Ask News.YC: How difficult is it to break out of prevailing paradigms of the present?

We break out of a paradigm when we push it to the extremes and notice effects that hadn't been observed before. For example, in quantum dynamics when something can pop up out of nothingness and 2 + 2 can sometimes equal 5.

The difficult part of escaping our paradigms is that we can't just assume any random thing in our current paradigm is false. (e.g., My sky is not blue.) You need to find the key ingredient in order to come up with a new paradigm that is actually useful.

I agree that we necessarily must be thinking in one of many paradigms, but there is a tendency to default to the larger overarching "trending" paradigm. If you look at the car from the 1950s, it doesn't have the curviness of cars and this could be attributed to the manufacturing process as opposed to the design process.

The functional features on the car that have changed most notably are the doors...

Maybe I'm applying the word "paradigm" inappropriately...perhaps mindset or something else is what I'm aiming at and not "paradigm".

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OK, I've had some time to think about that which I am attempting to grasp...

I think there is a common thread with "advances" in technology such as the 1950s car in the link above (really, the only apparently visible "innovations" are with the many directions in which the doors open outwards) and with other "advances" that we might see around us today. The common thread being that we tend to reinforce what works in hindsight and project that into the future. Perhaps we can call this the "hindsight paradigm" but I would like some input on whether or not this is an appropriate usage of the word "paradigm".

Advertising markets will also stick to "what works". It had to be a company founded by two Stanford kids that created a revolution in the advertising industry because they were not bound by the traditional thinking of not having to reinvent the wheel such that they could actually deliver the marketer's dream of highly targeted adverts...

Engineers will (hopefully) build something that is solid and then tweak as necessary. There is no need to reinvent the wheel over and over again and this is something that is similar to what I'm groping for: we are sometimes trapped by the convenience of what works at the moment. There seems to be no end to the length at which we may improve anything, but at the same time if people are comfortable with what works, then they can revel in that comfort and simply pass by innovation after innovation because the additional uncertainty of new ideas require somewhat of an adjustment phase, which can be uncomfortable for some and possibly unfeasible for large collective groups.

(This leads me to dream that there should be some sort of way to perhaps time levels of comfort such that when people are sufficiently comfortable they might be more susceptible to shifting to something new...)

Now when I look at the picture of the car (after blocking out the loveliness of the ladies who oddly look quite fashionable by even today's standards) I see a number of innovations that at the time "worked" because it was merely projecting the past upon the future. It is perhaps the very natural tendency to seek that which is familiar because it is safe and project that into the future thus becoming trapped by our past. Contrast this with the notion that I was suggesting in my questions earlier that there is a paradigm of some sort that shifts from generation to generation and that advances are somehow governed by such paradigms.

Now the reason why I think this is worthwhile for a segment of the News.YC community to reflect upon is because those of us who like to think of ourselves as innovators need to constantly question the merits of creativity invested in any given direction. The 1950s car just seemed to me exemplary of how the leading thinkers in the automotive industry were so trapped by the prevailing notion of what seemed to be working (because of past experience, aka "we know best") at the time and just seemed to me to be adding more of that into future projections.

Change happens from the bottom up, not from the top down. When a new radical idea takes hold and is adopted, it gradually becomes part of the system and is no longer a paradigm. You can only iterate so far on a current design before something else comes along to replace it.

If you took the standard car design in the 1950s and tried to use it as a basis for what the future brings, well...you'd get roughly the same thing that you'd get if you took a Toyota and used it as the basis for what cars look like in the future.

Have you ever noticed in the music in futuristic sci-fi movies? It's the same thing. You can't imagine what music sounds like in 50 years any more than you could have imagined rap or hip hop in the 1940's.

“We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish.” Marshal Mcluhan