Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)
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henrikkarlsson.xyz
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The entire point of feedback is to see it as impersonal and not a value judgement on you (the creator) vrs the project.
Like okay, what if someone was extremely successful and taken a lot of risks and repeats the same feedback you've gotten. Would that make the feedback magically true?
Instead of judging the people who give you feedback, judge the feedback itself and let it go. In the end, you disagreed with them because you knew what was right to do. There is no point thinking about them as good or bad people but just whose feedback was objectively wrong.
Again this is a bit of a ramble but my point is that "i will prove them stupid people wrong" can turn into internal resentment as well where you judge your victory by how much you "showed them" rather than how much you showed yourself. It is very likely you can get all the success in the world and those people will still think you are a loser. You cannot win that battle and if you actually believe them thinking that of you matters, you will not be happy even in success.
If someone had taken risks, had ideas, seen some fail some work and they said my idea is bad, I would listen to them more for sure. Maybe my idea is bad, only time will tell. I'm not saying these people are stupid, many of them are smart. I think if you are smart it actually gets easier to poke holes in an idea.
I always find it so interesting that the same principle can lead to many conclusions. Based on the people I know and my own life, I would have argued the opposite. The people who do not attempt to poke holes in every idea are those that just go with the "default", "safe" option. They have not meaningfully evaluated any options and simply taken face value where the default seems less complex and therefore the lowest risk/highest value (I.e, safe) option.
That means they may try to tell you to give up on any idea that does not fit their framework, simply because having no experience with means it’s riskier than things that do fit.
I don’t mean to defend this behavior, neither to say this is definitely what is happening here, but if it applies, I think it’s a good idea to frame this as people wishing you well, in their own twisted way.
You’re on the wrong message board then haha
When they pitch a new idea to family and friends they get pats on the head and it doesn't materially help them at all, but when someone says "that'll never work" they get excited and their ears perk up, because that new perspective could save them a ton of money going down a wrong path.
Maybe it’s pressure that kills ideas, or competition, or premature desire to commercialize, or just the kind of people that become founders; it’s definitely not co-working in and of itself.
Should add I agree that solitary reflection is important, just not that being surrounded by like minded people is detrimental.
I think the point the post was trying to make was that; spend too long in an "academic" or "professional" environment and you become too contoured by the mores of the establishment to truly innovate. Spend too little time and you toil away in a cave, at best reinventing things that were invented already without your knowledge. I think in a heavily networked world like today, where there's also a lot of competitive pressure in these establishments, the solitude is probably worth thinking about more.
It's something I think a lot about in terms of capital allocation in academia and in tech, both in terms of monetary capital and the capital of time (which is limited by its very nature.) Investors and funds are heavily affected by the trends surrounding them but a minimum amount of funding and social buy-in is needed to really develop ideas. There's a lot more I have to say on the topic but it's perhaps a little too tangent to this article itself.
To academics, how often do you end up chasing an idea because it was popular in a conference? How often do you chase grants? Math might be one of the "easier" fields to be adventurous since mathematical innovation can be independently verified relatively simply compared to many other fields.
Meaning that even if an idea already has been invented, that doesn’t mean there’s no room for your implementation of it. There still may be room.
I think there's a point of diminishing returns where improving something isn't worth it. But I mean, if you're innovating at the level of a PhD, does anyone really know anything at all? You are, by definition, pushing the boundary of human knowledge.
> Spend too little time and you toil away in a cave, at best reinventing things that were invented already without your knowledge.
Grothendieck disputes this point. He reinvented the wheel many times when he was 17-20 years old, but believes it was training for accessing the required cognitive spaces. He says:
A few years after I finally established contact with the world of mathematics at Paris, I learned, among other things, that the work I’d done in my little niche [. . . had] been long known to the whole world [. . .]. In the eyes of my mentors, to whom I’d described this work, and even showed them the manuscript, I’d simply “wasted my time”, merely doing over again something that was “already known”. But I don't recall feeling any sense of disappointment. [. . .] Without recognizing it, I’d thereby familiarized myself with the conditions of solitude that are essential for the profession of mathematician, something that no-one can teach you. [. . .]Grothendieck's later years or more extreme isolation were less productive, same with Perelman, so maybe there's some balance that needs to be struck. Although age is a confound with these two cases.
Academia is only as good as the people in it.
I ended up doing traffic shaping in the Linux kernel because my house mate had edonkey running all day..
The most innovative teams I've worked on implored, and maybe incentivized, periods of reflection and evolution of ideas. Often we built POCs along side that evolution. They'd often juggle many different new ideas. Each, often, had its own evolution. Whatever shook out is what won and we often had pivots in line if we needed them.
I think in general it's what Sam says it is: if you artificially force people to defend their ideas early on then you end up coming up with pretty mid ideas.
