Lately I've seen a trap of people seeking innovation because they are really addicted to novelty. There's all sorts of interesting post-hoc justifications going on in this space when the underlying thought process is exposed.
"Curiosity killed the cat" when looking at a cat's behavior it's very easy to see that seeking novelty is something that is an evolutionary artifact and there are many cases where it's not advantageous.
Searching for novelty is something that allows us to avoid some certain local-minima, in some senses this is likely why the tendency to look for novelty has persisted. However if we can understand things as they really are we can make better judgements about when to pursue novelty vs when to apply that effort elsewhere. While it may be enjoyable, too much novelty is expensive. Take for example the massive amounts of churn in modern Javascript, many people have been burned by adopting new fads that are unmaintained 6 months later and abandoned 12 months after that.
However this is not an argument to become meekly risk averse and to only wait until later, but rather to assess choices on their merits and not flawed heuristics biased by our evolutionary past.
shuttle1987
commented
4 years ago
Lately I've seen a trap of people seeking innovation because they are really addicted to novelty. There's all sorts of interesting post-hoc justifications going on in this space when the underlying thought process is exposed.
"Curiosity killed the cat" when looking at a cat's behavior it's very easy to see that seeking novelty is something that is an evolutionary artifact and there are many cases where it's not advantageous.
Searching for novelty is something that allows us to avoid some certain local-minima, in some senses this is likely why the tendency to look for novelty has persisted. However if we can understand things as they really are we can make better judgements about when to pursue novelty vs when to apply that effort elsewhere. While it may be enjoyable, too much novelty is expensive. Take for example the massive amounts of churn in modern Javascript, many people have been burned by adopting new fads that are unmaintained 6 months later and abandoned 12 months after that.
However this is not an argument to become meekly risk averse and to only wait until later, but rather to assess choices on their merits and not flawed heuristics biased by our evolutionary past.