Martin Hähnel

Idea Mining Patterns

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Something that came to mind when thinking about my recent post How To Figure Out What You're Not Good At. I wrote:

I think you can credibly invert what the writer Sasha Chapin is saying[...]

And I think this might be an example of a pattern on how to use ideas to have other ideas. What I did there was a simple inversion of an interesting observation. But maybe there are other techniques we can use to mine Ideas for other ideas.

I think this is something that Hillel Wayne describes in his Computer Things Newsletter titled Making Memes:

And I've been thinking of a kind of article I commonly write:

  1. Here's some examples of something.
  2. I am going to give that thing a name.
  3. Now that we have a name, let's discuss it as its own topic.

Examples: edge case poisoning, mimicry, cleverness vs insight, constructive and predicative data.

Doing this creates a (minor) branch of human knowledge, in the form of a topic, that then has a distinct existence independent of the original examples. It's more transmissible than the information, but also makes the contained information more transmissible by acting as a handle to it. It's easier to find information on "patterns" because we have a topic of patterns. Topics can also be expanded, like how there's now "testing patterns" and "performance patterns"; discussed independently of the information, like with "patterns are just missing language features" discourse; and related to other topics, like "'patterns are missing language features' means 'patterns are an example of mimicry.'"

I also have another one of these called "Aufpfropfung". This is a concept taken from French philosopher Jacques Derrida as understood by me through a text by Uwe Wirth when I was still studying history of science and technology.[1] Wikipedia knows:

Grafting or graftage is a horticultural technique whereby tissues of plants are joined so as to continue their growth together. The upper part of the combined plant is called the scion (/ˈsaɪən/) while the lower part is called the rootstock. The success of this joining requires that the vascular tissues grow together

In my simplified understanding I understand "Aufpfropfung" as a way of recontextualizing an idea. What happens if you take the idea of industrialization and its destructive potential and graft it onto a fantasy world? Mordor and the orcs. What happens if you graft the idea of an experimental system onto the work of writing itself? (I think:) Writing as an epistemological practice becomes visible. What happens if you graft the idea of a notes system onto the idea of a blog? I hope to find out. Not every grafting is successful.

These are some of the patterns I could think of in the short amount of time I gave myself to write this down. There are probably more, but now these patterns and the idea that there might be a catalog of them are written down.

  1. Aufpfropfung als Figur des Wissens in der Kultur- und Mediengeschichte, from the book Kulturgeschichte als Mediengeschichte (oder vice versa?), 2006 ↩︎