
The Elusive Big Idea - jakevoytko
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/opinion/sunday/the-elusive-big-idea.html?_r=2
======
pemulis
Social networking as conversation is a good analogy, and one that Gabler
doesn't follow through on in this article. Yes, the vast majority of
conversations are banal, and always have been. The only difference is that,
because of social networking, we now have a lasting record of how mundane our
conversations are. Most conversations are not three-hour monologues about the
End of History (and thank God for that). That doesn't mean that the quality of
discussion has declined, or that we are in a post-idea era. It just means that
throwaway small talk is located on the same global platform as the big ideas.

A positive side effect is that the _interesting_ conversations are now
available to everyone. For example, most chatter in a Philadelphia bar in 2011
is of no interest to anyone except the people having the conversation, but
chatter in a Philadelphia bar in 1776 would make a fascinating read. I sure
wish we had a record of that. Take Twitter as an example, since Gabler singles
it out for criticism. Most of the time, I don't care what Muhammad Everyman in
Cairo is tweeting about, because the quality level is the same as that of
ordinary conversation. But when a revolution breaks out, I can listen in on
tens of thousands of conversations talking about what is happening on a
street-by-street level. Conversation is mundane, except when it isn't.

As for the comment about the Internet following a sort of Gresham's Law, with
trivial information pushing out the big ideas, I think it's off the mark.
Nothing is getting pushed out because there is nothing to get pushed out _of_.
More bytes of kitten photos does not mean less bytes of Nietzsche. The amount
and availability of big ideas and trivial data are increasing concurrently.
The issue is one of attention: You can seek out and pay attention to big
ideas, or you can look at cats. Most people look at cats. But that's always
been true.

~~~
wpietri
> As for the comment about the Internet following a sort of Gresham's Law,
> with trivial information pushing out the big ideas, I think it's off the
> mark. Nothing is getting pushed out because there is nothing to get pushed
> out of.

I disagree. What it gets pushed out of is human thought. Both that of
individual humans and of our collective processing of notions.

I notice it in my own life for sure. I read more now, but I read a lot fewer
books, and I spend less time thinking about what I read: I tend to leap to the
next shiny thing.

I'm using tools like LeechBlock to claw back some of that time. And the time
spent on lighter-weight web stuff isn't totally wasted; it allows me to
maintain a much larger social network, which is both enjoyable and
professionally useful. But I'm starting to feel about the web like I feel
about modern grocery stores: I don't mind that they _have_ candy, but I kinda
resent having to run a junk-food gauntlet to get to the broccoli.

~~~
pemulis
_I notice it in my own life for sure. I read more now, but I read a lot fewer
books, and I spend less time thinking about what I read: I tend to leap to the
next shiny thing._

I know what you mean, and I have the same problem. I think that the big
difference between the present and the past is that the monetary value of our
attention has increased dramatically, and companies are spending hundreds of
billions of dollars just to get us to look at them. It takes a lot of
discipline to keep yourself from looking at a trillion-dollar lightshow.

I just don't buy the premise of this article, which is that because of all of
these distractions, people are no longer grappling with big ideas. To extend
your grocery store metaphor, it's as if the author were to argue that because
there are so many candy bars, vegetables no longer exist. He mentions Richard
Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould as examples of people who would be superstar
public intellectuals in an earlier time period, but I think that they are
_now_. This is pure conjecture on my part, but I think that the percentage of
the population that knows who Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould are is
higher than the percentage of the population that knew who Marshall McLuhan
and John Maynard Keynes were when they were active. In fact, I would venture a
guess that Marshall McLuhan and John Maynard Keynes are _also_ more well-known
now than they were in their day. It's a lot easier for big ideas to reach the
general public through the Internet than through old media and local word-of-
mouth. Most of these people will never penetrate beyond the surface level, but
at least they're aware that these big discussions exist. For the people who
want to go deeper, they still can, will, and are, even if it means taking
dramatic measures to focus their attention.

~~~
jeffr
I don't think he means people are no longer grappling with big ideas. He is
saying the people that are "thinking big" are not being recognized due to the
huge information overload. We are focusing less on whats important and more on
what generates buzz.

------
mchusma
Every generation has said something exactly like this about the generation
before (modern, postwar, postmodern, etc). However, I agree that we are in an
age where most (if not all) big fuzzy ideas have already been thought of.
People have already suggested that "God is Dead" (or nonexistent) or "God is
all knowing and all powerful", and everything in between (even that a flying
spaghetti monster controls all). Nobody is going to come up with something
more radical on that spectrum. Its now on to morality and efficacy. Morally,
there are still active debates on topics such as gay marriage, abortion, scope
of the government, and cloning. Everything else is about efficacy, and what
actually works. Big ideas are the easy part. Proving they work requires
intellectual vigor, experimentation, data, and analysis over long periods of
time. If big ideas are dead, then its only because we are on to the good
stuff, figuring out if they were worth anything.

------
bluekeybox
I, for one, welcome the post-idea world -- consider that the rise of Nazism
and Communism was primarily driven by the so-called big ideas that helped the
masses "make sense of the world" not unlike in the way the article seems to
espouse.

I've known people consumed by ideas (nearly all of my college friends who were
into politics). They were antagonistic, insincere, subtly hypocritical, and
appeared simply brainwashed. You would not want to have them as partners
neither in a business nor in a family. Not a pretty picture.

