№ 225. Seed Clouds of Ideas: Interestingness

Here's an interesting read about interestingness of ideas. "Interesting" used to be a neutral, ergo, a safe response to an idea. This was until the word was repackaged with new visual power and connotation in Flickr.

Seed Cloud Installation

"Interesting ideas are counterintuitive, but not all counterintuitive ideas are interesting. Davis warned that if we believe too strongly in an idea, we don’t want to see it questioned:

'one must be careful not to go too far. There is a fine but definite line between asserting the surprising and asserting the shocking, between the interesting and the absurd… those who attempt to deny the strongly held assumptions of their audience will have their very sanity called into question. They will be accused of being lunatics; if scientists, they will be called ’crackpots’. If the difference between the inspired and the insane is only in the degree of tenacity of the particular audience assumptions they choose to attack, it is perhaps for this reason that genius has always been considered close to madness.'" (Quartz)