[The following was copied and pasted from GPT-4 after I fed it a transcript of a 3 minute ramble I had recorded while walking just now and asked it to turn it into a 500 word blog in the style of Morgan Housel]
Title: Mapping Innovation: An Approach to Harnessing Collective Progress
Hello readers, today let's venture into the vast yet interconnected world of innovation and progress. Our aim? To construct a grand network of ideas spanning diverse industries, inventions, and evolutionary leaps in products. This proposed exercise is not simply an academic endeavor, but a necessary exploration in our quest to comprehend and, eventually, catalyze innovation.
Envision a vast diagram, a network if you will, where each node represents a specific innovation, a unique idea, or a distinct set of skills. These nodes, tagged meticulously, would be interlinked, reflecting the shared skills, overlapping benefits, and cross-industry applications. This network, in its complexity, would serve as a visual roadmap, leading us to potential progress in seemingly unrelated fields.
The purpose of such a network is manifold. On one hand, it might inspire fresh connections in our minds, sparking innovation by drawing parallels between distinct fields. Simultaneously, it could offer a different lens through which we perceive existing innovations, enriching our understanding and appreciation of the intricate web of progress.
Indeed, projects of this magnitude could qualify for innovation grants from pioneering organizations like Stripe or visionaries like Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, who have consistently championed the pursuit of understanding progress.
But why is this network critical?
Simply put, it makes the implicit explicit. As a teacher, one of my key goals is to unearth the underlying learning from any experience and explicitly state it. This process is comparable to the 12-steps program in Alcoholics Anonymous, where the first step towards progress is awareness and recognition.
This process of 'naming' or identifying is critical in the realm of innovation as well. The phenomenon known as Goodhart's Law states: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." This underscores the importance of explicitly defining an idea or innovation. Until we give an identity to an idea, until we talk about it openly, it exists in a state of implicit obscurity, a limbo where ideas with great potential may wither away unseen.
Building this network is akin to naming these ideas. Once we do, we bring them out of the shadows, giving them an identity, making them a part of our collective consciousness. This is the point where true progress happens - when an idea is identified, recognized, and shared for others to build upon. Without this process, we are left grappling in the dark, our hands reaching for ideas that have yet to be named and recognized.
So let's embark on this journey of making the implicit explicit, of connecting the seemingly unconnected, of mapping the landscape of innovation. We might stumble upon unexpected parallels, trigger new thoughts, or simply gain a new perspective on old ideas. Regardless of the outcome, this process of creating a network of innovation is not just an exercise in comprehension, but also a step towards creating a shared language of progress. And who knows? The next big idea might just be a connection away.