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Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)

henrikkarlsson.xyz

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Re: Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)

#21

Post by contingencies »

FYI the so-called Bertrand Russell quotation is apparently in fact an expanded paraphrase of Carl Sagan, The Burden of Skepticism (1987):

Britain has produced a range of remarkably gifted multidisciplinary scientists and scholars who are sometimes described as polymaths. The group included, in recent times, Bertrand Russell, A. N. Whitehead, J. B. S. Haldane, J. D. Bernal, and Jacob Bronowski. Russell commented that the development of such gifted individuals required a childhood period in which there was little or no pressure for conformity, a time in which the child could develop and pursue his or her own interests no matter how unusual or bizarre.

Still earlier Sagan The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (1977), Chapter 8, 'The Future Evolution of the Brain'.

Re: Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)

#22

Post by ididwkdij »

Alephinitesimal wrote: post #20

I think solitude is great. The hard part is finding the right people to talk to. I'm not sure if this is a Silicon Valley thing, but I've met some people who use a lot of jargon in a way that feels partly about status. At first I thought they just had a lot of ideas. Then they started talking about things in my own field, and I realized they were getting some pretty basic concepts wrong. My guess is that some of this…

> but I've met some people who use a lot of jargon in a way that feels partly about status.

You mean basically every HN commenter nowadays?

Big words. Big terms. Heavy phrasing. All to say a bunch of nothing. True knowledge lies in simplicity. True wisdom lies in humility. Both of which are sorely missing around here.

Re: Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)

#23

Post by fuzzfactor »

Under certain conditions you may get more good ideas than others.

This can be cultivated and if you end up with one or more ideas in excess of what you can possibly deploy, that would be a surplus.

Under ideal conditions that is.

So it stands to reason that ideally the same place that good ideas come from, is the exact same place where more of them die than anything else :\

Re: Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)

#25

Post by Jblx2 »

Gecko4072 wrote: post #3

Why is there always a self-imposed need to extract something from ourselves instead of just being? I really hate this in the modern world. Maybe one of the worst defining traits of industrial times.

That sounds like a recipe for living like hunter/gatherers. I for one appreciate modern medecine, indoor plumbing, and hope to live long enough to see someone step foot on Mars. Each to their own, but I appreciate all the work our ancestors have put forth, planting the trees whose shade they knew they wouldn't enjoy.

Re: Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)

#26

Post by podocarp »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #5
Gecko4072 wrote: post #3

Why is there always a self-imposed need to extract something from ourselves instead of just being? I really hate this in the modern world. Maybe one of the worst defining traits of industrial times.

Not at all a modern idea. Pico della Mirandola would rank mere being the lowest form of existence, the same sort of existence a plant has. Mirandola's is the oldest source for the ranking of being that I can recall off the top of my head, but the idea is almost certainly even older. > On man when he came into life the Father conferred the seeds of all kinds and the germs of every way of life. Whatever seeds each man…

It goes even farther back than that, I mean the stoics were preaching things like live each day like it's your last, and there are proverbs from ancient China like "being the rat in the granary than the rat in the toilet". At the same time there are plenty of counter examples and people teaching the opposite, like Diogenes.

I think it's useless trying to find councel regarding these things, people will just say what they believe is right. It's mostly just seeking external validation.

The end state should just be a lack of judgement -- right now we are too preoccupied with minmaxing so called productivity which is mostly an illusion most times. Much of this comes from a self imposed sense of guilt, in that doing nothing becomes like eating junk food. And this sense of guilt is in turn cultivated by the environment at large. Try telling people you're in between jobs or taking a sabbatical, they'll just assign you to the "loser" or "unemployed" class automatically.

Re: Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)

#27

Post by mlvljr »

ididwkdij wrote: post #22
Alephinitesimal wrote: post #20

I think solitude is great. The hard part is finding the right people to talk to. I'm not sure if this is a Silicon Valley thing, but I've met some people who use a lot of jargon in a way that feels partly about status. At first I thought they just had a lot of ideas. Then they started talking about things in my own field, and I realized they were getting some pretty basic concepts wrong. My guess is that some of this…

> but I've met some people who use a lot of jargon in a way that feels partly about status. You mean basically every HN commenter nowadays? Big words. Big terms. Heavy phrasing. All to say a bunch of nothing. True knowledge lies in simplicity. True wisdom lies in humility. Both of which are sorely missing around here.