~~~
wpietri
I think you're half right here, both on your examples and on your conclusion.
Communism was definitely built around an idea. Nazism, though, wasn't; it's
just tribalism dressed up a little.

By generalizing from a few data points without looking for other examples, you
come to a false conclusion. The fight against both communism and fascism was
helped greatly by fighting for ideals like democracy, individual freedom, and
the right of peoples to avoid oppression.

What we should learn from this isn't that ideas are bad. It's that ideas are
very powerful, and that we need to be extremely careful with the ideas we
support. That in turn argues for the sort of careful thinking that the article
recommends.

~~~
bluekeybox
> What we should learn from this isn't that ideas are bad. It's that ideas are
> very powerful.

Actually what we should learn is that ideas are powerful and especially
dangerous if they are combined with a general lack of information and
alternative viewpoints as was the case in the first half of the 20th century.

You are incorrect in stating that Nazism was not primarily idea driven. The
whole "nationalism" thing started off as a powerful idea in the early 19th
century spearheaded by the Romanticist zeitgeist. Previously, people imagined
their "tribes" as consisting of their immediate family, relatives, and perhaps
friendly neighbors. Europe consisted of multiethnic empires at the time. With
the rise of nationalist ideas, people started to imagine their tribes as all
people speaking the same language and being of the same "race". Also, don't
forget the "socialist" part in Nazism, which was also idea-driven. I recommend
watching "The Goebbels Experiment" (IMDB:
<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0458375/>) to get a hint on how significant the
idea-driven propaganda/brainwashing was in the rise of Nazism.

The nationalist wave started off somewhere in Central Europe and reached other
parts of the continent much later -- it is still causing trouble in Russia
(the surprising rise of neo-Nazi skinheads there with the fall of the USSR),
Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and the Basque Country in Spain, for example.

~~~
wpietri
I'll definitely check out the video, but I'm not yet persuaded. I think
nationalism _is_ dressed-up tribalism. Further, propaganda, especially of the
Goebbels sort, is directly opposed to the pursuit of widespread thinking and
big ideas that this article is promoting.

Also, nationalism isn't a big idea in the same sense that communism or western
democracy are. Communists and democrats of many nations work in common cause
for their ideals, but nationalists of many nations are by definition opposed.
What they share isn't so much an idea as a set of behaviors and a style of
thinking. In Gabler's framework, nationalism is more an observation than it is
a big idea.

~~~
bluekeybox
> propaganda, especially of the Goebbels sort, is directly opposed to the
> pursuit of widespread thinking and big ideas that this article is promoting.

The problem I have with the article is that many of the "big" ideas that
happened during past history were only big and influential because they were
absorbed by vast numbers of ill-informed people. In other words, it wasn't so
much that an idea itself was big, but that most people didn't have alternative
sources of information and therefore were ripe material for absorbing the
given idea. Totalitarianism thrived on persuading people through clever
control of the (new at the time) mass-media channels to believe into this or
that idea.

> nationalism isn't a big idea in the same sense that communism or western
> democracy are.

You are equating "big" with "well-intentioned," which I believe are different
things. There can be no doubt that nationalist ideas had a major impact on
modernity, from Nazism to Balkans to post-colonialism. Regarding tribalism, it
can take many forms, not just nationalism. One of the channels which the early
USSR used to spread communist ideas was precisely tribalism. Russians were
imagined as good and communitarian "by-nature" while people from Western
countries were portrayed as more mean-spirited and selfish.

