Many of the most innovative minds have been young, not old, and when those young innovators get old, often lose their imaginative and innovative edge.
Dunning-Kruger is accepted as empirical evidence of Pope's "A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring" but the next couplet is generally ignored: "There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again." Sobers us again. Could it be that knowledge stiffles imagination and innovation? Are the widest readers always the most innovative thinkers? Is there a fertile mix of ignorance and arrogance that wide knowledge sterilizes?
In some ways, probably. On the one hand, wide reading facilitates cross-fertilization of ideas, analytical tools, methods and analogies. On the other, there are so many legacies of false assumptions that surround us as unquestionable consensus that thinking out of the box can be a struggle. AI now presents an even greater challenge since it is biased towards the frequency of its training. I find that it sometimes can't come up with contrarian views at all no matter how well it's prompted, outside of spelling it out for the AI.
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