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Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)
41–50 of 78 posts
Re: Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)
#42Just 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…
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Re: Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)
#43The "new ideas are fragile" is certainly true. I'm struggling with something I'm building which I think is extremely cool but technically difficult, but which if based on the reaction of friends and family I'd abandoned long ago. Only after having worked on it for 2 years and really got it working technically did I see a small spark in my dad's eyes as he said "oh, you can make MONEY off of this?". I feel like I have…
You can't tell people anything (2004)
https://web.archive.org/web/20091025030730/https://habitatch...
Re: Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)
#44Why 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.
Why is there a need to extract nectar from flowers, instead of just beeing? —Bee
Re: Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because people generally will not pay for others to "be". And they will not give you food or shelter if you don't pay. And the money has never been more concentrated away from the people who would prefer to just be. If you don't self-impose, society will structurally impose it on you.
Well of course but there are many ways to survive very close to “just being” that are seen as not fulfilling potential or a wasted life. It’s not a full binary but living close to one end is shunned and we internalize it as a waste of space when really it is more sustainable for the planet and mind.
I saw this video of an American tourist in the Mediterranean, stunned that people would drink one coffee for hours and didn't feel pressured to order more.
He said, back home, he would have been getting dirty looks, if he wasn't constantly justifying his existence in a place by either consuming or producing something.
Re: Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)
#46Under 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 :\
I've always found it kind of oppressive that I'm only allowed to be one thing. There's simply too much to do!
(Allowed by space and time, I mean)
Re: Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)
#47[dead]
Re: Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)
#48Reminds me of this quote:
> "A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a joke or worried to death by a frown on the right person's brow."
-Charles Browder
I think that teams can be very creative; with a “whole is greater than the sum of the parts” effect, but it has to be the right team.
Personality fit, and synergy have as much to do with it, as raw talent.
I have worked with teams of highly-talented and educated people that actually had a “whole is less than the sum of the parts” effect.
I think efforts to commodify creativity are doomed to fail.
Re: Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I didn't invent IoT. But in 2001 I independently proposed building something we'd now immediately recognise as IoT, and my lecturer dismissed it as simplistic and pointless for my dissertation.. Academia is only as good as the people in it. I ended up doing traffic shaping in the Linux kernel because my house mate had edonkey running all day..
Ha! In 97 on I proposed a web page that would read content from a database (for multilingual support). My supervisor demanded I decide if I was building a web page or a database because I couldn’t do both!
Re: Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)
#50I 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…
I don't live in Silicon Valley but dealing with same issue, finding people brainstorm or discuss ideas is very hard these days. A lot of trend following, listening to same podcast and reading same books, emphasis being on non fiction, using terms like neuroplasticity, neurodivergence etc. Then I end up talking with with Claude, which can be useful sometimes but cant replace human creativity.