graphite mine certainly does not know the finer points of manufacturing and how to make a global operation of pedaling small wooden sticks infused with carbon. In isolation we are hurting ourselves.

Yet.

There is this pervasive element of individualism in our lives. A sort of drive that we can do it by ourselves, that we must, and should do things by ourselves. Why?

Attribution vs plagiarism¶

There is something bugging me about our schooling system that drills in ideas about cheating and plagiarism. But I think that the way these are taught often miss the mark. It is not the fact that you did use someone else’s idea, that is amazing, well done! It is the fact that you passed it off as your own. Attribution is what we should hammer home. We should focus on teaching the positive rather than warning and scaring students about the negative.

Why is attribution important? Remember how terrible we are at getting ideas across, if that is true we need a lot of different instances of the same idea. Ideas evolve and grow off of each other. They need to be tied together and have an unbroken strand to the beginning, whatever that means. I think the scientific literature has this right-ish, each paper must weave itself into the literature and point to what it builds upon. There are no works done in isolation.

The web¶

Attribution and a culture of sharing. The web is a a place where sharing is baked in. And we should think like the web.

This might be why the Wikipedia model works. Attribution is a part of the system, every comment and change is marked and attributed to the user, or at least the IP address. But something interesting about this is that those statistics are not obvious, the user of Wikipedia does not know how many people made this for us. Talking to Matt Hall, we were wondering why knowledge sharing in corporations sometimes fails to gain momentum. Perhaps one of the reasons is that the attribution is hidden away. We can’t see the author, or perhaps more importantly the author can’t see themselves attached to their work. Much of open source software is hosted in an ecosystem that monitors every single line of code that people write. When, what did it build on, did the change work, who commented on it, who approved the change. It is a mash up of attribution that enhances the sharing because you can see your contribution. They are front and center. How many changes did you contribute to the open software world this week. Did you suggest changes? Is your code accepted by others? The author can see their contributions and feel included in the ecosystem.

We need to be included in the network.