I really enjoyed this book and I actually really enjoy the critique of the book as well. While I do believe that good ideas are a crowd phenomenon, I think that “crowd” could be defined a lot more loosely and honestly must me be in a world in which the handiwork of thousands of people is readily available off the shelf and the wisdom of the masses is not more than a click away.

You can be working with a team of hundreds, remixing and reshaping their ideas without ever physically talking to a single person. Understand this and you can see how the future might be a world of lone geniuses working in a basement who are, in fact, taking advantage of the efforts of millions.

…It is a celebration of the virtues of openness, experimentation (including failed experiments), giving “slow hunches” chances to develop, to serendipitously blending ideas from diverse intellectual backgrounds and disciplines, and the continuity of human culture and thought with processes in the natural world. It’s a view of the social life of the mind, illustrated by engagingly-told anecdotes from the history of science and technology; apt references to a wide range of scholarly studies; long, admiring quotations from Darwin; the natural history of coral reefs and the evolution of sexual reproduction. (The broader history of culture, especially the fine arts, is occasionally alluded to, and there are abundantly merited plugs for his old teacher Franco Moretti’s studies on the evolution of genres and “distant reading”; but mostly it’s a science-and-technology book.) Johnson has painted a crowd scene: good ideas hardly ever come from isolated individuals thinking very hard and having flashes of inspiration; they come from people who are immersed in communities of inquiry, and especially from those who bridge multiple communities. The picture is an attractive one, which I actually think (or perhaps “fervently pray”) has a lot of truth to it. But I feel like being contrary,

Read Where Good Ideas Come From (Via University of Michigan) (Images)

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