How to play the glass bead game
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Highlights
- Interesting things usually happen in unexpected intersections of branches of knowledge. Places where people haven’t quite looked enough, behind couch cushions and in between things. The best startups combine ideas lying around in unique Lego forms to better explore niches. The best scientific endeavours combine ideas, too—like Kekulé combining the artistic view of an ouroboros with chemical knowledge to come up with benzene’s molecular structure. Or when mRNA was suggested by Jacques Monod and Francois Jacob thinking in informational terms, later to be discovered at Caltech. Combining areas of knowledge can be uniquely helpful in breaking through stagnation!
- But even if you can’t copy paste equations, the contours being similar is enough. It means the thought processes that led you to understand one thing can be used, transplanted, finessed, moulded to help you understand something else. This happens to be how we understand things and learn them. When we explain machines to children or gravity to high schoolers, we use metaphor to light the way towards a better understanding. They are the ladder we use to get better understanding of things before we throw them away.
- So this is my challenge for all of you. Create your own game-boards from this and expand it. Choose something you’re intrigued by and write out your thoughts and theories on the left, in the first column. Choose the questions you’re grappling with, the sciences you want to explore, and write them as column headings. And see what the intersections bring about! You won’t be able to fill everything in, and that’s okay. Indeed that’s expected! At least if you don’t want your extrapolations to get too tenuous. Figuring out where a particular simile finds its natural boundary can itself be enchanting. There’s a peculiar organic beauty to this superstructure of how domains intersect. The bad side will be similar to the usage of quantum to suggest woo regarding your fate. But it needn’t be thus.
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The hyper-specialisation of software startups and resultant explosion in their individual APIs helped me understand the need for a better monitoring and orchestration layer, since coordination problems scale much faster than the addition of a new species, if the landscape isn’t highly mutable.