Ask News.YC: How difficult is it to break out of prevailing paradigms of the present? | Hacker News Reader

Ask News.YC: How difficult is it to break out of prevailing paradigms of the present?

22 pointsfiaz33 comments

I'm hoping that some sort of interesting discussion will come of this. I came across this picture in a recent issue of Motor Trend. This was Detroit's vision of the future car way back in the 1950s.

http://www.motortrend.com/features/archive/112_0803_mercury_xm_turnpike_cruiser/photo_01.html

What was so striking about what I see here is that the car design is more or less the same as what you'd find in the 1950s on a typical automobile except that it simply has more of what we don't need.

I wanted to know what people's thoughts were about being trapped in the paradigm of our times in the sense that the engineers of this car were trapped in the paradigm of their times.

How different, in retrospect, are the designs/plans/ideas that fuel some of the startups that are popping up today any more groundbreaking or "futuristic" than the "XM Turnpike" of the past??

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the car design is more or less the same as what you'd find in the 1950s on a typical automobile except that it simply has more of what we don't need

That is a very insightful observation, and it sheds light on the reason why "visions of the future" are always so wrong: they aren't designed for the future. They're designed for the present, purposefully.

That wacky car of the 1950s doesn't represent an automotive engineer's thoughtful attempt to redesign the car. It's not even a real product! It's a marketing gimmick designed to sell the typical car of the 1950s. The idea is that Joe Consumer sees the "Car of the Future", notes that it's covered in chrome, subliminally associates chrome with Progress and Style, and then happily splurges on today's chrome-covered model down at the local Mercury dealer.

Naturally, considering it's raison d'etre, the Gimmick Car looks exactly like the cars that were for sale at the time, only more so.

The lesson to draw here is that most of the "paradigm trap" is a marketing barrier. It turns out to be generally more profitable to sell people a slight variation on what they already like than to show them something totally different and have to prove that it's better. It turns out that the real "vehicle of the future" invented around 1950 was the Land Rover, but that took a long time for people to get used to.

I think the hardest part of breaking out of a paradigm is to realize that you're in one. For example, in physics, the only time physicists ever break out of an existing paradigm en masse is when stuff starts breaking so badly that you realize there must be an erroneous assumption somewhere. (e.g., the Michelson-Morley experiment that proved that there is no aether.)

"I think the hardest part of breaking out of a paradigm is to realize that you're in one."

Perhaps the single most useful insight I've heard thus far. The best part of this observation is that we have many examples that are readily available to illustrate it for us, yet we somehow fall back into thinking that is governed by preconceived notions.

Maybe the more interesting question is:

Why do we default to thinking that is driven by prevailing paradigms?

Why do we default to thinking that is driven by prevailing paradigms?

They're what you think in.

The shortness of your answer is making my head spin...I think perhaps my second question is rather poorly stated...

I agree that we necessarily must be thinking in one of many paradigms, but there is a tendency to default to the larger overarching "trending" paradigm. If you look at the car from the 1950s, it doesn't have the curviness of cars and this could be attributed to the manufacturing process as opposed to the design process.

The functional features on the car that have changed most notably are the doors...

Maybe I'm applying the word "paradigm" inappropriately...perhaps mindset or something else is what I'm aiming at and not "paradigm".

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OK, I've had some time to think about that which I am attempting to grasp...

I think there is a common thread with "advances" in technology such as the 1950s car in the link above (really, the only apparently visible "innovations" are with the many directions in which the doors open outwards) and with other "advances" that we might see around us today. The common thread being that we tend to reinforce what works in hindsight and project that into the future. Perhaps we can call this the "hindsight paradigm" but I would like some input on whether or not this is an appropriate usage of the word "paradigm".

Advertising markets will also stick to "what works". It had to be a company founded by two Stanford kids that created a revolution in the advertising industry because they were not bound by the traditional thinking of not having to reinvent the wheel such that they could actually deliver the marketer's dream of highly targeted adverts...

Engineers will (hopefully) build something that is solid and then tweak as necessary. There is no need to reinvent the wheel over and over again and this is something that is similar to what I'm groping for: we are sometimes trapped by the convenience of what works at the moment. There seems to be no end to the length at which we may improve anything, but at the same time if people are comfortable with what works, then they can revel in that comfort and simply pass by innovation after innovation because the additional uncertainty of new ideas require somewhat of an adjustment phase, which can be uncomfortable for some and possibly unfeasible for large collective groups.

