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Hey that's a great course. Pls do not avoid. Highly recommend signing up. The reason he wrote this famous paper & the book that evolved from that paper, in his

• eropple 12y ago
  > He says - "progress and innovation may depend less on lone thinkers with enormous IQs than on diverse people working together" > Not too sure about that. Why would that not be a thing? I mean, I am not the smartest person on my team. The list of things I know very little about is long. But I occasionally ask questions that are really obvious to me that reorient the discussion because people didn't think of them--problems that were Too Obvious To See up close, you know? And, similarly, when working in stuff that I do know a lot about, I find myself ignoring things that are to me so obvious and basic that my brain just goes right by them. Innovation isn't like Civilization, you aren't just generating lightbulbs. Diversity of thought process leads to some inefficiencies, but it helps you reach new global maxima.
  • jrapdx3 12y ago
    I'm not so sure diverse (divergent?) approaches to a problem are always better than one leader's effort. For one thing, stand-out genius or talent shows up randomly in populations, it's not really predictable when or where it will occur. But on rare occasion when a natural leader does emerge, suppressing diversity (of problem-solving approaches) is likely the better strategy. The true maxima of human effort have generally followed this pattern, born of singularity and not diversity. Once an innovation is widely enough known, it attracts a diverse range of followers who improve the idea and nurture its maturation. Diversity is useful for the "aftercare" of innovation, but not its creation. The other major point is that value of diversity (however defined) vs. uniformity depends on context. In the context of one's home, there may be many ways to arrange furniture in a room, and with few exceptions, one way is as valid as another. By contrast, in a shared household over time diverse opinions are likely to converge to an arrangement using the space optimally. Diversity probably leads to a better workflow solution vs. one person's choices. OTOH there is not a great diversity of "valid" ways to remove an inflamed appendix, that is, regardless of other considerations, a qualified surgeon is required and procedural diversity is constrained by the anatomical realities. This situation demands uniformity not diversity. Finally, "diversity" has an indeterminate number of definitions, and applicability of the term is entirely dependent on context. On second thought, that would seem to drain it of specificity or meaning, on that ground, I should have a policy of using "diversity" carefully and sparingly.