~~~
wpietri
> many of the "big" ideas that happened during past history were only big and
> influential because they were absorbed by vast numbers of ill-informed
> people

Sure, and I think Gabler would agree. He is, after all, arguing in favor of
"rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate". He doesn't want
people to have a single big idea; he wants lots of them to be discussed.

Your basic argument is that if X sometimes causes problems, we should be glad
to see X gone. On its own, it's a weak argument, because it ignores the
positive side of the ledger, and it supposes that the problems you associate
with X won't occur in the absence of X. Neither looks true to me; big ideas
also have plenty of benefits, and a vast number of ill-informed people isn't
going to get any less dumb or manipulable if Enlightment culture dies out.

> You are equating "big" with "well-intentioned,"

Not at all. American nationalism isn't the same idea as Chinese nationalism or
Indian nationalism. Nationalism is an observation about ideas (or perhaps a
meta-idea), not an idea in the sense that the author is talking about.

~~~
bluekeybox
> Your basic argument is that if X sometimes causes problems, we should be
> glad to see X gone.

That's not my basic argument. My basic argument is that the very concept of
"big" ideas as defined by Gabler is fundamentally flawed because: (1) the
"bigness" factor of an idea he uses is a measure of how influential the idea
is; (2) ill-informed people (think children, some rural communities etc) are
much, much easier to influence than well-informed ones; and finally (3) there
were proportionally many more ill-informed people in the past than there are
today.

So we might as well be in the golden age of ideas but neither one of them ever
becomes "big" because they are all in fierce competition with each other. Or
perhaps not -- but the basic point is that the way we measure this "bigness"
is flawed.

> American nationalism isn't the same idea as Chinese nationalism or Indian
> nationalism.

Of course it isn't. America was founded before the wave of nationalism took
over Europe. American nationalism is to European nationalism as ham is to
hamster -- only the name is similar. Nationalism in most countries in the
world was modeled on European nationalism. Examples: Lebanese nationalist
Kataeb party was modeled on Spanish and Italian Fascist parties
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kataeb_Party>). Pakistani nationalism stems
from utopian visions of Muhammad Iqbal, an idealist poet influenced by
Romanticism (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Iqbal>). Ukrainian
nationalism holds as holy populist-Romanticist ideas of Taras Shevchenko
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taras_Shevchenko>) and owes its ideologic form
to Dmytro Dontsov (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmytro_Dontsov>).

One of my biggest realization in the past years has been that nationalism
isn't some "natural" tribal tendency but an ideology like any other that only
uses ("perverts") the tribal tendencies for its own purpose and which was
built and formulated nearly exclusively on a populist form of Romanticism that
spread throughout Europe in the middle of 19th century
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848>,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_nationalism>).

------
bmac27
_“We prefer knowing to thinking because knowing has more immediate value. It
keeps us in the loop, keeps us connected to our friends and our cohort. Ideas
are too airy, too impractical, too much work for too little reward. Few talk
ideas. Everyone talks information, usually personal information. Where are you
going? What are you doing? Whom are you seeing? These are today’s big
questions.”_

Knowing is also what gets you brownie points from academia & from most cubicle
jobs. Rote memorization has become the litmus test by which many seem to
measure intelligence. And most on the receiving end oblige because hey, do
what your told and while society might suffer as a result of your lack of
imagination & ideas, at least you’ll get that A. Or the promotion you so
desperately want. So to me, our learning institutions and a great bulk of
corporate America are to blame for big ideas dying on the vine just as much as
new media.

The author makes some salient points though, particularly with the concept of
“information narcissism.” That's certainly something I can see becoming more &
more prevalent with the rise of the social graph.

~~~
Raphael
And with efficient search, sometimes as simple as find in a text file,
memorization should not be a priority.

------
dkarl
Ideas such as the death of God or the end of history, ideas that can't be
nailed down, much less verified, serve as food for enlightening discussion.
And we're tired of discussion. We can't take any more. We want ideas that can
be settled in labs or supercolliders or computer simulations. Why don't we
want to talk about ideas any more? Actually, it was a single idea killed our
appetite for discussion and hence our appetite for big, open-ended ideas. That
idea is that everything has political implications and because of our concern
for the well-being of others we are morally obligated to prioritize politics
above all else.