(This leads me to dream that there should be some sort of way to perhaps time levels of comfort such that when people are sufficiently comfortable they might be more susceptible to shifting to something new...)

Now when I look at the picture of the car (after blocking out the loveliness of the ladies who oddly look quite fashionable by even today's standards) I see a number of innovations that at the time "worked" because it was merely projecting the past upon the future. It is perhaps the very natural tendency to seek that which is familiar because it is safe and project that into the future thus becoming trapped by our past. Contrast this with the notion that I was suggesting in my questions earlier that there is a paradigm of some sort that shifts from generation to generation and that advances are somehow governed by such paradigms.

Now the reason why I think this is worthwhile for a segment of the News.YC community to reflect upon is because those of us who like to think of ourselves as innovators need to constantly question the merits of creativity invested in any given direction. The 1950s car just seemed to me exemplary of how the leading thinkers in the automotive industry were so trapped by the prevailing notion of what seemed to be working (because of past experience, aka "we know best") at the time and just seemed to me to be adding more of that into future projections.

Right now, almost every car looks like an ergonomic blobject. The trendy thing to do to cars right now is to add chrome, neon, and spinny wheels. If I were to extrapolate a future car from current trends, I'd imagine a chrome egg that glows like Las Vegas.

Sure, I could just as easily imagine a car that looked like a matte black monolith. Problem is, that's just a random shot in the dark. There is no current trending to lead me in that direction.

I think the genius in creating a new paradigm lies not in extrapolating from superficial trends, but in isolating a fundamental problem that no one else has fully appreciated yet. It would be like predicting a future car that doesn't need to be replaced as soon as it's paid for.

Elegant.

So how do you break out of these things?

I'd think the best way is to recognize that these "prevailing paradigms" are just models for the world that only have some degree of applicability.

If you want to create the next paradigm shift, you need to figure out where the current paradigm breaks down. Look for the rough edges: the places where the solution doesn't quite fit the problem contour.

Right. Which is exactly why the most powerful startups provide potential paradigm shifts.

Not to get too deep into philosophy, but I imagine it has to do with observed cause and effect. For example, you may not realize it, but you think in a paradigm where 2 + 2 = 4. There is no good reason why 2+2=4 has to be true; we only believe it is true because we observe 4 objects every time we aggregate 2 and 2. Every time.

We break out of a paradigm when we push it to the extremes and notice effects that hadn't been observed before. For example, in quantum dynamics when something can pop up out of nothingness and 2 + 2 can sometimes equal 5.

The difficult part of escaping our paradigms is that we can't just assume any random thing in our current paradigm is false. (e.g., My sky is not blue.) You need to find the key ingredient in order to come up with a new paradigm that is actually useful.

Here's the problem, I think: There's no escaping what you know (or what you think you know). So adding more is much simpler than changing how or why. To do so you must fundamentally break from your most basic assumptions.

My suggestion is read more broadly on a daily basis and let the ideas percolate into consciousness rather than as an strained product of it. Once there gradually shape them on their own path. I also find that talking to a broader sample of friends and family and even strangers on the bus forces you to re-evaluate those basic assumptions. Groupthink affects us all but it's really a symptom of who we associate with (and why) than it is of how we think.

People want familiarity. Therefore, a drop-in replacement has more chance of succeeding, even if it has ornate details which are completely irrelevent. As an example, some early cars had a horse reins type mechanism. This allowed a horse owner to accelerate, brake and steer a car with no training. Unfortunately, it is a fiddly mechanism which requires the use of both hands at all times. It is obvious to us nowadays that peddles and a ship style wheel is more appropriate. However, even the peddles have a varied history because double clutching was quite common on early cars and remains in use in some large vehicles.

You raise an interesting point. When I saw this in Motor Trend, I was bothered with how far off the designers of the car were...Of course, nobody can predict the future accurately and it's best to be "safe" in order avoid the criticism of others. What bothered me was the thought of myself being trapped in such thinking.

