Pessimism finds great acceptance in all social classes because it feeds our natural tendency to distrust the new, advances of any kind, luddite style mode.
And that prevents us from fully understanding how innovation affects not only our lives, but the effects of the innovation itself. He talks about this and other things the new book of Matt Ridley: Keys to innovation.
Serendipity and context
One of the great sources of scientific discovery is serendipity.: the scientist pursues a goal and, along the way, by pure chance, finds something he did not expect, which ends up becoming his main discovery.
In the same way, scientific discovery is not customizable: it works in waves that cover nations or cultures, waves that are more or less intense and rich depending on political, cultural or ideological issues. Because inventions are nothing more than materialized ideas. And ideas fly from head to head like viruses. And ideas have no owner: ideas are reformulations of other ideas that we borrow.
Keys to innovation (Guesses)
And that's what Ridley talks about, relying not only on encyclopedic documentation, but also narrating it like good storytellers: making us participate in each small advance on the long ladder of innovation.
Innovation is the most important activity of our time: it brings spectacular progress to our standard of living, but also, at times, disturbing changes to society. Matt Ridley understands innovation as a haphazard process that advances from the bottom up and is a direct result of the human habit of exchange, and not as an orderly process that is set in motion from the top according to an established plan. It is always a collective, collaborative phenomenon, which involves trial and error, and is never the creation of a solitary genius. The author draws these and other conclusions from the fascinating history of numerous advances that illustrate what innovation is and what mechanisms drive it.
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The news
Books that inspire us: 'Keys to Innovation' by Matt Ridley
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.