Because of that belief, we cannot indulge in honesty, good faith, or curiosity
in any intellectual discussion, lest the enemy steal a march on us. Lest a
child starve, a woman be raped, a citizen be robbed of the fruit of his labor,
or a nation decay, we must treat every discussion as a political battlefield.
Talking with someone you disagree with on their own terms isn't stimulating or
educational; it's legitimizing a harmful ideology. Conceding a point isn't
part of a healthy interchange of ideas; it's emboldening a dangerous
mentality. Even the goal of changing your conversation partner's mind is self-
indulgent, since what's important is not changing the mind of the person
you're talking with but convincing the spectators that you're winning. It
doesn't even matter whether your partner thinks you are sincere. Since the
spectators are the point, he is obligated to argue with you no matter how
uncivil or insincere you are. It would be immoral of him to concede the field
to you, because of the damage you could do with it.

This view of conversation as political struggle, which ruthlessly extends into
every sphere of life through the habits we cultivate in public, has banished
good faith and curiosity from intellectual discussion and turned it into an
onerous moral obligation. Ideas that stimulate conversation are an unwelcome
call to arms for bored and weary warriors. Good riddance to them!

~~~
dreamdu5t
Yet here you are having an intellectual discussion, without using it to wage a
political battle.

~~~
shadowfox
Sadly it was more of a monologue vs a discussion

------
6ren
Perhaps we don't need to consolidate information into ideas (theories), as
much because the information is available directly (via internet). We don't
need to find the underlying pattern anymore.

Also, _The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through
three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and
Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For
instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?'
the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question
'Where shall we have lunch?'_

------
fauigerzigerk
I would suggest an experiment. All intellectuals complaining about the dumbing
down of the generation that follows their own should instead compare pairs of
past generations and see if they still think that the later generation always
has less substance, fewer great thinkers, etc. Because if you read what people
write when comparing their own generation (or the one before) to the next
you'd have to think the world has been in an intellectual death spiral
basically from the start.

It may just take time for great ideas to turn out as such or be interpreted as
such. It would be interesting to do an empirical study to see whether the age
of ideas at a time when they were first called "great ideas" has changed over
time. It would be difficult to do because the concept of "greatness" may
itself have gone through fashion cycles.

But maybe he is right and our society suffers from a little bit of "big" idea
fatigue after the ideological desasters of the past two centuries that cost
many millions of lives.

His complaints about social media seems totally misplaced. Does he really
think that the Facebook or twitter event stream is somehow competing with
deeper thought in people who would otherwise be thinking more? I don't believe
that at all.

Just because a lot of chatter is now public doesn't mean fewer ideas of
substance are published or perceived nowadays. Publishing just isn't filtered
and curated as hierarchically as it used to be. That may influence the
perception of greatness quite a lot.

------
networkjester
All 3 pages in one: [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/opinion/sunday/the-
elusive...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/opinion/sunday/the-elusive-big-
idea.html?pagewanted=all)

Pretty good read, thanks for posting this!

------
padobson
I agree with the author in that there seems to be a general lack of thought in
society as a whole. However, I would say that the information glut we're
exposed to is only one of the reasons - and different reasons apply to
different people.

I would include the "rat race" or "daily grind" into these reason pool for a
lack of critical thought. So much of our brain power is demanded for tasks
that are unoriginal, uninspired and uninnovative that when ( or even if ) we
have a chance to sit and think critically, our brains are sapped and it
becomes easier to let a pundit or a blogger form our thoughts for us.

Another big reason is the lack of incentive put forth in the article. An
innovative idea has little to know value to society if not immediately
monetizeable.

------
aklein
Ironic that the article is light on fact and heavy on anecdote and
unsubstantiated claims.

"For one thing, social networking sites are the primary form of communication
among young people, and they are supplanting print, which is where ideas have
typically gestated. For another, social networking sites engender habits of
mind that are inimical to the kind of deliberate discourse that gives rise to
ideas. Instead of theories, hypotheses and grand arguments, we get instant
140-character tweets about eating a sandwich or watching a TV show."

