Thread: The Psychology of a New Idea

Alot of people (including me for some reason) are attracted to new ideas because they are new. Which is interesting because I think two new ideas are generally further apart from each other than to an old idea.

Really new ideas are just harder to see the advantages and flaws of, so people accept them because otherwise they'd have to think.

This leads to something I find frusterating. Every time I read a book about a new idea (The Shock Doctrine, The Plausibility of Life, The End of Ignorance) I get excited and want to reccomend it, then I think about and realize, I have no clue if they're accurate. It would be nice to have a way of accurately looking at new ideas, that doesn't require the amount of data available when judging old ideas.

As far as I realised, any new idea -necessarily- has to depend on old idea(s). They can either share some principles, actors, method or terminology. New idea is like a new species in the nature: It has to develop what is around before it. We can not imagine any creature or any idea without its background, history, evolution and connection to others..

Ideas are try-outs, solutions, energy and everything else in human world. Without ideas no one can talk about the concept of human being. Without old ideas we could not provide stability and without new ideas we could not improve our civilisations. DNA produces new species and/or modifications on existing species in order to continue the concept of life, and same is true for humans and ideas.

On top of it, some ideas can only be judged when they are applied to real life. During the 1930s in Germany, National Socialism was a very sexy idea and almost all countries were in love with Hitler. Once it became a real application, concentration camps, racism and occupation of Europe, people saw the real face of the idea...