6 ms·

Does irrationality fuel innovation?

74 points by dsr12 10y ago

ssivark 10y ago
Cognitive dissonance is extremely "expensive". Deliberately suspending one's beliefs takes very good storytelling and/or resources corresponding to a movie budget. All that so that each person could suspend their beliefs for a couple of hours. For the kind of long-term emotional investment it takes to do research or develop something new, one (typically) needs to have "buy-in" at an emotional level (aka irrationality). Few humans can invest a lot of their time/effort/resources on things they believe are probably not worth the trouble; sustained dissonance would probably cause burnout.
- iiii_iivii_iiii 10y ago
  "...sustained dissonance would probably cause burnout." Or religion.
  - pmalynin 10y ago
    Or lack thereof.
    - iiii_iivii_iiii 10y ago
      Our innate sense of justice, of how things ought to be, clashes with how things are. Thus we have divine retribution. We ought not die, but we do, so after we die we live supernaturally. Dissonance can give way to religion, generally speaking.
      - pasquinelli 10y ago
        there's been a lot of religion that doesn't fit with what you're saying, norse mythology for instance.
    - throwaway9475 10y ago
      Religion is the result of changing the world to fit your beliefs. Lack of religion is the result of changing your beliefs to fit the world. Cognitive dissonance can be resolved in one of two ways.
- kordless 10y ago
  > Deliberately suspending one's beliefs takes very good storytelling and/or resources corresponding to a movie budget I think the "cost" entirely depends on the frame in which the truth is held. It is my belief/hypothesis, that internally visualized truths are cheap to be "rational" in the internal frame. Out here, in reality, those "truths" become irrational, i.e. a lot of expensive work must go into manifesting those truths in the "hardness" of reality. Irrational truths can manifest "on the cheap" here, I think, if they don't involve speaking for other's truths. Sticking to your own vision, for yourself (or a god), seems to be a common teaching across multiple religions and philosophies. Maybe groups can manifest things cheaply here if it is a common truth for a large amount of the group (and only one or two groups). I appreciate someone else knows about dissonance. It's a powerful force, when involved in complexity.
Fricken 10y ago
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -George Bernard Shaw.
oceanghost 10y ago
Yes but it also fuels failure. The lines that separate what we know is possible, what is actually possible but we don't know it and what isn’t at all— are very very fine. Fools often rush in and are successful because they didn't know they shouldn’t have been able to do something. But more often than not, I think they’re met with disaster simply because the skillset they lack is the same one they need to be successful. Conversely, sometimes competent people are restrained by existing opinion structures.
- taurath 10y ago
  Trying fuels failure, but not trying guarantees it.
- hyperpallium 10y ago
  "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws (The first of his three laws, the third of which is the magic-tech one)
  - Ngunyan 10y ago
    Are you implying time travel is certainly possible? "Even if it turns out that time travel is impossible, it is important that we understand why it is impossible." - Stephen Hawking
- gozur88 10y ago
  All true, and it's probably a good thing to remember for people on this particular site. But on a societal or civilizational level, one great success wipes out a lot of failure.
iiii_iivii_iiii 10y ago
Ignorance can fuel innovation. It can help to not know what you can't know or do.
- jimmaswell 10y ago
  http://www.snopes.com/college/homework/unsolvable.asp http://www.snopes.com/college/homework/unsolvable.asp
  - iiii_iivii_iiii 10y ago
    http://www.openculture.com/2012/04/orson_welles_explains_why_ignorance_was_the_real_genius_of_citizen_kane.html http://www.openculture.com/2012/04/orson_welles_explains_why...
rhizome 10y ago
"Irrational" is a fundamentally negative term, in that it describes a subjective judgement of deficiency, so it's not a good choice to derive any proofs. I would rephrase it as "Does empiricism fuel innovation?"
tedsanders 10y ago
Innovation tends to have many positive externalities. Whoever invents a widget probably only captures a tiny slice of the overall value it delivers to society. Therefore, a particular level of investment can simultaneously be irrational from the perspective of an individual but rational from the perspective of society. Overall, I'm not sure if this is a debate with an answer that will help people move forward. Everyone probably agrees that have accurate beliefs is good, all else equal. And everyone probably agrees that living a good life doesn't require you to maximize your belief accuracy at the expense of all else. Maybe the central idea nugget is that a high degree of self-doubt will improve belief accuracy but hurt other aspects of your life, such as speed of idea generation or speed of work output. I suppose that's a trade off that we all must navigate, consciously or otherwise.
jhchen 10y ago
Creativity and rationality are conventionally seen to be at odds than they actually are. But often something creative and innovative to one person is boring and logical to another, particularly when the former is not versed in the latter's domain. For example, many people versed in networking were using the early internet to make voice communications circumventing long distance telecom bills. It just seems obvious to them then (and many more people now) that if you can send data through the internet, why not encode audio in that data?
dlwdlw 10y ago
