Dispatches from the Frontier

The Limits of Intuition

Faced with a complex system characterized by delay and feedback, our intuition often serves to occlude understanding.   According to the authors of these two books, that fact does little to diminish our confidence in what our senses and intuition tell us and the stories we create to make sense of the world:

The Invisible Gorilla and Other Ways our Intuitions Deceive Us

Everything is Obvious (Once You Know the Answer): How Common Sense Fails Us

The scientific method remains our best path to understanding, sometimes in spite of our intuition and common sense.

Art of the New: Bill Clem of the Gallatin Valley Robotics Center

 

You can learn more about the GVRC via its Facebook page.

Art of the New: Will Ritter of Spark R&D

From time to time, I intend to post short video introductions under the "Art of the New" banner.  (It's a term I stole from George Gendron, the former editor of Inc. magazine.)  My intent is to help make interesting people and organizations engaged in learning and creating become a little more visible.

To kick things off, check out Will Ritter of Spark R&D in Bozeman, Montana:

 

Will is a very talented design engineer and is rapidly becoming a skilled businessman.  In the growing world of splitboard backcountry riding, Spark R&D is developing a heady reputation for the design and manufacture of innovative products.

Questioning Our Intuition About Viral Marketing

Duncan Watts knows more about small world networks than most of us.  That's why we should take note when he challenges some of the key assumptions underpinning the prescriptions of viral marketing:

We imagine information or influence propagating through a network in the manner of an infectious disease. We talk about viral videos and viral media, and we really think things spread this way. What we recently stumbled on is that almost nothing spreads. Instead, the vast majority of all adoptions happen within just one degree of the seed...Research suggests that when we do see big events—things that we call viral—something other than word-of-mouth, peer-to-peer diffusion is happening..Once you get your so-called viral video on the front page of Yahoo!, 100 million people see that. So this is not about viral anymore. This is mass media.

 

Read the McKinsey Quarterly article here.