Ask HN: Does being practical act as a hinderance to one’s imagination?

This is something that I've thought about quite a bit over the years. My current resolution is that practicality and unbridled imagination are both attributes of a person's mental makeup - and that we probably grow up with an affinity in one direction or the other... But that it's a false dichotomy to say that one must necessarily inhibit the other. It's just that to find a synergistic balance between the two implies deliberate introspection, practice, and cultivation to achieve the most beneficial balance. In my case, I arrived from the more laterally minded side - fancied I might be a sculptor before differentiating professionally into an engineer. Dreaming big was easy, but the self-work to be done was to fortify the practical strengths needed to synthesize the dreams with what is practically achievable. Not saying its easy, but I am saying that it's not impossible.

So, if you want to start to even out your levelheadedness then there are a lot of fun avenues to pursue. Creative writing, read some surrealist literature, talk with people who have experimented with psychedelics and witnessed the preposterous cognitive edifices of modern culture fall to shimmering disjoint pieces before their eyes, etc etc. Then work on reconciling the cognitive dissonances along the way.

It's only a blocker if you're using the "buts" to dismiss the idea out of anxiety. Most "divergent thinking" ideas sound cool on paper but are horrible in reality for a bunch of reasons unforeseen at the generation of the idea (Communism and Eugenics come to mind). Accounting for the potential negatives up front is just due diligence and good design. Then you do a risk analysis and determine if the risk of the negatives is worth the potential positives.

To use your "I'm a unicorn fireman" example, sure that conversation can be fun.. and what does the winner get? With that example you're not building a system to be used by humans in the real world, you're doing stream-of-consciousness thought experiments, more art than engineering. There are no solid constraints.

Sure there's some debatable evidence that creativity can be "practiced" and generally applied, but when you're trying to build a better airplane putting a giant swimming pool in the nosecone is probably not a good idea for a whole host of reasons and it's best that you account for those before building the thing.

Software and the other arts largely benefit from cheap iteration cycles and relatively low-impact mistakes. And even in those cases if you "yes and" too much and try to account for the mistakes later you can find yourself with a horrible, underthought design and swamped trying to fix all the problems at once. Then all those negative constraints you ignored in the name of "divergent thinking" suddenly make themselves known. Many a failed startup led by a Steve Jobs wannabe is a perfect example of this.

I wonder if you might be demonstrating the principle in your response?

I think the main point is that there may be advantages to explicitly giving room to both divergent and convergent thinking to exist in separate phases (this could be done in one cycle -- there's nothing that says any of the cute unworkable ideas would ever leave the meeting room or shopfloor or prototype. Reality/logic/laws of nature are the final arbiters).

Constraints/refinements/criticisms will emerge in the second phase, but we often don't give room to the first because we tend to want to edit too soon, and if we're honest, our impulse criticisms going to be based on our past experience and emotion rather than a cool, deliberate, rational analysis process or empirical reality.

A disciplined balance is what is sought. In creative processes, withholding judgment during ideation is a basic principle -- but many engineering types are too quick to ignore it, wanting to filter almost immediately. This is ok if the space is well-understood and what you're doing is cookie cutter (which to be honest, is all most engineers do), but definitely a blocker if you really want to challenge ideas and do something truly new. It snuffs out ideas pre-maturely and doesn't allow them to potentially grow into something that would work.

An example of this: I was against neural networks for years because they lacked explainability ("black boxes" was my criticism of them), and whenever someone brought them up I would enumerate my usual list of criticisms of why they would never work -- all rational and mathematically watertight. It became so habitual that a few good ideas (where neural networks actually would have worked if we had tried them, albeit it had to be in creative ways) passed us by. I snuffed that idea out before it had a chance to emerge in a form that I would have recognized as something workable.

Peter Carey’s early novel Illywhacker [1] has a central character that is both practical and imaginative, and is a brilliant description of these two coexisting. Well worth a read.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illywhacker

Fair enough. I'd definitely agree there needs to be a disciplined balance, too much conservatism is just as bad as too little. But in defense of Engineers in general, it's quite possible that in their experience they've seen many situations where negatives ignored grew out of control.

An example I experienced a couple of weeks ago: Someone let code that "just works" slide through a code review back in 2017. That code had a hard-coded value that would have been easy to determine dynamically (he just set a max at an arbitrary value instead of counting how many of a resource there were) but wasn't due to general lack of discipline. Now it's a minor issue, and the code did indeed work up until a couple of weeks ago. Then the number of the resource in question changed, and all of a sudden that hard-coded max was no longer accurate.

The error manifested as a segfault in our C++ but only sporadically and was hard to reproduce when we didn't know what the issue was. Doesn't help that it was in a mountain of legacy spaghetti code. It took me and two other people two days to track down the original cause, which if you add up our de-facto hourly rates cost the company thousands of dollars. All because of one little minor piece of sloppy code.

Now imagine the effects of bigger, grander sloppiness at the design level. And then those effects get compounded because they're conveniently ignored and integrated into still further mistakes, and you get an exponentially multiplying mess.

I'm willing to bet many professional engineers have had an experience similar to that, and if they care about their craft at all it was likely extremely frustrating and painful to deal with. So it's not that they're "bad at divergent thinking" so much as they've been trained by experience to believe that the benefits of divergent thinking aren't worth the potential downsides. Whether that's an unconscious bias that should be worked against is an interesting question.