One of the reasons radicals have amassed so much power in the middle east is because they were the only ones willing to stand up to the west as the more reasonable people realized they couldn't do anything. A bit of craziness can create very unexpected results, with a destabalization wave having many orders of effects. The strong become weak, the weak strong, the poor rich, the stupid "smart". So much of the status quo relies on people willing to play games. The stability of a game is its degree of belief. That is, it is sustained by cooperative delusion. Another example is that salaries are maintained by collective willing agreement on what is fair. A union, if it amasses enough believers can disrupt this game. Every game you tear down brings you closer to reality and raw possibility. Often it is necessary because of the limited attention for games. Of course, touching reality for the self is insanely hard, nevermind established institutions. Single individuals however can amass a following, seedingargwr waves of energy tha re-evaluate the status quo, swapping what is profane and sacred. This wave of energy is what gives us temporary clarity on reality. Like earthquakes destroying a city, reminding us that the universe doesn't particularly care about our games. One of the biggest games that is currently unravelling is the West as a beacon of innovation and morality. The response to 9/11 was exactly what terrorists wanted. And things like brexit and trump don't particularly help. From a GDP perspectice, each citizen in the US is worth many times a citizen from China or India, but this is only the result of a long historical game that impoverished these former world powers. The natural order of things is that each human provides the same value, the reason this doesnt happen is due to resource flown restriction along lines of military strength.
- Senderman 10y ago
  I followed this up until the final comment, which seemed to come out of nowhere. Each human doesn't provide the same value to each scenario. Case in point, your opening sentence singled out "radicals" as having an entirely separate influence.
- worldsayshi 10y ago
  I agree with another comment that your last sentence goes against most of the rest and I think it makes an otherwise very poignant comment fall a bit flat. I'm not saying that there's no truth to it, just that it's flawed and doesn't explain as much as the rest. Each human doesn't provide the 'same value'. However, I believe value creation is much more chaotic than what economic praxis will try to make it appear. Any person has the potential to create value - under very peculiar circumstances that are not very well understood. In today's society one person may end up creating more value than a thousand others, by inventing something, by being lucky or just by having the right combination of values, connections and friends at the right time and at the right place. Then again, effort still counts, but it's just one of many factors.
hyperpallium 10y ago
Non-conformism fuels innovation, in that conformity prevents it. "Best practices" and "state-of-the-art" are usually appallingly bad, but conformity is the norm https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments
pella 10y ago
"How do you innovate? First, try to get in trouble. Innovation sparks from initial situations of necessity, in ways that go far beyond the satisfaction of such necessity. The excess energy released from overreaction to setbacks is what innovates!Moderns try today to create inventions from situations of comfort, safety, and predictability instead of accepting the notion that “necessity really is the mother of invention.”" https://sivers.org/book/Antifragile https://sivers.org/book/Antifragile More irrationality -> more trouble -> more innovation ?
Animats 10y ago
Most people look at a “crazy idea” — like seasteading — and say: “That’s obviously dumb and not worth trying, lol, you morons.” Well, it is. There are so many easier ways to dodge taxes.
api 10y ago
There's another thing he doesn't seem to mention: the problem in all learning systems of converging on and then getting stuck in local maxima. Perhaps when things get stuck it is in fact rational to be irrational-- to strategically adopt odd heterodox modes of thought or even employ a bit of randomness (Monte Carlo methods) to shake yourself free of a local maximum.
eli_gottlieb 10y ago
Oh come on, guys. Sure, sampling from the tails of the distribution means you sample points with low probability, but if you sample them with disproportionately low probability, you're simply failing to accurately sample the distribution. Translated: if you don't try crazy ideas sometimes, you're not accurately modeling the chances an idea is crazy.
ericcdl 10y ago
The first article that appeared in my feed after reading this one: The Emerging Trump Doctrine: Don’t Follow Doctrine. This article made me think of this line from Does irrationality fuel innovation? "A lot of important truths come from v. irrational ppl." You guys are smarter than I am. Any correlation? Is there any hope that his irrationality might just be what the world needed? Crazy like a fox? Didn't he gain most of his support from people's desire to shake things up? People didn't necessarily like him. They had an overwhelming desire that maybe a force from the outside traditional government could bring a change. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/08/us/politics/trump-doctrine-foreign-policy.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/08/us/politics/trump-doct...
known 10y ago
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw
digsmahler 10y ago
Paul Feyerabend argues as much in [Against Method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method), that "science is an anarchic enterprise." Our greatest innovations were created by people who were claiming "irrational" things against the backdrop of the knowledge of their time.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
MR4D 10y ago
This is a great article. I wish more people understood it. However, the bigger impact is the effect of their marketing on the public. It should worry you about the more complicated things that are being marketed by the financial industry.

