Minimalism is not a viable intellectual strategy | Hacker News Reader

Minimalism is not a viable intellectual strategy

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70 pointsgandalfgeek21 comments

The author seems to be ignorant of the fact that minimalism predates geeks discovering it. Minimalism has been prominent in art, music, linguistics, literature, philosophy, etc. for much of the last 50-100 years and no doubt has reared its head many times over the preceding centuries.

Regardless of the semantics of what minimalism is aesthetically, the author is referring to the particular idea that creative types ought to have minimal clutter environments to produce good work. The author countered this notion by stating that many creative individuals, regardless of the "minimalism" of what they produce, can have cluttered, messy work environments!

ex, minimalist composer Philip Glass:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOM_YtP5f0U&t=0m50s

He's confusing "physical" minimalism (having less physical stuff) with asceticism (getting by with less/being exposed to less). He starts to draw this distinction, but for some reason he doesn't quite understand it. His entire argument falls apart as a result.

The cool thing about "physical minimalism" in the digital age is that my stuff is digital -- I can have access to a huge variety of things, only when I need them. I can have innumerable movies, on demand, whenever I want them. Compare to 20 years ago, when I would have to actually own these physical VHS tapes (and they would presumably be more difficult to navigate/organize).

This is important for his notion of creativity, too. Digitizing things lets you more easily access a larger body of objects. If da Vinci had a computer, he'd probably digitize a lot of his stuff too -- it would allow him to be exposed to more things, more easily. Plus, he'd be able to travel more easily, and new experiences are a HUGE part of creative thinking.

On experiences and creativity:

http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/oct2010/sb20101...

>>>>>>> Psychologists have spent years trying to discover the answer to the question: "What makes innovators different?" In one of the most thorough examinations of the subject, Harvard researchers spent six years and interviewed 3,000 executives to find out. According to the Harvard research, the No.1 skill that separates innovators from noncreative professionals is "associating"—the ability to successfully connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas from different fields. The three-year Harvard research project confirms what Jobs told a reporter 15 years earlier: "Creativity is just connecting things."

This notion of making creative associations through seeking out new experiences is worth exploring more closely, as it plays a significant role in the way Steve Jobs has generated one innovative product after another, and another, and another. Jobs is a classic iconoclast, one who aggressively seeks out, attacks, and overthrows conventional ideas. And iconoclasts, especially the successful ones, have an "affinity for new experiences," according to esteemed Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns. >>>>>>

What a straw man. Who are these supposed minimalist developers who read no books, avoid the internet, and just sit on a mountain eating rice and coding all day?

I recognize this minimalist movement too, and I participate in it somewhat, but exposure to new ideas is not only compatible with it, it's essential! Great developers go to meetups, read tech blogs, swim in the Github sea, and maintain a balanced lifestyle. Then maybe they go sit at bare desk with a Macbook Air and fire up their minimalist code editor.

I've seen it circulate in the meta blogging and lifestyle design blogging circles, but not in development circles. It's hip in the same way that nomadic lifestyle appears to be hip. Not based on the merits of the philosophy, but because it sounds sexy.

Creativity is an internal endeavor. How your environment effects you internally seems to be different for every single person. This article seems to gloss over this fact.

However I do agree that minimalism is certainly a periodic style. "Everything in moderation" (including moderation) is a motto I try to live by.

   The typical creative professional is not a minimalist.

Do you want to be a 'typical creative professional'?

...or http://www.everydayminimalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09...

IIRC, that's when he just bought the mansion (which has long since been nearly destroyed from neglect [1]).

Here's a more recent picture of his home office - which looks relatively cluttered: http://allaboutstevejobs.com/pics/life/2004-2006/08-dianawal...

[1]: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/04/29/inside_steve_j...

He may just have had bought that mansion at that time, but it wasn't minimalist by accident.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pacman3000/4042368287/

As to your second point: minimalism and 'clutteredness' are independent properties. From the photos, I think the office is still much more minimalist than many other (home) offices you could find.

Minimalism isn't the problem here. Minimalism can be used a number of different ways, and the author discusses only one of those ways - luddite asceticism. I rarely encounter that attitude, though.

Instead, many of the better minimalists I've read cut back on most things so that they can dig in extremely deeply with a few things. They want to be extremely good at a few (2-5) things, and to do so, they sacrifice being moderately good at a large number of things.

The author talks about great achievers soaking themselves in things, building lots of connections, and building great ideas. This 'minimize to maximize' approach does the same thing. It just tries to build connections where they are most likely to be helpful. It understands that with our limited capacity, we should be devoting as much as possible to the most important things in our lives.

>My gripe is with the way they sell it as a way of life.

I think it is fair to classify minimalism as a way of life, because simplification heuristics are intrinsically broad in scope. In other words, it is not possible for minimalism to not be a way of life, because adding information to specify the domain to which minimalism applies would be decidedly unminimalistic.

If anyone is interested in real debate on this topic simply read the wiki on Occam's Razor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occams_razor

I generally find myself in support of Einstein's Constraint:

>Everything should be kept as simple as possible, but no simpler.

I only got through the first paragraph or so when I had to stop because the font is almost unreadable in Chrome on Windows 7.

The descenders on letters are being clipped and it's too decorative to read comfortably as a body font on screen.

Are you familiar with Readability? -- http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

I've heard of it - I prefer readability to be the standard choice for a website though :)

I'm using Firefox 3.6 on Windows XP and I'm experiencing the same problem...

  Have you ever seen a clean, bare creative space?

The home of Steve Jobs. And since the entire essay hinges upon that sentence, it just came crashing down completely.

An article full of non-sequiturs.

I think the article is articulate and makes some good points. Mainly: creativity is a process that feeds on, and thrives amid chaos / disorder / complexity.

The most creative person that I've ever worked with is an uncompromising minimalist.

As posted to a minimalist blog.

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