Trello.
I use it to implement the processes described in other comments here.
Ask HN: How do you work through large ideas?
31–40 of 87 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you work through large ideas?
#32If it's of any consolation, I too have these "grand" ideas. My obsession for the past ~30 years (I'm 40-something now) has been "how to build the city of the future".
Re: Ask HN: How do you work through large ideas?
#33There are lots of good suggestions in other comments, but there is one thing I don't see that's really important.
A lot of these "large ideas" are really large. Like the amount of work they take is the amount of work it took to get through college, or master your profession, etc. More time than most people can afford to spend.
So the first thing to do is learn how to use the work other people have put in to answering the question. Learn how to judge the reliability of sources. Get to know the structure of the existing discussion of the issue. Look for ways to take advantage of existing knowledge in related areas to shortcut those tasks.
If you get good at those things, you'll at least get better at understanding the real complexity of the questions you're asking. You'll still do your own thinking, but realize that you're not in a position to just jump into that. You need to learn the context first. As other comments noted, you likely don't really even understand the question yet.
Re: Ask HN: How do you work through large ideas?
#34You've asked a top-down question. Have you considered a bottom-up approach? What's the citizen's point of view? From their point of view, maybe the best organization has a little chaos thrown in.
You can break it down into smaller problems. You can also assemble all of the individual problems into a large problem.
Re: Ask HN: How do you work through large ideas?
#35Using your example, my personal approach would be:
1) Figure out how to organize a democracy of 10 people.
2) Once you got that down, bump the number to 100 people, and identify / solve any new problems that arise.
3) Bump the number again to 1000. Rinse & repeat until you get up to 100 million.
In simpler terms, break the problem / idea into something you can confidently solve in a reasonable time frame, even if the first step (ie. "how to organize a democracy of 10 people") seems far removed from the end goal (ie. 100 million people).
Re: Ask HN: How do you work through large ideas?
#36I 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 suggest…
I don’t have kids, but I do have a partner. Nonetheless, such large questions no longer consume my spare cycles.
Obviously there are many exceptions, I wonder if on average interest in such questions peaks. If so, does the average peak coincide with an age or a period of life. Do we lose interest in our late 20s/early 30s, on average, because that’s when we have kids or is that just how long it takes for people to get bored with contemplative pondering?
I sort of hope it’s that having kids, a partner, a more challenging career soaks up the extra cycles. But even without those things, I find my passion ebbing. I worry this is an inevitable part of aging.
Re: Ask HN: How do you work through large ideas?
#37For the example question you posed, I would look to precedents. To rehash a bit: I came across this article on Singapore some time ago [1], and even though Singapore is a small nation-state, I believe two principles can be extracted on how to tackle big problems.
1) First principles
"Ironically, Lee Kuan Yew himself had no patience for other people’s models. In his words, “I am not following any prescription given to me by any theoretician on democracy or whatever. I work from first principles: what will get me there?” If there is a lesson from Singapore’s development it is this: forget grand ideologies and others’ models. There is no replacement for experimentation, independent thought, and ruthless pragmatism." (Lee Kuan Yew was the founding Prime Minister of modern Singapore)
2) Experimentation (while recognizing the limitation of models and the increasing error between models and ground truth as scale increases)
"Decision-makers must rely on simplified models to make their decisions. All schemata are by nature imperfect representations of reality. Indeed, a scheme that reflected reality perfectly would be cluttered and uninterpretable. The reality is always more complex than the plan. In large countries, the planner is further from ground reality than in tiny city-states. Abstractions and errors inevitably compound as the distance increases."
Re: Ask HN: How do you work through large ideas?
#38Depends a bit what you want out of it but for that sort of idea seeing what other thinkers have come up with is a good way to start (eg Google Wikipedia Quora etc). Then for entertainment try writing something about it. To try to make the world better perhaps you can come up with something on it that's not been covered well yet.
I quite like the happiness focused stuff as a new approach as in see which systems seem to make people happiest in surveys eg. Finland, Denmark and then see if you can use that stuff to figure which system wins.
Re: Ask HN: How do you work through large ideas?
#39Using your example, my personal approach would be: 1) Figure out how to organize a democracy of 10 people. 2) Once you got that down, bump the number to 100 people, and identify / solve any new problems that arise. 3) Bump the number again to 1000. Rinse & repeat until you get up to 100 million. In simpler terms, break the problem / idea into something you can confidently solve in a reasonable time frame, even if the…
I like this “scaling” thought experiment technique very much in a variety of problems I face. It often makes things clearer to think in those terms.
However, I think the 100, 1k, 100M approach might have drawbacks to finding the _best_ solution because the final iteration carries forward assumptions from the previous iterations. In CS terms, we may arrive at a local maximum this way, instead of the global max.
Re: Ask HN: How do you work through large ideas?
#40I start by getting clarity on the experience I am working to enable, then revisit frequently along the way. For every decision or element, consider how it contributes to the experience you are enabling. Then, fill out the scope of any large project by talking to others about it, and ideally, others from a range of disciplines and backgrounds. Even some of those who don't appear to be relevant to the effort.
Developing an understanding of the experience you want to enable and the scope of implementing it are obviously important. And for me, the specific objective is to avoid doing the life's work of implementation only to discover it didn't turn out the way I wanted.