This might have the sound of truth, but the article really gives me no reason
to believe it's actually true.

------
ivankirigin
It seems like there is a pretty big assumption here, not supported in any
significant way. I don't see much evidence that there aren't big ideas being
made right now. Not all big ideas make waves right away, for one. And some big
ideas might not be obvious to everyone paying attention. How do you define it
even? Audience? This post did little in that regard.

Also, who says we don't have and discuss big ideas in social media?
[http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/jitk9/how_the_fuc...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/jitk9/how_the_fuck_does_the_frozen_soap_instructional/)

------
ivanzhao
1: radical ideas break the patterns of your thoughts.

2: patterns are the least resistant way to think -- they are habits.

3: breaking habits is uncomfortable.

So: radical ideas are uncomfortable.

~~~
mathgladiator
_So: radical ideas are uncomfortable._

And this is why I'm writing a programming language that isn't turing complete.

~~~
alephnil
> And this is why I'm writing a programming language that isn't turing
> complete.

That would not be a particularly new idea. One example is SQL, that makes
searching through the data structures of an database much simpler than it
would be if a general purpose language was used. Now SQL has been extended to
be touring complete, but is not typically used that way.

------
repos
_"The collection itself is exhausting: what each of our friends is doing at
that particular moment and then the next moment and the next one; who Jennifer
Aniston is dating right now; which video is going viral on YouTube this hour;
what Princess Letizia or Kate Middleton is wearing that day."_

To say this is a modern construct is false. People may not have been following
Jennifer Aniston, but they were doing whatever the equivalent was at the time.
As with any generation, there will be your rare innovators as well as your
'average chumps.'

~~~
Rebus
Great points about the information flood of banality - not just 'facts', but
factoids, op-ed pretending to be fact - that has reduced the depth of public
discourse to that of a 3-day puddle. And thereby made our society far more
prone to twisting in the wind of every blow-hard shock-jock and politician
willing to hammer their talking points to death (IF that politician is the
recipient of Murdoch press support, of course, otherwise, talking points
vanish into the ether).

Far more prone to acceding to corporate fascism (witness the slide of the USA
and UK in this direction) dressed up as 'the all-knowing Market'. God is dead
(which was Nietzsche's question, not finding by the way), long live The
Market!

Uncomfortable, unsettling, mold-breaking ideas - AND a passionate discussion
of them in their wake, placing them in context, searching out their salience,
noting their blind-spots, etc - and popular curiosity and interest in the
writers and thinkers who produce them, are life-blood to a civilization.

Ideas are still at large and very much alive in many non-anglophone countries.
is this the saving grace of NOT being native speakers of the the English that
rules the internet?

I'm interested in seeing information technology become idea technology. Any
ideas about that?

Meanwhile, the internet reminds me of nothing so much as one of those bowls
you have somewhere around the house into which miscellaneous oddities accrue
over time, none of which will ever be used, but it seemed good at the time to
put them somewhere... You know what I mean?

I mean a constant 'feed' of junk...Exhausting indeed, to host it anywhere in
your actual head. And so much is coming in that memory is buckling under the
strain and having to be downloaded to Google, which just further strip-mines
the mind in its effort to retain the component parts that build genuine,
socially valuable knowledge.

------
aakz
Love how the line right after the last one - "Think about that." is "Connect
with The New York Times on Facebook."

On a related note to the article, I agree with the author that the web is
filled with information exchanges that is one reason why the web can end up
being anti-ideas.

However, what I love about Hacker News, is that it is one of the few such
exchanges that I know of that seems to have a health balance between
information and big ideas. Hope it stays this way.

------
richcollins
_It is certainly no accident that the post-idea world has sprung up alongside
the social networking world._

. . .

 _Entrepreneurs have plenty of ideas, and some, like Steven P. Jobs of Apple,
have come up with some brilliant ideas in the “inventional” sense of the word.
Still, while these ideas may change the way we live, they rarely transform the
way we think_

------
dfc
I enjoyed the article and generally agree with the argument. However I wonder
if we are over romanticizing the past?

How much of an effect did Rawls and Nozick have on the practical political
debates of their time?

~~~
msluyter
Nozick seems to have had a lot of influence amongst libertarians, though it's
unclear to me how much influence libertarians actually wield.