[dead]

Re: Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)

#28

Post by oooyay »

andy99 wrote: post #2

Just read the beginning but I feel like there are obvious counter examples. Basically lots of academic environments. I personally (and somewhat sadly) did my best work in grad school, thanks entirely to the environment. All of us in the lab I studied in benefitted from being around each other every day. From what I’ve seen, this is very common throughout history in academia. Maybe it’s pressure that kills ideas, or c…

One of the least innovative teams I've worked on involved engineers that would try to force group discussion on ideas early on. Nearly every project or initiative I tried to build there met significant friction.

The most innovative teams I've worked on implored, and maybe incentivized, periods of reflection and evolution of ideas. Often we built POCs along side that evolution. They'd often juggle many different new ideas. Each, often, had its own evolution. Whatever shook out is what won and we often had pivots in line if we needed them.

I think in general it's what Sam says it is: if you artificially force people to defend their ideas early on then you end up coming up with pretty mid ideas.

Re: Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)

#29

Post by podocarp »

DaveZale wrote: post #19

This is so true. I've had some inventive ideas during certain phases of being a hobbyist and very small business owner. Sometimes I'd share them prematurely. Just killed the momentum, and I'd look back and say, "what happened?" Ever hear the very early Talking Heads song, "Artists Only" - David Byrne remarks, "pretty soon now, I will be bitter, pretty soon now, I will be a quitter. You... can't... see... it... til it…

Now that you bring up the British and bosses, I am reminded of the scene in the imitation game where Churchill just goes "give them whatever they want" to the general.

In most orgs nowadays, sometimes we are too tied down with pragmatism. Somehow we're asked for deadlines before even starting work. Somehow we need to define the end product and design before even starting. Only the most menial chores have their entire paths laid out. Anything great, by its virtue of being new, has unknowns that cannot be planned for beforehand.

The Socratic dialogue you bring up assumes that ideas can be interrogated to reveal itself to all members involved but frequently there's no way to put it into words until you do it. It morphs and changes as work is put into it. If Picasso described what he wanted to paint to some random artist would it have produced Picasso?

Re: Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)

#30

Post by energy123 »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #13
andy99 wrote: post #2

Just read the beginning but I feel like there are obvious counter examples. Basically lots of academic environments. I personally (and somewhat sadly) did my best work in grad school, thanks entirely to the environment. All of us in the lab I studied in benefitted from being around each other every day. From what I’ve seen, this is very common throughout history in academia. Maybe it’s pressure that kills ideas, or c…

I thought Grothendieck's "example" was a good one. It's not that the academic environment stymied him, it's that he built up a practice of solitary creativity that helped him take inputs from his surroundings and fold them into his own framework. Both the solitary practice and the communication with fellow leading mathematicians was essential for his growth and output. I think the point the post was trying to make wa…

Other examples like Grothendieck: Wiles (Fermat), Perelman (Poincare), Newton (calculus), Ramanujan.

> Spend too little time and you toil away in a cave, at best reinventing things that were invented already without your knowledge.

Grothendieck disputes this point. He reinvented the wheel many times when he was 17-20 years old, but believes it was training for accessing the required cognitive spaces. He says:

   A few years after I finally established contact with the world of mathematics at Paris, I learned, among other things, that the work I’d done in my little niche [. . . had] been long known to the whole world [. . .]. In the eyes of my mentors, to whom I’d described this work, and even showed them the manuscript, I’d simply “wasted my time”, merely doing over again something that was “already known”. But I don't recall feeling any sense of disappointment. [. . .] Without recognizing it, I’d thereby familiarized myself with the conditions of solitude that are essential for the profession of mathematician, something that no-one can teach you. [. . .]
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