A good argument for strong norms of free expression is not that it leads to truth, but that it’s a form of system design that protects against the harms produced by small but well-organised groups that impose self-serving orthodoxies and taboos on the broader population. When that happens, you can’t challenge the orthodoxies without risking social punishment. By upholding norms in favour of free expression, however, you lower the scope and costs of such punishment.
Any large system is going to be operating most of the time in failure mode. What the System is supposed to be doing when everything is working well is really beside the point, because that happy state is rarely achieved in real life. The truly pertinent question is: How does it work when its components aren’t working well? How does it fail? How well does it work in Failure Mode?
The doers are the major thinkers. The people who really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker-doer in one person…Did Leonardo have a guy off to the side that was thinking five years into the future about what he would paint or the technology he would use to paint it? Of course not. Leonardo was the artist, but he also mixed his own paints. He also was a fairly good chemist and knew about pigments and human anatomy. Combining all of those skills together—the art and the science, the thinking and the doing—is what resulted in the exceptional result…There is no difference in our industry. The people that have really made the contributions have been the thinkers and the doers…It’s very easy for someone to say ‘I thought of this three years ago.’ But usually when you dig a little deeper you find that the people who really did it were also the people who worked through the hard intellectual problems.”
Curiosity is at its weakest when people have no idea about the answer to a question and also when entirely convinced they do. The place of maximum curiosity—the zone in which storytellers play—is when people think they have some idea but aren’t sure.
To be ahead of the market you can’t be a follower. You can’t be following what is hot. You have to have your own belief system. But to me risk is a religion, and I think if you want to go after the big market, you need to take it.
Innovation is perhaps best understood as the process of introducing, adopting, and mastering new materials, products, processes, and ideas. Accordingly, there could be plenty of invention without commensurate innovation.
Traditional systems (like wood-plank-keeled boats) have an advantage over innovative systems (like the then-novel plywood trimarans) in that the whole process of maintaining traditional things is well explored and widely understood. Old systems break in familiar ways. New systems break in unexpected ways.