Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born | Hacker News Reader

Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born

henrikkarlsson.xyz

239 pointssavagejohn44 comments

I have never been productive in open office spaces and then saw an HBS study showing empirical data on the things I felt all along: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2017.023...

I totally see the value of cultivating ideas in a private space without constant background noise, and then sharing these ideas with the right arguments for feedback when you see them as ripe.

Unfortunately, the narrative by big tech has popularized the notion that these open spaces with everyone speaking over each other has great productivity and collaboration benefits. It saves them a lot of cost to not build and maintain humane cubes, but other arguments of how great it is for "me" are just bogus.

Interesting. That link deserves its own submission.

Here you go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36889478

I've never worked in an open office space myself. I imagine there'd be a lot of distractions due to the factors you've listed. It's not that difficult to go up to someone else's cubicle for a chat.

I've worked in various size open offices, they can best be described like financial trading floors, some are busy and chaotic, some are not.

The main point with an open office, is people can shout across the room quickly and easily when they want something from someone else which may need an immediate response or response in the timescales said office works to when resolving problems. ie some offices need to resolve things by the end of day, others need to resolve problems within a few days. Its also a lazy way of communicating without a document trail like a messaging system can provide.

Very difficult to manage, accountability is virtually at zero, so if you have a team which doesn't work or has personality clashes, that's a team which will perform poorly, but still look super busy.

Seating arrangements are interesting as well, you can spot hierarchies.

It probably explains the saying, if you want something done properly, do it yourself!

Shouting across the room saves one person 15 seconds while simultaneously distracting every single other person in the office. Regardless of how pro-open office one is, that seems like a terrible trade off.

> day, others need to resolve problems within a few days. Its also a lazy way of communicating without a document trail like a messaging system can provide.

This is the biggest benefit of a slack-first (or whatever your messaging software of choice is) approach. It’s very common that I search chat history from weeks or months ago because someone already answered something that I need to refer back to.

Trust HN to turn every single thread into an opportunity to rail against open office spaces.

They're a very-objectionable topic! Complaining will continue until office spaces stop being so open.

Look for wonder, joy, strong emotional reactions, or things that pierce your autopilot and draw your attention. Write them down. Read them back over time. Write down reactions. Eventually, start to identify which ones elicit strong reactions. Which ones recur. Which ones connect with one another. Especially look for surprises. This is a sixth sense. Follow your nose.

I've stumbled onto a similar algorithm, trying to pay attention to when I feel strongly about things, good things and bad things. Then I try to dig into what's under there (if it's bad) and figure out how to go further into it (if good). It's been helpful so far. "Follow your nose" for sure.

Yes. Someone else in this thread put it well, emotions are a signal honed over billions of years, passing down whatever it means to thrive from generation to generation. Under the hood, we're processing information, activating DNA, creating proteins, and sending signals back in response. Listening to that voice and discerning what it's telling you, it's a sense that's trying to ensure you thrive.

I sometimes am concerned that what random reactions and thoughts I have are not indications of some universal deep unconscious insight but rather just the inane weirdness of my brain that could like things for temperamental, nostalgic, or pointless reasons. I like to imagine I'm veering on something profound but I can't always be so sure.

A lot of random noise, for sure. But also as much signal as there is to be had in this world. And even noise is usually interesting when it's so highly personalized. Which maybe means there is far less noise than people think?

It's not a test. You won't be graded. It's OK to be inane or banal.

I thought it was a good read. Basically the essay argues that one should make time, and summon the requisite courage, to look for new ideas and new ways of thinking. Imo it applies to any decision that must be made alone.

I'm not I buy that the lack of great success stories coming out of co-working spaces is because peer pressure conspires to kill original ideas. In my experience, people working in these places are usually professional and polite, not going around shitting on other people's ideas or laughing at them. And even if they did, are the people working on these ideas really so sensitive that they'd abandon them simply because some asshole said something mean? I can't say I've _ever_ heard of a startup deciding to voluntarily shut-down because of negative feedback from co-working peers. It would be ridiculous.

I think a simpler explanation is that co-working spaces are really an expensive luxury, and are favoured by people who want a lively and social workplace rather than those who are super-focussed on thrift and productivity. Startups who spend money on unnecessary things and whose employees are not unusually driven are statistically less likely to succeed.

"I can't say I've _ever_ heard of a startup deciding to voluntarily shut-down because of negative feedback from co-working peers. It would be ridiculous." -

You're right, but the danger is when the self-censorship happens in the subconscious part of mind, such that you don't even realize it has happened.

