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How to get new ideas

paulgraham.com

111–120 of 222 posts

Re: How to get new ideas

#111
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…

We like to believe that the problem is just "our own adult psychosis", but I spend my days around many people over quite a range of ages (including elderly) and it is very obvious to me that cognitive abilities decline in the way shown in the charts you have probably seen (or, it feels to me, even more dramatically) and that it is apparent at an earlier age that we would like to think. Old people lose the ability to…

I thought your mental faculties peak in their abilities in your 40's?

I don't have a specific reference but if you google it, you should find what I mean.

Re: How to get new ideas

#112
post #108

Hi, Idiot here. How can I reliably find "Frontiers of Knowledge"? Especially in fields I'm not savvy in?

Walk (study and be curious) in a single direction, eventually you'll reach the frontier.

walking the engineering lattice allows for way more vector intersection considerations.

Re: How to get new ideas

#113
post #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.

Would you mind giving a high-level summary of the physiology of mental health (like one paragraph or two, however much you like)? Just the main things that are currently known/believed.

The autonomic nervous system and the glymphatic nervous system are both things I never really learned about in schools. ANS is taught as a textbook fact of homeostasis, not the constant fight-or-flight reflex that’s on every second of every day and the impacts that causes on health. The glymphatic system has only been discovered in the last 10 years but helps explain why sleep deficits explain cognitive performance decrements, mental health concerns, and age-related declines. And still so much we don’t know like gut-brain health and neuroelectronics as for implants!

Re: How to get new ideas

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is PG saying something... he linked to a chatGPT generated response and said he didn't like the response so he wrote his own.

PG was a little ambiguous about this. He said "So I asked: What would I have said?" It is not clear whether he asked himself or ChatGPT.

It appears pretty clear that PG wrote what he actually thought in response to ChatGPT's render of his potential thoughts.

Re: How to get new ideas

#115
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…

Name 3 things you own or use that were invented (even at conceptual level) by a child.

Re: How to get new ideas

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is having a full time job, leaving little time where I have creative energy to work on side projects. Strongly considering trying to find a part time consulting gig once my current is played out.

google glasses / vr & double down on what can do at any one given time?

God that's so toxic lol. But it's what capitalism wants!

Re: How to get new ideas

#117
post #42

Most things are strange, missing, broken for mundane reasons that you can't do much about. The space of new ideas is huge, but almost all new ideas are bad. One strategy I really like is to think of technologies you couldn't build 5 years ago but are just barely possible today. That's where yesterday's bad ideas become today's good ideas. For example, laptops and phones produced 20 years of incremental improvements i…

Progress in the technology landscape, which makes previously impossible ideas barely possible, sounds like just the thing wardley maps are good for.

Re: How to get new ideas

#118

It might not be good at generating original posts, but it’s really good at generating HN comments. Try it! Generate typical HN comments to this PG post [ … ]. - Include both positive and negative comments. - add replies that focus on annoying details that draw attention to the commenter - include fan boy defence of original post - point out obvious exceptions

sounds like enumeration of 1st order logic concepts

Re: How to get new ideas

#119
post #28
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But can you build products on ChatGPT with the assurance that they will not yank their service from under you in the future, like how Twitter did?

This space is getting so much interest that OpenAI will not be the only one providing LLM as a service forever.

Like web search in the 90s.
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