74 points by dsr12 10y ago

Cognitive dissonance is extremely "expensive". Deliberately suspending one's beliefs takes very good storytelling and/or resources corresponding to a movie budget. All that so that each person could suspend their beliefs for a couple of hours. For the kind of long-term emotional investment it takes to do research or develop something new, one (typically) needs to have "buy-in" at an emotional level (aka irrationality). Few humans can invest a lot of their time/effort/resources on things they believe are probably not worth the trouble; sustained dissonance would probably cause burnout.

iiii_iivii_iiii 10y ago
"...sustained dissonance would probably cause burnout." Or religion.
- pmalynin 10y ago
  Or lack thereof.
  - iiii_iivii_iiii 10y ago
    Our innate sense of justice, of how things ought to be, clashes with how things are. Thus we have divine retribution. We ought not die, but we do, so after we die we live supernaturally. Dissonance can give way to religion, generally speaking.
    - pasquinelli 10y ago
      there's been a lot of religion that doesn't fit with what you're saying, norse mythology for instance.
  - throwaway9475 10y ago
    Religion is the result of changing the world to fit your beliefs. Lack of religion is the result of changing your beliefs to fit the world. Cognitive dissonance can be resolved in one of two ways.
kordless 10y ago
> Deliberately suspending one's beliefs takes very good storytelling and/or resources corresponding to a movie budget I think the "cost" entirely depends on the frame in which the truth is held. It is my belief/hypothesis, that internally visualized truths are cheap to be "rational" in the internal frame. Out here, in reality, those "truths" become irrational, i.e. a lot of expensive work must go into manifesting those truths in the "hardness" of reality. Irrational truths can manifest "on the cheap" here, I think, if they don't involve speaking for other's truths. Sticking to your own vision, for yourself (or a god), seems to be a common teaching across multiple religions and philosophies. Maybe groups can manifest things cheaply here if it is a common truth for a large amount of the group (and only one or two groups). I appreciate someone else knows about dissonance. It's a powerful force, when involved in complexity.

Fricken 10y ago

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -George Bernard Shaw.

oceanghost 10y ago

Yes but it also fuels failure. The lines that separate what we know is possible, what is actually possible but we don't know it and what isn’t at all— are very very fine. Fools often rush in and are successful because they didn't know they shouldn’t have been able to do something. But more often than not, I think they’re met with disaster simply because the skillset they lack is the same one they need to be successful. Conversely, sometimes competent people are restrained by existing opinion structures.

taurath 10y ago
Trying fuels failure, but not trying guarantees it.
hyperpallium 10y ago
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws (The first of his three laws, the third of which is the magic-tech one)
- Ngunyan 10y ago
  Are you implying time travel is certainly possible? "Even if it turns out that time travel is impossible, it is important that we understand why it is impossible." - Stephen Hawking
gozur88 10y ago
All true, and it's probably a good thing to remember for people on this particular site. But on a societal or civilizational level, one great success wipes out a lot of failure.

iiii_iivii_iiii 10y ago

Ignorance can fuel innovation. It can help to not know what you can't know or do.

jimmaswell 10y ago
http://www.snopes.com/college/homework/unsolvable.asp http://www.snopes.com/college/homework/unsolvable.asp
- iiii_iivii_iiii 10y ago
  http://www.openculture.com/2012/04/orson_welles_explains_why_ignorance_was_the_real_genius_of_citizen_kane.html http://www.openculture.com/2012/04/orson_welles_explains_why...

rhizome 10y ago

"Irrational" is a fundamentally negative term, in that it describes a subjective judgement of deficiency, so it's not a good choice to derive any proofs. I would rephrase it as "Does empiricism fuel innovation?"

tedsanders 10y ago

Innovation tends to have many positive externalities. Whoever invents a widget probably only captures a tiny slice of the overall value it delivers to society. Therefore, a particular level of investment can simultaneously be irrational from the perspective of an individual but rational from the perspective of society. Overall, I'm not sure if this is a debate with an answer that will help people move forward. Everyone probably agrees that have accurate beliefs is good, all else equal. And everyone probably agrees that living a good life doesn't require you to maximize your belief accuracy at the expense of all else. Maybe the central idea nugget is that a high degree of self-doubt will improve belief accuracy but hurt other aspects of your life, such as speed of idea generation or speed of work output. I suppose that's a trade off that we all must navigate, consciously or otherwise.

jhchen 10y ago

Creativity and rationality are conventionally seen to be at odds than they actually are. But often something creative and innovative to one person is boring and logical to another, particularly when the former is not versed in the latter's domain. For example, many people versed in networking were using the early internet to make voice communications circumventing long distance telecom bills. It just seems obvious to them then (and many more people now) that if you can send data through the internet, why not encode audio in that data?