To me, the most compelling telling of the Grothendeick story is this:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/201707/the-mad-g...

A different telling of another profoundly gifted character is this:

http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1638/divinity-in-th...

The state of mind where new ideas are born is a liminal state that integrates disciplines effortlessly. Think Herb Simon, Marshall McLuhan or Arthur Koestler.

That first one was discussed (a bit) here:

The ‘Mad Genius’ Mystery - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19342544 - March 2019 (17 comments)

I take this as an argument for staying off the internet as much as possible. Avoid the temptation to continually see what everyone else is doing and give yourself space to think.

You will inevitably dedicate thoughts to whatever is placed in front of you. The only relevant trick is to be in control of what is placed there. Let the canvas be an overly familiar place and sustenance be an endlessly repeated ritual. Everything must be as boring as possible.

I had a hilarious conversation one time with a wealthy guy who owns a sizable plot of land with an enormous house. He lives in a single room in the basement. The rest of the decor is only there to keep people away. It started out as a place to occasionally smoke weed back when it was a crime in the US. It gradually turned into a place to think.

I suppose it is a comical instance of things having to get worse before one takes action. The weed really helped show who people are.

It takes a lot to keep society running, most of it is careful repetition. Many will end up thinking this is all there is and change is a terrible thing by definition. I'm not at all convinced they are wrong about it. All other animal species just live and do their familiar thing. They are finely calibrated for it.

Then one day someone just had to bang rocks together and make fire. Perhaps it was all down hill from there. Whatever it is we are doing today is trying to get back up the hill. It is not just that each answer we find raises many new questions. It is that every solution we find creates many new problems.

And so we end up scavenging the world looking for something that was always inside our heads.

edit: I forgot the emotional part!

Emotions are our encyclopedia build over hundreds of millions of years. There is no correct emotional state to think, they are all good. Think deep why you feel the way you do in the historic context. Why was this feeling hard coded millions of years ago?

It's still a (federal) crime in the US, isn't it?

Dunno, there is still a long list of things people love to force others to do.

Like Feynman's "Disregard others" https://stepsandleaps.wordpress.com/2017/10/17/FEYNMANS-BREA...

So hard to do!

I love this story! Thanks

>> Introducing a long delay between when you do the work and when it is shown to the world.

Ain't it anti-thesis of "get frequent user feedback" in agile terminologies.

There's a lot of dark matter in Agile that nobody talks about in the press, but I've had plenty of frank conversations about over lunch or coffee.

Agile is Necessary but Insufficient, and some flavors are antagonistic to the things that supply sufficiency. I'm looking at you, Schwaber.

I took the advice to apply more to subjective enterprises, like writing, painting, composing, etc. Not building a product. The fact that the article kicks off with an SA quote seems like he was trying to grab the attention of a particular audience.

Pressure from peers to conform to established paradigms does suppress the development of new approaches. And it's true that pushing back against that is not good for your social standing. Interesting article, but not sure he really needed to read two books to figure that out.

Speaking of new paradigms and the states of mind necessary to push the limits of human knowledge, I feel that is going to be one of the last stands for AI-pessimists. But I also suspect that it will quickly fall.

So I anticipate the relevant articles five or ten years from now will be about getting into a state of mind where you can understand what the hell the latest genius AI agents are talking about. They will eventually conclude that the only option is a state-of-the-art high-bandwidth brain-computer interface.

Don’t really agree with this generalization to business and startups.

Mathematics/theoretical physics and “prestige” writing are possibly the two single most fields in which a single person working by themselves can, and often does, produce something of tremendous value. So yes, they are filled with “rogue genius visionaries” who channeled their creativity into something great.

Running a business is not like that at all. It’s pretty rare for any business, even in software, to be able to directly attribute its success to one immensely valuable insight or innovation. And even if it could, the actual work of building a business around that innovation IMO doesn’t require a particularly innovative environment for the line staff.

Take Google - hugely profitable, most of its success stems from creating two innovative things (good web search, and auctioned search ads). Pagerank was not even new when Google was founded and the idea itself was easily replicated elsewhere. Google was successful because they just searched the thing you wanted quickly with no BS compared to their competitors shoving portal garbage in your face and lazily linking to curated indices of keywords - by the time their competitors got their shit together Google had all the usage to use search outcomes (hit back, researched with similar terms) to improve their algorithm, and shortly thereafter and was already executing on CAC strategies (some of which like android and chrome are arguably a third innovation, though I assert any search giant would be smart enough to pursue these, and indeed MS did).

