
The Size and Shape of “Idea Space” (2011) [pdf] - bridgeland
http://scaledinnovation.com/innovation/publications/2011-01-ideaspace.pdf
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jmmcd
Fascinating!

The _methods_ are very interesting -- a threshold (similar to "just noticeable
difference" (JND) used in cognitive/perceptual science); an attempt at
estimating the size of the space; an attempt using Hausdorff dimension to
approximate the number of dimensions (one could consider a multi-dimensional
scaling approach to this too).

But the choice of data and features means the _results_ shouldn't be taken too
seriously:

> We have implemented such a capability using feature counting, where a
> feature can be a word or phrase with statistically significant frequency, or
> the author’s name, or specific text from popup-menu selections, or if
> available, background database demographics about the author (his or her
> department, location, title, etc.).

If you use e.g. author's name and demographics as features, then this will
contaminate the features that describe the ideas themselves. The rest of the
results just aren't worth reading about until that problem is fixed.

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fallingfrog
I wonder if the dimensionality 14 is something intrinsic to idea spaces in
general, or if they're actually measuring the dimensionality of the human
brain's storage of ideas? Or something about the English language even?

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jmmcd
For me, any such number is an artefact of the data -- they've included things
like the name and demographics of the idea's author, which will be clearly
useful in practice for a "Show me more ideas like this" application, but which
will only be misleading if trying to study the nature of "idea space".

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diyseguy
Seems like if you stood in the middle of the 14 dimensional space - every idea
is 7 dimensions away - our typical mental stack depth. Perhaps if you could go
to one more extra step away you could come up with really new ideas that
haven't been thought of before.

