Disordered Cogitations

[. . . contintued from part 2]

Steve Fuller observes:

Major scientific breakthroughs tend to come out of left field, often as a result of people trained in one field moving to another one, or of one field borrowing ideas and techniques from another.

In the language of this essay, we would say that a person creates a new brilliant idea by linking together several disparate pre-existing brilliant ideas and adding enough intellectual glue that the whole new idea is greater than the sum of its parts.

In the language of complexity theory we would say that when feedback from the environment impinges upon a local stew of brilliant ideas, new brilliant ideas emerge as an adaptation to the changing environment. There is a sense of brilliant ideas bubbling up to the top of the heap. In the marketplace of ideas, the brilliant ideas become sought after hot commodities.

So how do we actually create, capture, save, search, and link to common and brilliant ideas?

I hope the reader has already come to the answer: BLOGS!

Blogs are designed for individuals to capture their brilliant ideas and their intellectual capital. It behooves all knowledge workers to document the creation of knowlege, or to narrate their work.

The blogosphere is full of 99 percent common ideas hiding one percent brilliant ideas. But blogs allow us to capture and save our ideas. Blogs can be indexed and searched. Blogs allow us to link to other ideas.

This last point is particularly important. It is this linking that allows a brilliant community to emerge. As important as a few brilliant ideas are, the real value comes when thousands of brilliant ideas create a brilliant ecology that is greater than the sum of its parts (cf. Aristotle, The Metaphysics).

[continued in part 4 . . .]