What About Us?

Polymaths 3/3In the previous post we explored the benefits for innovation that reasoning by analogy brings, and the utilisation of this process by the greatest minds throughout history and today.Analogies for Dummies But is this sort of thinking only available to geniuses capable of holding such vast realms in their minds simultaneously? I don’t think so. I think everyone can benefit from these lessons.We live in a highly specialised world, where it is profitable for each of us to focus on one specific area. In unison with each other, this makes for a highly efficient and productive cooperative network. And yet this specialisation has come at a time when the availability of information has exploded—right when all of human knowledge is available, we are blinkered to it.And this makes sense, we cannot possibly hope, like J.S Mill, to know everything there is to know. It is overwhelming to think about, and so our default tendency is to pay attention to only that which is immediate, urgent and fleeting.But analogies don’t require us to absorb all human knowledge, they provide for us a way of understanding a topic on a structural level, to “understand” (to stand among) the various components to see how they connect, without having to memorise every detail — a form of information compression*.Personally I actively pursue this understanding through making connected notes about ideas that resonate with me. Trusting this “resonance” (re-sonance: the “hearing again” or “echoing”) of the ideas is an intuitive sensitivity to the analogous nature of the ideas. When developing posts for the blog, I don’t merely set about writing something from start to finish. Almost every post is the result of a new idea coming from an analogy I’ve recognised between two or more seemingly distinct features of the world †. By connecting my notes in the linked-note-taking app Obsidian, I find myself discovering unexpected connections in a more deliberate way. When I do this, I’ve found a post topic