Amateurs Unbound

In one of my recent posts, I spoke about the possibility of “anti-amateur bias” that might keep medical researchers from appreciating the wisdom of the amateur crowds as a source of creative ideas. One possible advantage that amateurs have is their ignorance. Not knowing how things are supposed to be done frees them (or forces them) to think about how to do things unencumbered by convention. My favorite recent example of this phenomenon is the story of the Argentine car mechanic, Jorge Odón, who saw a YouTube video explaining a cool way to remove a cork from inside a bottle. In this clip you can see how inflating a plastic shopping bag does the trick without harming the cork or the wine bottle: