Claude Shannon’s “Creative Thinking” Speech (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Claude Shannon’s “Creative Thinking” Speech (2017)

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188 pointsHooke18 comments

Equally important might be the milieu in which you exist - Newton was fortunate to be surrounded by people like Hooke and Boyle, who helped constitute a robust scientific society that transmitted his ideas and gave them favor. He was not, say, merely laughed at, or burned at the stake, or told that his ideas had no marketable value.

So seek out (and even be prepared to create) a milieu that helps you to be creative.

Authors and artists seem to collect into milieu. Thinking the Pre-Raphaelites or The Algonquin Roundtable, or Hemingway's friends in Paris.

Great read.

TLDR Shannon's approach to creativity and few mental tools for problem-solving:

  * simplify by eliminating everything from the problem except the essentials; cut the problem down to size
  * seek similar known problems, find analogies and apply solutions to your problem
  * try to restate the problem in just as many different ways as you can
  * generalize the building blocks by trying to apply them to broader class of problems
  * structurally analyse the problem - break it down into sequence of smaller mental leaps
  * invert the problem and see if it's solvable by retracing from solution to the start

Mobile friendly version (I am on mobile now, I hope HN changes this part of their design, bullet points should be mobile friendly, enough users complain about this, what happened to make what users love?):

simplify by eliminating everything from the problem except the essentials; cut the problem down to size

seek similar known problems, find analogies and apply solutions to your problem

try to restate the problem in just as many different ways as you can

generalize the building blocks by trying to apply them to broader class of problems

structurally analyse the problem - break it down into sequence of smaller mental leaps

invert the problem and see if it's solvable by retracing from solution to the start

@mods: this got 40+ upvotes as of writing this reply.

Thank you for the summary. Incidentally the above, is approximately what I try to get from my interviews for technical and non-technical roles.

Specifically, for technical roles I am interested if the person being interviewed can do ( 2 ).

I feel that algorithmic puzzles are the almost an anti-pattern to ( 2 ), and create a negative filter that eliminates applicants that are great at ( 2 ).

Agreed. Most algorithmic puzzles are looking for very constrained ways of solving problems, that's why those so-called good solutions are fast. In real-world applications, this could be an anti-pattern because of most of the business model are dynamic. In contrast, general strategies like logic programming are underrated for a long time.

> invert the problem and see if it's solvable by retracing from solution to the start

This last bit I personally find tremendously useful. It works best on hard conceptual blocks (though not necessarily Shannon-hard).

I start by "explaining" to an invisible audience how I solved (past tense) the problem – without having a clue how to actually approach it. First the overall hand-wavy "feel" of the solution, then filling in more specific gaps as the imaginary audience prompts. Sometimes retracting and adjusting the narrative. Very top-down, back-to-front.

By the end of this, there's often a working outline. I call it "Solution by Bragging", as a more extreme form of rubber-ducking.

That's not what Shannon means. He just meant "solve the inverse problem".

It's a great list and by now a fairly standard list. You can find variations and extension of this in many places. I recall one of Feynman's standards tricks was seeing if he could get a desired result without going through the expected stepped. I think Douglas Hofstadter's analogy project was aim to construct an AI using this (an approach that hasn't gotten the attention (or research grants) it deserves imo).

Link to the speech itself: http://www1.ece.neu.edu/~naderi/Claude%20Shannon.html without Medium's clickthrough window and introductory comments at the link posted above.

I feel like Shannon missed one point: a mind free of distractions.

If you have all of the qualities that shannon described, but you were born poor, you'll spend your talents trying to feed, cloth, and house yourself and your family. These are the distractions I refer to-- the distractions of life.

Only once you no longer need to worry about the basics can a mind be free enough to contribute something novel to the world.

This is why I think it's important knowledge workers have a good benefits and pay package. If they have health insurance, for example.. that's one less worry... which reduces their cognitive load, allowing them to perform their work better. Minds only have so much bandwidth, so to speak.

“Then there’s the idea of dissatisfaction. By this I don’t mean a pessimistic dissatisfaction of the world — we don’t like the way things are“

I felt like these are the standard techniques I have used in high level competitive programming. Its comforting to think that these same methods work well when encountering novel, longer form problems.

I would disagree about the idea of someone with an IQ of only 100 (average) not being able to engage is this sort of thing. I know any number of people who are undisputably in the average range of IQ but have nonetheless managed to acquire a unique and deep expertise in one area or another. This does not speak to general intelligence itself, but rather the extreme limits of IQ as a measure of intellectual capacity.

Here's the talk the author gave at Code Mesh LDN last year: https://youtu.be/elwKUJg4-Ko

I thought it was cool that Shannon grew up in Gaylord, Michigan, of all places. The authors note that Shannon found out he was related to his hero, Thomas Edison. Their common ancestor was John Ogdan, an early settler.

Other descendants of Ogdan include:

Edith Roosevelt, wife to President Teddy Roosevelt.

Frank Nelsen Doubleday, founder of the publisher.

And, Bill Weld, former Governor of Massachusetts. Former VP candidate in 2016 on the Libertarian ticket. And current GOP candidate for President.

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