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Comment by zw123456 | Hacker News Reader

I am writing a book about this topic. I started my career in 1978 at Bell Labs and worked in 3 different startups after that. After 45 years in R&D, I have recently retired. So many times, the inspiration for new inventions we worked on came from unexpected sources; the arts, culture, music, history and many other sources. And I said we on purpose because rarely did a new invention come from one person, it was almost always from collaboration on a team. My conclusion is that invention so often comes from a team of well rounded people with knowledge in many areas and the ability to work in a team. I wonder if the decline in the productivity in R&D comes from a decline in these attributes?

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I would love to discuss with you on zoom about your career and your book.

In research on creativity in the arts and sciences, the importance of a supportive community is seen to be so important that some researchers deny the validity of the idea of the creative genius working in isolation.

Interested in your project. Can you point to any similar books and how you are expanding on them?

> some researchers deny the validity of the idea of the creative genius working in isolation.

Is it that they deny the entire possibility of a creative genius working in isolation, or deny that a creative genius working in isolation, without a supporting community to spread the good word, will still see his work make it out into the world?

I think it's more that creative genius requires both the time invested to attain mastery, and time to push the boundaries on paths that may or may not work out.

Ramanujan would have still been Ramanujan had he not worked with Littlewood and Hardy (though the world might not have witnessed both his genius and his contributions), but by all accounts he invested an enormous amount of time and effort in mathematics, to the point that his family urged him to do other things. Einstein worked a job that was so trivial for him that he spent most of his time thinking about other things. Newton invented calculus while his classes were halted because everyone was isolating from the plague. Bukowski famously quipped that his choices were to earn a wage, or to write and starve, and he'd chosen to starve.

In the same way that you probably don't get garage startups in a society where no one has a garage, you probably don't get many creative geniuses without good family structures and some level of slack in the system.

As a lifetime experimenter myself, I'm going to play the cards I'm dealt and I sure like slack in the system, but mainly to make up for my other weaknesses :)

One person's idea can be good enough to be the most revolutionary thing in a field, but it still may not be as well thought-out as if more than one worked on it together from the beginning.

One person's physical efforts can almost always be dwarfed by a team of some kind, and that might be the only way for an idea to become reality, but it's not going to help if there's not a proper team to join or resources to build staff from scratch.

Since most teams do not contain an absolute genius, at least they come up with products because they have a team. Excellent products sometimes, but not often genius level.

In some fields they really think brains are the most important thing, but it's too rare and everybody knows it.

So if they want to get to market any time soon they have to settle for what they have to work with until such a rare genius comes along.

Which may be never so no time to wait, but by the time some miracle-working wizard shows up it's too late because the team has no drop-in task for them to perform, and has not naturally been formed with the necessary structure to leverage anybody's wizardry by then. So never mind, they can't recognize it anyway.

Einstein, Ramanujan, and Newton were boosted by existing networks of review and promotion. A lot of core engineering math was invented by aristocrats and government functionaries around the French Academy. Germany developed its own equivalent scene somewhat later.

All of these followed the model of a relatively small number of smart people bouncing ideas off each other, reviewing them, building on them, and promoting the good ones.

The difference between that and modern R&D is that modern R&D tries to be industrial rather than academic. Academia is trapped in a bullshit job make-work cycle, where quantity gets more rewards than quality and creativity. There isn't room for mavericks like Einstein. Even if they're out there having great ideas, there's no way for them to be discovered and promoted.

Industry focuses more on fill-in developments than game changer mathematical insights, which are the real drivers of scientific progress.

So there's a lot of R&D-like activity in CS, and occasionally something interesting falls out, like LLMs. But fundamental physics has stagnated.

One of the biggest reasons is that the smartest people don't work in research. They work in finance, developing gambling algorithms.

I'm not discounting the benefit of having additional networks in place, I just think they're a facilitating factor rather than a causative one. They're important for educational development and spreading ideas, but they can also result in homogeneity. The biggest two factors to me are time and interest. You yourself point out that most modern math and engineering was invented by aristocrats; the main reason for this was that they were the only ones with the luxury of being able to think about such abstract topics. They had the time to spend, so those with the interest and aptitude pushed the boundaries. You occasionally saw members of the working class do the same (Heaviside, for example), but they had a more difficult road.

I disagree that the smartest people work in finance. Some very smart people do. From what I've seen, the ones at the very farthest edge of human ability typically aren't motivated by money.

If for example you knew someone who has great idea, but doesn't have time to check it with a prototype because he has a lot of "normal" work, but he doesn't want to give it for free to everyone (so that he can finally have some more money and check his other ideas), what would you suggest to that person, or how would you support such person?

There are at least three definitions of creativity in circulation. One, you are the first person in history to have that idea. (rare, but I've seen it) Two, you came up with an idea that was new to you. (most common) Three, you have a new idea that gains social acceptance. (Teresa Amabile argues for this one in Creativity in Context (1996))

I wasn't referring to that last definition, but to the view that intellectual environment is so important for supporting the exploration of ideas that true solitary creativity doesn't happen. For books arguing this view, try Robert Weisberg, Dean Keith Simonton, and Keith Sawyer. Study specifically on creativity in lab research was done by Kevin Dunbar, who also found the social aspect essential.

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