dlwdlw 10y ago

One of the reasons radicals have amassed so much power in the middle east is because they were the only ones willing to stand up to the west as the more reasonable people realized they couldn't do anything. A bit of craziness can create very unexpected results, with a destabalization wave having many orders of effects. The strong become weak, the weak strong, the poor rich, the stupid "smart". So much of the status quo relies on people willing to play games. The stability of a game is its degree of belief. That is, it is sustained by cooperative delusion. Another example is that salaries are maintained by collective willing agreement on what is fair. A union, if it amasses enough believers can disrupt this game. Every game you tear down brings you closer to reality and raw possibility. Often it is necessary because of the limited attention for games. Of course, touching reality for the self is insanely hard, nevermind established institutions. Single individuals however can amass a following, seedingargwr waves of energy tha re-evaluate the status quo, swapping what is profane and sacred. This wave of energy is what gives us temporary clarity on reality. Like earthquakes destroying a city, reminding us that the universe doesn't particularly care about our games. One of the biggest games that is currently unravelling is the West as a beacon of innovation and morality. The response to 9/11 was exactly what terrorists wanted. And things like brexit and trump don't particularly help. From a GDP perspectice, each citizen in the US is worth many times a citizen from China or India, but this is only the result of a long historical game that impoverished these former world powers. The natural order of things is that each human provides the same value, the reason this doesnt happen is due to resource flown restriction along lines of military strength.

Senderman 10y ago
I followed this up until the final comment, which seemed to come out of nowhere. Each human doesn't provide the same value to each scenario. Case in point, your opening sentence singled out "radicals" as having an entirely separate influence.
worldsayshi 10y ago
I agree with another comment that your last sentence goes against most of the rest and I think it makes an otherwise very poignant comment fall a bit flat. I'm not saying that there's no truth to it, just that it's flawed and doesn't explain as much as the rest. Each human doesn't provide the 'same value'. However, I believe value creation is much more chaotic than what economic praxis will try to make it appear. Any person has the potential to create value - under very peculiar circumstances that are not very well understood. In today's society one person may end up creating more value than a thousand others, by inventing something, by being lucky or just by having the right combination of values, connections and friends at the right time and at the right place. Then again, effort still counts, but it's just one of many factors.

hyperpallium 10y ago

Non-conformism fuels innovation, in that conformity prevents it. "Best practices" and "state-of-the-art" are usually appallingly bad, but conformity is the norm https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments

pella 10y ago

"How do you innovate? First, try to get in trouble. Innovation sparks from initial situations of necessity, in ways that go far beyond the satisfaction of such necessity. The excess energy released from overreaction to setbacks is what innovates!Moderns try today to create inventions from situations of comfort, safety, and predictability instead of accepting the notion that “necessity really is the mother of invention.”" https://sivers.org/book/Antifragile https://sivers.org/book/Antifragile More irrationality -> more trouble -> more innovation ?

Animats 10y ago

Most people look at a “crazy idea” — like seasteading — and say: “That’s obviously dumb and not worth trying, lol, you morons.” Well, it is. There are so many easier ways to dodge taxes.

api 10y ago

There's another thing he doesn't seem to mention: the problem in all learning systems of converging on and then getting stuck in local maxima. Perhaps when things get stuck it is in fact rational to be irrational-- to strategically adopt odd heterodox modes of thought or even employ a bit of randomness (Monte Carlo methods) to shake yourself free of a local maximum.

eli_gottlieb 10y ago

Oh come on, guys. Sure, sampling from the tails of the distribution means you sample points with low probability, but if you sample them with disproportionately low probability, you're simply failing to accurately sample the distribution. Translated: if you don't try crazy ideas sometimes, you're not accurately modeling the chances an idea is crazy.

ericcdl 10y ago

The first article that appeared in my feed after reading this one: The Emerging Trump Doctrine: Don’t Follow Doctrine. This article made me think of this line from Does irrationality fuel innovation? "A lot of important truths come from v. irrational ppl." You guys are smarter than I am. Any correlation? Is there any hope that his irrationality might just be what the world needed? Crazy like a fox? Didn't he gain most of his support from people's desire to shake things up? People didn't necessarily like him. They had an overwhelming desire that maybe a force from the outside traditional government could bring a change. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/08/us/politics/trump-doctrine-foreign-policy.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/08/us/politics/trump-doct...

known 10y ago

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw

digsmahler 10y ago

Paul Feyerabend argues as much in [Against Method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method), that "science is an anarchic enterprise." Our greatest innovations were created by people who were claiming "irrational" things against the backdrop of the knowledge of their time.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

MR4D 10y ago

This is a great article. I wish more people understood it. However, the bigger impact is the effect of their marketing on the public. It should worry you about the more complicated things that are being marketed by the financial industry.