第四章 Serendipity - 机缘巧合

一如既往先举几个例子，具体说明什么样的情境是机缘巧合。

实例一，人的梦境

> In a sense, dreams are the mind’s primordial soup: the medium that facilitates the serendipitous collisions of creative insight. And hunches are like those early carbon atoms, seeking out new kinds of connections to help them build new chains and rings of innovation. 

人的梦境就像思维的“原始汤（这里是指地球生命最初期的形态是类似汤一样的环境中，正是这种偶然性的开始才使随后的一切成为可能）”：它可以促进人们产生出创造性的想法。

实例二，异性繁殖与无性繁殖

> scientists believe that the sudden adoption of sex is also a kind of biological innovation strategy: in challenging times, an organism needs new ideas to meet those new challenges. Reproducing asexually makes perfect sense during prosperous periods: if life is good, keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t mess with success by introducing new genetic combinations. But when the world gets more challenging—scarce resources, predators, parasites—you need to innovate. And the quickest path to innovation lies in making novel connections. This strategy of switching back and forth between asexual and sexual reproduction goes by the name “heterogamy,” and while it is unusual, many different organisms have adopted it.

解释无性繁殖与有性繁殖各自的优劣，和适应的情景，观点倒是很有意思。简而言之，就是穷则生变。物种的进化是个动态而有效的策略，没有什么危机，意味着前进的方向暂时是有利的，那么就维持现状，甚至是尽量克隆以维持环境和条件的稳定；而一旦遭遇危机和挑战，则需要广泛尝试新的可能，宏观上讲，这些尝试中偶然出现能克服挑战的可能，也有绝大多数失败的尝试，但整体来说，接下来只要复制和扩散成功案例，就可以扭转局势。这似乎也是人类社会中最普遍采用的策略。

这一条给我们的另一条思考是，也许并非所有时候都需要兵出奇招，看清局势，了解需要解决的问题究竟是什么，更为重要。

然后，作者引出了 Serendipity 的定义：

> serendipity is not just about embracing random encounters for the sheer exhilaration of it. Serendipity is built out of happy accidents, to be sure, but what makes them happy is the fact that the discovery you’ve made is meaningful to you. It completes a hunch, or opens up a door in the adjacent possible that you had overlooked.

并非任意随机的机遇都能称得上 Serendipity，而是那种对你有意味、开阔你的视野，让你能够完成某些 hunch 的机缘巧合。

实现 Serendipity 的方法：

1. 转换注意力（散步或者洗澡）

> The shower or stroll removes you from the task-based focus of modern life—paying bills, answering e-mail, helping kids with homework—and deposits you in a more associative state.

我理解是将思维从左脑有序的逻辑模式切换到了右脑模式，其实做饭、跑步、洗碗等活动都有类似功效。

2.集中阅读

> While the creative walk can produce new serendipitous combinations of existing ideas in our heads, we can also cultivate serendipity in the way that we absorb new ideas from the outside world. Reading remains an unsurpassed vehicle for the transmission of interesting new ideas and perspectives.

第一条的目的是帮助我们以不同的方式组合现有的认知、信息等等。另一方面，我们还需要不断地从外界吸收学习。而阅读仍然是吸纳学习新的观点和视角的有效渠道。

但我们日常阅读常会被日常事务所中断，所以不是最有效的阅读方式。这里并不是说日常就不应阅读，但要明白日常阅读的局限性：

> The problem with assimilating new ideas at the fringes of your daily routine is that the potential combinations are limited by the reach of your memory.

针对这局限性的解决方法是，抽出整块时间集中大量、广泛的阅读，数量和种类都要多样化。

> One way around this limitation is to carve out dedicated periods where you read a large and varied collection of books and essays in a condensed amount of time. Bill Gates (and his successor at Microsoft, Ray Ozzie) are famous for taking annual reading vacations. During the year they deliberately cultivate a stack of reading material—much of it unrelated to their day-to-day focus at Microsoft—and then they take off for a week or two and do a deep dive into the words they’ve stockpiled.

3.个人资料库以及检索功能，作者介绍了他自己使用的Devonthink工具，在我这个可以看做是前面介绍过的洛克的方法的延续。他用这项工具储存自己认为有用的信息和想法，然后用这个库做即兴发挥创造性的辅助工具。

本章后面，作者探讨了当今人们的两项误解。

其一，专利保护是否促进创新、促进 Serendipity 的产生。

> The premise that innovation prospers when ideas can serendipitously connect and recombine with other ideas, when hunches can stumble across other hunches that successfully fill in their blanks, may seem like an obvious truth, but the strange fact is that a great deal of the past two centuries of legal and folk wisdom about innovation has pursued the exact opposite argument, building walls between ideas, keeping them from the kind of random, serendipitous connections that exist in dreams and in the organic compounds of life. Ironically, those walls have been erected with the explicit aim of encouraging innovation.

专利的目的是维护发明者的经济利益，用这种奖励去激励人们创造更多。然而，专利为分享和应用这些发明创造建立了技术壁垒，阻碍了 Serendipity 的可能。

> When nature finds itself in need of new ideas, it strives to connect, not protect. 

其二，移动互联网、数字媒体的普及对人们阅读习惯的影响，对 Serendipity 产生是否造成障碍。作者认为媒体的变化，必然导致人的阅读习惯的变化（这点不容置疑，最简单的例子就是以往在纸上做读书笔记，而现在lofter 上写读书笔记：P）。

另外，一般人认为的由于搜索引擎的发达，人们少了很多发散阅读的机会。而作者认为恰恰相反，他觉得网络扩大了人们发散阅读的可能。只要人们主动地希望获取信息，那么当今的任何一个普通人都比以往任何一个时代的精英能获得的信息都要多得多。

当然，这是一个开放的问题，其意义不在于讨论出一个确定的结论，而在于吸引人们对此进行关注和思考，根据自己的判断调整行为，由微观的个体行为，促进宏观人类社会的 Serendipity。

  

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本系列是针对《Where good idea come from》的精读分享，查阅其他章节，请点击帖子下方的标签“Where good idea come from”。

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LOFTER：浮生絮语·得意忘言   http://lazecate.lofter.com/post/3b2d0b_2698397