Absorbing Good Ideas ain't Easy

It’s easy to curse and lament the fact that new ideas don’t get accepted easily. Sure, the reason is vested interest and factionalism at times. But often, there’s a very far less malicious reason for it: inertia, as Seth Godin wrote:

“We stick with what we know, with what feels safe, with the status quo… (After all) the status quo is the status quo precisely because it’s good at sticking around.”

Also, as venture capitalist Paul Graham wrote, there’s the inevitable asymmetry between new v/s established ideas:

“When a new idea first emerges, it usually seems pretty feeble. It's a mere hatchling. Received wisdom is a full-grown eagle by comparison.”

 

So how do we learn to recognize new ideas worth pursuing?

 

For one thing, Graham says we should give weightage to who is proposing it:

“Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be safely dismissed. But not when they're proposed by reasonable domain experts. If the person proposing the idea is reasonable, then they know how implausible it sounds. And yet they're proposing it anyway. That suggests they know something you don't.”

Of course, that’s not a guaranteed way to pick any one idea to back. Rather, he’s saying it’s good principle to follow in general:

“If you bet on the entire set of implausible-sounding ideas proposed by reasonable domain experts, you'd end up net ahead.”

 

Remind yourself that you need to be patient when it comes to new ideas:

“The current paradigm seems so perfect to us, its offspring, that we imagine it must have been accepted completely as soon as it was discovered… Copernicus published the heliocentric model in 1532, but it wasn't till the mid seventeenth century that the balance of scientific opinion shifted in its favor.”

 

And get into the habit of asking questions about new ideas, to not make judgmental statements:

“Why has this smart and reasonable person proposed an idea that seems so wrong? Are they mistaken, or are you? One of you has to be. If you're the one who's mistaken, that would be good to know, because it means there's a hole in your model of the world. But even if they're mistaken, it should be interesting to learn why. A trap that an expert falls into is one you have to worry about too.”

 

So yes, there are no magic bullets (obviously). But there’s plenty of good advice.