Insight

Is insight creativity applied to thought processes? I mean, if art is creativity using materials, and maths creativity using symbols, can we distill the notion of insight right down to creativity using partial world views? It could fit: the idea of generating then analyzing and reducing sets of ideas down to ones with higher value (for a given notion of value), of combining partial views, refining them and creating leaps by adapting or removing base assumptions. So are the people who spot the moving patterns and understand trends fast enough to profit from them creative (as they're adapting their models quickly) rather than purely logical. Possibly. Could we use structure-mapping to model those processes? Some, but that would definitely need deep parsers, large knowledgebases and one heck of a legal framework...

When we created the 4-tier fusion pyramid (data-information-knowledge-insight/wisdom; you've been using it for years chaps, and now you can finally credit Mark Bedworth. Who isn't me, btw...), I placed insight on the top tier. It made sense as a simple analogy; if all the raw materials in intelligence processing could be heaped together, then the distillation of a larger amount of knowledge into a smaller amount of insight could be viewed in a similar way to the distillation of a larger amount of data into a smaller amount of information. It also tacitly acknowledged that the representation of insight might be quite different to that of knowledge, that somehow (as with data to information), the linkages within and context of that knowledge could be used and shown more concisely. And now I need to think very very carefully about what exactly I meant by that. But first, I need to sleep. Goodnight.