Sure, it's easy to laugh at how many superfluous ornaments that are visible. I get the impression that the futurism that is present in this car is representative of the auto manufacturer's perspective of producing cars in that the manufacturing process of the future will afford automakers to pack more "features" than is necessary for the customer to take practical advantage of - that is the message I see being communicated (I can hear the manufacturing engineers patting themselves on the back saying, "gee whiz! look at what we'll be able to make in the future; no matter that anybody needs a needlessly complicated door, by golly we'll have the process streamlined so that we can increase the complexity of what we put together!!"). By this I mean that the car reflects the car maker's vision and not the customer's vision.

Let's take a wildly different example of breaking the mold: The Matrix. I would argue that what made that movie (aside from the loyal geek following of Neo wannabes, myself near the top of the list) was the unusually original photography method of "bullet time". It was something so wildly different and brought a new experience onto the silver screen unlike anything else, and to experience that on such a large scale (the movie theater) was the big selling point.

I am very guilty of the type of mindset of the automakers in the 1950s and at the moment cannot claim to be as ground breaking as John Gaeta (the visual effects genius behind The Matrix). I just feel somewhat relieved that I'm aware of it!!

Regarding this, there is an excellent book: "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn

I also like the book, but more as a diagnosis of the disease than as a path to curing it. Still, seeing why dinosaurs develop (and hew to their turf) is a fundamental exercise in creative thinking.

This is one of my favorite topics. I like the movie "The Nightmare Before Christmas" because it's all about being trapped in a paradigm.

I think photo sharing is trapped in the paradigm of the early adopters (photography enthusiasts), and I write about that here:

http://ourdoings.com/2007-12-19

In general, the only way to break a paradigm is to throw it very hard against the wall of reality.

For product design that means immersing yourself in what people want. Evolve as you come into contact with different needs, wants and behaviors.

"In general, the only way to break a paradigm is to throw it very hard against the wall of reality."

That's a great quote! I'm curious to know how your photo-sharing site is exemplary of this statement. I'm not trying to be a jerk here (I think I do a great job of that with little effort!), instead I'm just trying to understand from the perspective of a potential user (or for that matter an investor) of your site who is interested in innovative thinking that is distinctly different from the superfluous ornamentation that you see in the "car of the future" picture given.

[just to be clear: I'm just asking for the sake of knowledge exchange, I am not at all a picture taker and I am not in the business of funding startups!]

I was talking about finding the cracks in a paradigm that needs to break, so I hope ourdoings.com is not exemplary of it. Traditional photo sharing breaks when it hits someone who has amassed a pile of digital photos but has no time to organize them into albums. It also breaks when your peers have litle time and you email them a link to your new photos instead of having thumbnails and explanatory text right in the message.

Up until late last year the ourdoings.com paradigm broke if people had a lot of photos but no time to choose the good ones. Finding what else is broken is tough, in that people may go months without using the site (putting up more photos) without that being a problem. They know they can come back and catch up easily when they have a little time.

If only "futurists" had this type of honesty about their own visions of the future then perhaps we wouldn't have so many "visions" that are obscured by more of the same.

UK industrial designers Dick Powell and Richard Seymour had a television programme called Better By Design in which they designed products immersively. They also had some other techniques. One was to seek overlooked advances in material science. Another was to seek a "standing wave" in product design. This is an element in a design which is blindly and repeatedly copied.

You may benefit from the most widespread example of this analysis because their company, Seymour Powell, inverted the cordless kettle. The initial design worked in one orientation. Copies are omni-directional.

Both in science and in the industry things tend to progress in stages. It's very easy to sell an idea that advances one step ahead, but it's quite hard to make people buy your idea if you try to take a few steps with a single leap. That's why people with very radical ideas in science are often dismissed as crazies a priori.

On the other hand, I have seen some quite advanced car ideas in literature from as far as the late 1800s.

One favourite resource of mine regarding creativity is Originality in Design by Nick Pugh (http://thegnomonworkshop.com/dvds/npu01.html), where he describes his process of coming up with original design, as applied to drawing. One interesting thing he brings up is that sometimes, if you know less about something you become more free in your thinking about that subject. So experts face a real danger of becoming stuck in their way of thinking. There is a lot more in there and it is worth checking out for the discussions alone, even if you aren't into drawing.

