I've heard it said recently that 'intuition is broken'. The comment is a reference to a world that has become so large, and connected and noisy that 'intuitive' strategies for just about everything, from getting dates to launching tech products, don't work as they once did.

I'm not sure intuition is broken: I just think the networked world is rapidly changing, and has temporarily outstripped the tried-and-true approximations we use to help cope.

You can see an example of this by watching 2 movies back to back: Metropolis, the Fritz Lang Classic from 1926, and The Matrix. The pace of the two films is the first clue: Metropolis proceeds glacially, compared to The Matrix. Teenagers have a hard time watching it at all.

The information density is the second: Metropolis asked people to believe in flying machines, cars and a society of elite pleasure seekers and masses who keep the elite's machines running. Matrix asks you to believe that all reality is a simulation projected by machines to keep humans enslaved. Even in our era, it requires a nimble mind to grasp the Matrix: it may have been nearly impossible to communicate the message to a 1926 movie audience in a single sitting.

It's not that people were dumber in 1926: it's just that they hadn't developed the tools and understandings that we have. And the development process is never-ending.

Creativity and intuition are linked, IMHO. It has been said that all the great works of music, literature et al. already exist. Somewhere in information space is every combination of words, musical notes, movie frames etc. - 'geniuses' are merely those people who find the good ones.

But, the geniuses in question have a knack for 'finding' these fortuitous orders over and over again. Shakespeare did, The Wachowski Brothers appear to, Mozart and Dennis Wilson did.

I believe that this is because the 'genius' brain is wired a little differently. It has the gift of finding similar patterns in disparate realms. The connection between math capabilities and music has long been noted in young prodigies, for example.

So, creative people are those who are good at understanding useful patterns in one realm, and finding similar things elsewhere: they have a better toolbox to sift through the gigantic ranges of possibilities as they assemble the words of an essay, or notes of a song.

And it is precisely this sort of intuition that will lead to the tools and strategies that will help us all deal with the networked world. It's happening already, every day, as people sit down and launch their browsers.

And, thanks to the amazing economy of Web servers, these people are able to share and collaborate and refine these strategies in near real-time. Weblogs are a bigger deal than people think... the democratization of publishing will have, in my opinion, as great an effect as the democratization of government...
Comments 9:03:19 AM    

workspace.userlandSamples.fixFilePathsAndAddresses

Global search and replace worked, too, BTW. It found something like 2700 instances of the old path...
Comments 6:42:42 AM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures