Robert wrote:
> 2. What IS a "powerful idea", and how does it become powerful?
> I'm particularly interested in asking whether ideas get their power
> from abstraction (finding similarity in structure), or generalization
> (finding similarity in features) - or from both.
Extrapolating just a little bit from contemporary science studies
(people like Bruno Latour, John Law, etc.), I think it's possible to
define "powerful" as "well-connected," in the sense that those ideas
which are capable of doing the most work, of carrying you farthest,
are the ones that are strongly connected to others -- the process
part of experimental science is all about establishing connections.
Conversely, powerful ideas are the ones which allow you to *make*
connections, to explain thing x in terms of thing y, or draw
analogies, or generalize; good theories do that.
I think the "connectedness" notion is a little less unwieldy than
"abstraction," which can be hard to pin down precisely. Things can be
very well connected while remaining very concrete.
- John Maxwell
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