Your example is a big question, and it presupposes that answering the question will yield an optimal solution. If you focus on identifying your starting assumptions then you will be more open to incorporating currently unrelated areas of knowledge or research.
Ask HN: How do you work through large ideas?
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Re: Ask HN: How do you work through large ideas?
#12My current framework for that (chronologically organized journal) has its deficiencies, so I've been looking at Zettelkasten for nurturing big, long-term ideas. It looks promising so far -- it's certainly better than a journal for revisiting, updating, tweaking, and for "spending quality time with the idea".
However, I've been using it for just a month or so, and it's too early for me to form any conclusions.
Re: Ask HN: How do you work through large ideas?
#13Start with assumptions, and try modeling them. For example, my brother and I had a similar question so we wrote an extremely simple actor model in Python. Then we started adding more and more rules to the model until various metrics we were watching matched reality.
From there, it was a matter of adding/changing rules to match what desired and seeing the outcome.
Re: Ask HN: How do you work through large ideas?
#14So with a minor assurance that I'm not criticizing you for doing so, are you using "large ideas" to mean "things that are interesting, but have very little practical application"?
I ask because it changes my answer depending on whether the sample question is representative and how you are thinking about it, either as an author imagining an ideal situation or as a political theorist trying to understand human behavior of as a political reformer writing out a five year plan.
The issue being that politics is a team sport, and it doesn't really matter what you think is the most ideal system so much as what 100m people will agree to.
(Which isn't to say I have a problem with thinking about the ideal situations which have no chance of being implemented; I spent far too much time yesterday coming up with a proposal to redefine the foot-pound-second units as 1 second = 9.5x10^9 caesium-133 oscillations, c = 1 billion feet per second, and 1 pound = mass of 10^25 atoms of Si-28.)
Re: Ask HN: How do you work through large ideas?
#15As far as I know, there is only one known successful approach to working through large ideas, and that is to build solutions to smaller related problems and scaling up those solutions after some kind of objective information gathering.
Generally a well-understood stable system of any kind (including a democracy) evolves from a smaller stable system.
This principle is more or less built into the scientific process, where smaller results are peer reviewed and kicked around to a while before being combined to solve large problems.
Re: Ask HN: How do you work through large ideas?
#16Most ideas can be deconstructed into smaller ideas. When I started my recruiting business, I wanted to become so good that I eliminated unemployment. That was a bit lofty, so I paid attention to things smaller in scope. One thing holding back my recruiting business was was index finger hurt too much. I could review a few hundred resumes in an hour, and processing each resume took about 10 clicks of the mouse. My finger started to hate me, so I designed a recruiting application that got the number of clicks down to 1 per resume.
So maybe try to start big, and zoom in to focus in on one piece of the puzzle. There's a good chance that whatever you choose can be used in other ways if the primary idea doesn't work out.
Re: Ask HN: How do you work through large ideas?
#17I take the question seriously but the answer that came to mind was- have kids with a partner. Caring for and supporting them- and a partner- will in the near term put to concrete use the spare cycles your brain is devoting to these abstractions, and in the long term they will ask of you these abstract questions and you will by then have arrived at answers to help them.
Ok. More specifically- some other poster suggested recording assumptions around these questions, and I will go further. Behind every complex large scale optimization question- what is the best way to X...- when X is fundamentally about humans- are a set of assumptions- here, around the definition of "best."
Rather than chew on the question as framed, perhaps work to understand the assumptions your own brain is baking into the question in whatever value is being optimized. Understand further those assumptions as choices in a landscape and identify other choices that did not originally arise in the framing.
With an understanding of the larger variety of choices that were originally hidden, visit in conversation with your fellow humans and ask of them how they see that landscape and set of choices.
This discovery process through engagement may yield more insight than the self-centered utilization of your brain's optimization machinery. This process makes yourself available for teaching moments that are usually more impactful both for teacher and learner than any specific optimization insight and may help in further writing/sharing those moments.
Best wishes.
Re: Ask HN: How do you work through large ideas?
#18You must break large problems into smaller pieces and solve those individually. It's only when you master the details of the small steps that you begin to solve large problems.
Re: Ask HN: How do you work through large ideas?
#19Being able to work through big ideas is really just a process of breaking a problem down into component parts and seeing how those parts interact and connect (much like with software). I'd recommend the book "How to Take Smart Notes" by Sönke Ahrens for some strategies on how to do that.
This! I see this as a research question, because to even begin to work through the problem requires proper framing—noticing the history of the problem, seeing what the best of modern thinkers are thinking, discovering what has not been applied yet probably from different fields, etc. This is the hard work it takes to have an opinion about something.
Whether you use metaphors or first principles, to even capture the scope of the problem and the important pieces that influence it is the first task.
Re: Ask HN: How do you work through large ideas?
#201) write a plan
2) execute the plan
The plan is likely hasty and will prove to be a failure when you execute on it. That's fine. The plan is little more than worthless, but the process of planning is invaluable. Once failure or any collision become clear repeat the process with a modified plan. Don't wait for clarity to strike.