Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Two extremes
Two extremes are easy. One is the revolutionary, who declares the consensus wrong, thinks nothing about it makes sense, and tries to reinvent absolutely everything. The other is consumed by consensus, treats progress as unrealistic, and expects things to stay as they are today.
The middle path
The harder path runs between them. Seen from an evolutionary perspective, today's world competed with other visions and won, so some of its elements exist for a reason and will continue. Others need to change, and the work is to identify those and push against conventional wisdom.
Selling the vision
A differentiated vision also has to be sold, which is about inspiring people. The usual reaction to an impossible vision is that it's not realistic, yet every meaningful development in history was at some point called non-realistic by somebody. Selling the vision takes conviction, and changing course takes active listening and the humility to accept that the vision may be incomplete.
Why look before tearing down an old rule?
The idea comes from G. K. Chesterton's 1929 book The Thing, which describes a fence across a road. A reformer who sees no use for it should leave it alone until he learns why it was built, Chesterton wrote, because only then may he be allowed to remove it. The principle is now called Chesterton's fence. It argues that a practice that has survived for a long time may be carrying knowledge that is no longer visible.
How often have impossible ideas turned out possible?
Wilbur Wright later recalled telling his brother in 1901 that humans would not fly for fifty years. The brothers flew a powered airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in December 1903. The Smithsonian's accounts of the early flight experiments show how many serious people thought the problem could not be solved. Early critics of the telephone and the automobile also doubted that either would find a market.
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