Though they had an image of a smart person’s playground, and did have such a huge money spigot they lived up to it for a while, I think it was their execution on search and really smart investments in early products (search ads, ad networks, gmail, YouTube, chrome, android) that made them successful. And you can see the same with many “deep tech” businesses: OpenAI commercialized LLMS that were researched and developed a lot elsewhere by launching the first public, tuned version of it and using that to tune an even better product. Amazon basically executed the most boring idea possible “a shop on the web” into a hugely efficient everything store. Snowflake, databricks, the flavor of the month DB company are repackaging the same boring stuff into things that are simple and easy to use. None of these take rogue geniuses.

I think the advantage funded startups (especially the ones that grow into giants) have over hacker houses is they aren’t to nearly the same extent operating as social clubs. It’s not so much deep work and rogue geniuses as just having a culture of work to begin with, actually executing on things instead of trying to relive your frat days, cutting deadweight instead of letting them be ideas guys.

Kind of a great quote by Altman there

I personally hate this train of thought. It sounds identical to the "all great things originally looked like toys" and then this gets twisted to the invalid conclusion that "all toys will eventually be great". His logic also seems to contradict their early validation mantra. I'd appreciate an even more strict filter on startup ideas, preventing so much waste on multiple versions of the same unneeded projects.

You need to try some things to see their potential. These people understand it causes waste. This is one of the major theses of Zero to One. It's really hard to know what works in advance. Power distribution of success cases pays for the losers. They know there will be losers, but they don't care.

It doesn't contradict. Early validation isn't about whether people think something is good idea. It's about whether people will pay. The Mom Test makes this distinction clear.

And there's no waste on startup ideas. Searching for something requires looking in places where there is nothing. That's not waste. That's searching. If you know where to look it's not searching, it's a lookup.

In the end, there's a pretty strict filter on startup ideas: you have to be able to convince someone to give you money.

I think it's closer to the truth to say that most progress comes not from invention, but in recognizing the implication of things that have already been invented. That can be borrowing ideas from another domain. It can be combining two ideas that never met each other. Or it can be seeing wisdom in something people take as a frivolity (literally turning toys into something profound).

But we also already suffer from a misapplication of this. Everyone wants to be the X of Y (which is basically trying to apply someone else's winning strategy to a different domain), and they think every pair of ideas will be the next Reece's Peanut Butter Cup. But it's still the champ.

Your comment is basically "I hate 'A implies B' because people twist it to mean 'B implies A'". Your comment is, in other words, _literally_ absurd.

Just smoke weed. I’ve had all my best ideas stoned.

What are those ideas? Can you name a few?

Well, the main one was my Ph.D. dissertation, which I can’t really describe because it’d dox me. But suffice it to say lots of other people thought it was a good idea too (journals, conferences, dissertation committee).

I came up with and implemented a programming language too, that was fun. Dunno if that was a good idea but it was certainly new.

Also an operating system based on that language.

Thanks for replying. I'm very interested in how our brains work and how we all perceive the world differently, so I was curious what kind of ideas those are. Especially psychedelic drugs are fascinating imo since they can have almost opposing effects, depending on the person.

Yeah it fascinates me too. If alcohol is social lubricant, weed is a creative lubricant. Couple puffs and the ideas start flowing.

> Grothendieck was, to be clear, a strong mathematician compared to most anyone, but these peers were the most talented young mathematicians in France, and unlike Grothendieck, who had spent the war in an internment camp at Rieucros, near Mende, they had been placed in the best schools and tutored.

Weil was also in a camp. Honestly, I can't stand Geothendieck. Where's the piece about how sociable Serre and Deligne were (and still are), and how much they contributed along side Geothendieck, but without going full bonkers?

Fine, schemes and etale topology are great, the category theory viewpoint is enlightening, but at the end of the day I'm interested in Deligne's (two) proof(s), in Mazur's torsion theorem, in Wiles' theorem, etc. Grothendieck's foundation is said to be fundamental to all of these, but I'm not so sure.

J.-P. Serre is indeed a gentleman, I had occasion to be a passenger in a car with him (and Giles Pisier) many years ago, me a no-mark grad student sitting with two giants. He quizzed me about my work and seemed genuinely interested in my relies, I knew this was all kid's stuff to him; kindness personified.

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