Hunting The Muse

Too Many Ideas

Life can feel like it sucks when you have too many ideas to even keep in your head at one time. Sure, it's exciting on the outside, but on the inside you can just feel like you are treading water while exhausted, scrambling to evolve rather than stagnate.

As I get older, I find that my overall theme of technical interest is getting more focused, but as I delve deeper I also find more people, many of whom are younger than me, even more intensely into it and more productive than I am.

Most simply and abstractly put, it's about empowering the mob without having the mob mentality. Finding group opinions without risking groupthink. Aggregating public opinion without ignoring individual inspiration. Interpreting group preferences, encouraging group creativity, decentralizing group productivity. All these topics spin in my head and they are so easily interrelated, so exciting, so overwhelming, so paralyzing.

Just in the last few days I found all of Joi Ito's writings on Emergent Democracy, and also something of a low-key job offer to work on collaborative filtering technology with someone who owns a bunch of patents on it, and there's so much to consider.

I want to feel like I'm a delver rather than a scanner, but the deeper I go, more I feel like I've only begun to scratch the surface. How much harder do I have to work before I actually feel like I'm moving forward? Posted by Curt at February 25, 2003 02:47 AM