Sometimes talking with my friends is like intellectual combat, which is great. I am glad I have such strong cognitive warriors on my side. But not all ideas are ready for intellectual combat. If I don’t get my friend on board with this, some of them will crush an idea before it gets a chance to develop, which feels awful and can kill off promising avenues of investigation. It’s like showing a beautiful, fragile butterfly to your friend to demonstrate the power of flight, only to have them grab it and crush it in their hands, then point to the mangled corpse as proof butterflies not only don’t fly, but can’t fly, look how busted their wings are.

When I’m stuck in a conversation like that, it has been really helpful to explicitly label things as butterfly ideas. This has two purposes. First, it’s a shorthand for labeling what I want (nurturance and encouragement). Second, it explicitly labels the idea as not ready for prime time in ways that make it less threatening to my friends. They can support the exploration of my idea without worrying that support of exploration conveys agreement, or agreement conveys a commitment to act.

The author goes on to talk about how hard it is to discuss butterfly ideas in a public forum like a blog post or social media quip.

And I agree with that. Another friend of mine told me she doesn’t write about something raw on her blog (those posts get saved for her journal).

The biggest risk to an evolving system is that you become bogged down by experts from a world that no longer exists. The more evolution you have, the more you should expect that expertise has a shelf life. And those most susceptible to that risk are the people you’d least suspect: The smartest and most intelligent, who at one point flashed their brilliance but struggled to admit that it can’t be repeated.

The article also makes a great point about how a lot of smart people struggle to listen to ideas that come from people they consider to not be on the same level as them.

The information processing (IP) metaphor of human intelligence now dominates human thinking, both on the street and in the sciences. There is virtually no form of discourse about intelligent human behaviour that proceeds without employing this metaphor, just as no form of discourse about intelligent human behaviour could proceed in certain eras and cultures without reference to a spirit or deity. The validity of the IP metaphor in today’s world is generally assumed without question.

But the IP metaphor is, after all, just another metaphor – a story we tell to make sense of something we don’t actually understand. And like all the metaphors that preceded it, it will certainly be cast aside at some point – either replaced by another metaphor or, in the end, replaced by actual knowledge.

As someone who makes a living (in part) by deploying metaphors to explain complex ideas, it is both harrowing and inspiring to learn how flawed the “your brain is a computer” metaphor actually is.

Despite the despair, this essay does a great job explaining why it is no longer a useful metaphor, and leaves you with the curiosity needed to explore and find a new, more helpful metaphor (or, as the pull quote says, “actual knowledge”).