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How to get new ideas

paulgraham.com

81–90 of 222 posts

Re: How to get new ideas

#81
post #15

My algorithm for generating ideas: https://taylor.town/an-algorithm-for-generating-ideas

Using combinatorial mechanics to generate new ideas is a powerful technique, perhaps first popularized by Ramon Llull in his Ars Magna ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramon_Llull ). Similar techniques are also used in TRIZ ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ ). The bottleneck here is to have the domain knowledge and experience to judge which generated ideas are good.

or enough connections outside of one's area of interest to generate comments about where the idea is considered good/$$$$

Re: How to get new ideas

#82
His take on non-natural lang for AI (https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1612510768674795523) sounds right (bias: because it's also what I was thinking)

So I'm not hyped about ChatGPT at all

> much of standup comedy is based on this (anomalies)

I think it's more about capitalize popular rants though. Not sure most of them are even feasible things to fix.

It's an ok essay .. though nothing sparks new idea of thinking about new idea.

Re: How to get new ideas

#83
wonder what the typical painting brush stroke count is between posted writings.

edit: perhaps a stippling[1] to stipulation [2] ratio tuppled with relevant/appropriate pruning technique(s)

      [1] stipplism vs pointillism : https://www.davidaccurso.com/the-art

      [2] document of concurrence : https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/stipulation

Re: How to get new ideas

#84
post #54
post #47

i am genuinely surprised that pg is writing such a short response to a question that seems right down his alley , seemingly very core to his subject matter. how has he not written an authoritative “how to get ideas” post until now?

True. Not sure what he was trying to convey. It was just a paragraph. Not even an essay. So vague it makes you wonder if it was an AI response.

or attempt to get everyone else to fill in the blanks.

Re: How to get new ideas

#86
post #58
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very true. Ideas are pretty cheap to come by. Implementing, building, teasing them out into a practical scenario is hard.

I don't think it's easy at all. Try to come up with an original plot for a hollywood big budget time travel movie. Take the plot of Edge of Tomorrow. I could never come up with that. Ideas are easy when it's just "Grand theft auto in space", but actual originality? Extremely difficult.

On the other hand I ditch a handful of film/TV ideas each week.

Many because they'd be crap of course, but the rest because there's no way in this lifetime I'll have the resources to bother thinking about them, never mind have the time to actually write them out.

Gotta do regular people work till I die. So glad I was dragged out of the universal energy just to pay rent for 60 years haha. Fuck I wish I could afford to do something arty farty instead. Such is life.

I passed my GCSE English literature (end of high school exam in UK) writing a time travel story, haha.

Re: How to get new ideas

#87
post #40

i think new ideas come from being naive and possessing the "no-mind" or a childlike sense of wonder. the older i get, the less plastic my brain is and the more depression and other issues start to seep in, get in the way, overcomplicate shit. to be completely free, uninhibited, released from guilt and predjudice. to just think, play, laugh, fart, and yawn. boring days spent looking out the window wondering how crows…

I'm locked in my own personality trap. I don't understand why people buy shit and my toxic also think they are dumb sheep of some made up social values. And I can't change myself to get out of my trap. I always think what I'm going to sell to people has to be really good .. but I just realize it's about a lot of bullshit going on on marketing and sales and network effect vs pure functionality.

Re: How to get new ideas

#89

Lots of truth to this. Just start building. Build for yourself and real people, not imagined profiles of people. The more you build, the more you explore, the more you'll find low-hanging useful ideas. As you encounter them it’ll surprise you that the space is mostly empty. Patio11 tweeted about using ChatGPT to immitate social signaling by rewriting content. I thought that was fun so I started doing it. That grew in…

What is the moat here?

Re: How to get new ideas

#90
Neuroscientist here. Closer I got to the physiology of mental health - sleep, stress, exercise, and nutrition - realized it was another fractal for personal and population health. Problem remains navigating regulatory or reimbursement hurdles from wellness into professional care.
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