Stanley: Innovation spreads via individual contrarians, not broad consensus
Ken Stanley · Kenneth Stanley: Set The Right Objectives · Oct 4, 2022 · at 17:49
Ken Stanley, AI researcher and author of Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, discusses how breakthrough ideas emerge and spread across networks outside rigid evaluation systems.
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“How innovation actually happens is individual connections. Most people see some idea somebody had and say, well, that doesn't fit with the usual paradigm. Like that's not actually a good idea. Like we know the right way. Now we're all very sure right now what we need to be doing. But there's some one, you know, contrarian or something who sees that it's like, actually, like, I can see a lot of potential here. And if you give them the space to express that, in fact, express means not just to write a critique, which they could, but also to follow up and actually try it themselves and build on it because they see the spark there of potential, which other people don't see. Then, yeah, I think that, that that's, that is how ideas percolate through networks. Like there's people, individuals make decisions. That are somewhat disentangled from like the large mass of consensus around the field.”
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