Xerography — the invention of the photocopier — was rejected by IBM, General Electric, and RCA before Haloid Company (later Xerox) built a business around it. Every major technology firm evaluated it and concluded: not worth pursuing. They were not stupid. They were applying rigorous, well-reasoned judgment — and they were catastrophically wrong. The philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn called this 'normal science': the powerful human tendency to evaluate genuinely new ideas using the standards of the old paradigm, which guarantees that truly disruptive things will look, at first, like nonsense. What this means for how we communicate about AI and new technologies is quietly serious: when you explain a new tool to a colleague or a team, their confusion is not ignorance — it's a paradigm mismatch. The framework they're using to evaluate it simply doesn't have a slot for it yet. Pushing harder with more data rarely helps. What works is building a small, concrete bridge — one familiar thing the new idea resembles — before dismantling the comparison and showing where it breaks. Not because people are slow, but because that's how paradigm shifts actually propagate.

Think of a technology or idea you've tried to explain recently that didn't land. What framework was the other person likely using — and what single familiar thing could you have compared it to first?

Drawing from Philosophy of Science — Thomas S. Kuhn