The perspective of an outsider poses a threat to conventional thinking. The consequences are particu

The perspective of an outsider poses a threat to conventional thinking. The consequences are particularly acute when the outsider raises foundational questions to which there is no good answer.When a few youngsters from a growing company called Microsoft entered the executive office of the Encyclopedia Britannica in the 1980s and offered to collaborate on an electronic CD-ROM version of the lucrative encyclopedia, their offer was declined by Britannica’s senior management. At that time, the print version of the encyclopedia was a prominent luxury item with an unparalleled reputation. As a result of the rejection, Microsoft released its own digital encyclopedia, Encarta, in 1993. Two decades later, Britannica ceased production of its print version, recognizing that it was unable to compete with online resources like Wikipedia. Ironically, the history of Britannica is now summarized on a Wikipedia page.Knowledge is an island in an ocean of ignorance, and a fresh perspective could identify distant unexplored lands. A set of narrow experts, each focused on a single intellectual territory, provides a fragmented view similar to early maps of the world, which depicted a set of regions with unrealistic proportions and boundaries. For example, Anaximander’s map from around 550 B.C., included only Europe, Asia and Libya, surrounded by a circular ocean. The only way to obtain a proportional view of the complete intellectual world is to allow scientists to cross boundaries between separate intellectual continents and venture into uncharted oceans. Such explorers might discover the Americas, those virgin continents of the new world beyond the imaginary circular ocean, that previous map makers had never visited.The Dangers of Intellectual Territorialism. -- source link

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