Eh. I guess I'm gonna go against the flow here and not get all gushy about the picture and what it's supposed to represent.

It's just one data point, and I think it's being drawn out way farther than it deserves. Some really inventive things have come out of the automotive industry throughout the years. The hybrids that people are getting into now? They've existed in one form or another since the 1920's (or earlier).

For a modern example of "wow-hey-neat" in automotive design, I like to use the Jeep Hurricane. I'm not wowed by its incredible suspension, the sweet, sweet blend of the new and the familiar in its overall design, or by the really cool transaxle drive train they came up with. What I like about it is that they built this thing with two frickin' engines, and then figured out how to run the engines in banks of four cylinders at a time depending on load. So, driving down the highway? You're on a four cylinder engine. Pulling a gentle hill? Have four more. Pulling a trailer up a steep mud slope? Here, have all 16.

Product design isn't all-revolution-all-the-time. Simply churning is really important; keep on improving your existing design incrementally, as often as you can. Then, when you do get that holy-wow revolutionary design in your head, you do something with it.

But you can't force that.

Not sleeping for awhile does it for me. Suddenly I understand the universe.

I think I have a pseudo explanation for why we can't predict what the future looks like (and I also mean that literally).

Change happens from the bottom up, not from the top down. When a new radical idea takes hold and is adopted, it gradually becomes part of the system and is no longer a paradigm. You can only iterate so far on a current design before something else comes along to replace it.

If you took the standard car design in the 1950s and tried to use it as a basis for what the future brings, well...you'd get roughly the same thing that you'd get if you took a Toyota and used it as the basis for what cars look like in the future.

Have you ever noticed in the music in futuristic sci-fi movies? It's the same thing. You can't imagine what music sounds like in 50 years any more than you could have imagined rap or hip hop in the 1940's.

You bring up a good point. I don't think anyone had the vision that we would be socializing the way we do now on social sites like Facebook. Even Mark. Z probably didn't see it until it started taking off.

The question as I see it is, can we predict the trends of the future? This divides itself into 2 questions: 1) Do we have enough knowledge/creativity to see the next waves of the future, and 2) If we saw a thousand possibilities of what would happen in the future, would we be able to pick the right one?

A different way to see it is that you are the force affecting the future - can you push your design/plan/idea far enough to make it groundbreaking?

What is interesting to me is not answering these questions, but rather, asking -

What can I do to strengthen my ability to answer 'yes' to these questions?

Hoping not to sound too smart-ass, Im pretty good at seeing the big trends, and breaking out of paradigms. My first startup would probably be a success if it was started now, but ten years ago nobody understood what the hell I was talking about.

What I do (having thought a bit about it) is this:

1 - having a pretty good grasp of a broad spectrum of technologies and where they are heading. This includes things as diverse as FPGA's, software and diesel engines. I don't know much about the details of any of it, but I have an idea of how stuff works and where it's heading.

2 - A good sense of human nature. Basically knowing what people want...

3 - Having lots of "what if" thoughts.

4 - being able to extrapolate the "what if" thoughts using my knowledge of technology and people.

It's entirely not possible. The opinion leaders have to die or retire and new people thinking new thoughts have to come along.

Think "natural selection" rather than Lamarckian evolution.

I don't think those two ideas are mutually exclusive.

Steve Jobs, maybe not now, extolled the creativity and clarity gained from LSD usage.

Francis Crick and Richard Feynman didn't mind it either, and I dare say their chosen careers might have required an even clearer perspective. I've never really understood why LSD gets a bad rap -- you have to try really, really hard to fuck yourself up while tripping, or have terrible judgment.

Then again, as Ken Kesey put it -- "we thought we were writing the history and future of the universe, but what we really said was 'if you pick your nose long enough, the world will unravel'." Drugs, strange experiences, etc. may unlock insights but they don't seem to help the unprepared mind very much.

"We notice the ripple and take the lake for granted" from "The Social Life of Information" by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid

“We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish.” Marshal Mcluhan

You can't know what you don't know. Read some golden age science fiction. Or watch Star Trek TOS. It's pretty ridiculous the things that they assumed.

For some reason I misread "XML Turnpike"...

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