Ever hear the very early Talking Heads song, "Artists Only" - David Byrne remarks,
"pretty soon now, I will be bitter, pretty soon now, I will be a quitter. You... can't... see... it... til it's finished"
My father knew this too, intuitively. He did some really nice, not-for-profit, practical projects on a very low budget. He'd like to comment during those fruitful years, "now, that's a pregnant idea" - the point being, perhaps, that you want to allow the idea to develop way past the fertilization stage, before releasing it into the world. The British have a term, "half-baked idea" that may run along the same lines.
What a nice essay. Thank you, author! It's hard to imagine these insights being hatched by interactions on social media, where everyone is a critic, and always so cock-sure that their biases are so correct.
Of course, our educational system is loaded the the dialectic-style interaction style, where there is a dogma that the truth can be arrived at by negation of opinions through a Socratic question-and-answer dialogue, but that often often goes nowhere. In my most productive R&D experiences, where I was often the only guy in the lab who had various consultants milking the billable hours, the best bosses would give plenty of space for diving into trying this or that, because they respected that intuition needs to run free. Then, the numbers and other results would validate the assumptions or instincts. But just point-blank instinctively shooting down every new idea... often goes nowhere - and happens so often. Too often.
Thanks again.
In most orgs nowadays, sometimes we are too tied down with pragmatism. Somehow we're asked for deadlines before even starting work. Somehow we need to define the end product and design before even starting. Only the most menial chores have their entire paths laid out. Anything great, by its virtue of being new, has unknowns that cannot be planned for beforehand.
The Socratic dialogue you bring up assumes that ideas can be interrogated to reveal itself to all members involved but frequently there's no way to put it into words until you do it. It morphs and changes as work is put into it. If Picasso described what he wanted to paint to some random artist would it have produced Picasso?
Britain has produced a range of remarkably gifted multidisciplinary scientists and scholars who are sometimes described as polymaths. The group included, in recent times, Bertrand Russell, A. N. Whitehead, J. B. S. Haldane, J. D. Bernal, and Jacob Bronowski. Russell commented that the development of such gifted individuals required a childhood period in which there was little or no pressure for conformity, a time in which the child could develop and pursue his or her own interests no matter how unusual or bizarre.
Still earlier Sagan The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (1977), Chapter 8, 'The Future Evolution of the Brain'.
Both in balance. Freedom to work out the ideas in whatever direction you want, "It's been done before"; "this won't work", "This is bad for your career" aside, along with smart, open, supportive people who you can exchange ideas with and collaborate on.
You will note that almost all the mathematical, and renowned natural sciences people of history and contemporary took traditional education paths, i.e. phds at research universities. Hmm.
Having had the opportunity to have ideas and pursue them extensively as a corporate employee, startup founder, and independent researchers, all I can say is that there seems to be a violent agreement of how stuff actually happens and that it's almost never fully made possible in either industry or academia. It's like a living irony.
For a deeper treatment of the broader subject - one of the most cited books is the "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"
what does this mean?
My guess is that some of this comes from listening to too many podcasts. You can pick up a lot of jargon and big ideas pretty quickly, and some podcasts are better at giving you that "oh, now I get it" feeling than actually helping you understand the ideas.
You mean basically every HN commenter nowadays?
Big words. Big terms. Heavy phrasing. All to say a bunch of nothing. True knowledge lies in simplicity. True wisdom lies in humility. Both of which are sorely missing around here.
Wind from the sea Butterflies in embankment weeds Never resting (1915) Taneda Santoka
> "A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a joke or worried to death by a frown on the right person's brow."
-Charles Browder
I think that teams can be very creative; with a “whole is greater than the sum of the parts” effect, but it has to be the right team.
Personality fit, and synergy have as much to do with it, as raw talent.
I have worked with teams of highly-talented and educated people that actually had a “whole is less than the sum of the parts” effect.
I think efforts to commodify creativity are doomed to fail.
Reminds me of that Rick Rubin quote:
The confidence that I have in my taste and my ability to express what I feel has proven helpful for artists.
This can be cultivated and if you end up with one or more ideas in excess of what you can possibly deploy, that would be a surplus.
Under ideal conditions that is.
So it stands to reason that ideally the same place that good ideas come from, is the exact same place where more of them die than anything else :\
(Allowed by space and time, I mean)
Eat. Sleep.
See what stuck the next morning, on the walk to coffee.
Mirandola's is the oldest source for the ranking of being that I can recall off the top of my head, but the idea is almost certainly even older.
> On man when he came into life the Father conferred the seeds of all kinds and the germs of every way of life. Whatever seeds each man cultivates will grow to maturity and bear in him their own fruit. If they be vegetative, he will be like a plant. If sensitive, he will become brutish. If rational, he will grow into a heavenly being. If intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God.
- Oration on the Dignity of Man
I think it's useless trying to find councel regarding these things, people will just say what they believe is right. It's mostly just seeking external validation.
The end state should just be a lack of judgement -- right now we are too preoccupied with minmaxing so called productivity which is mostly an illusion most times. Much of this comes from a self imposed sense of guilt, in that doing nothing becomes like eating junk food. And this sense of guilt is in turn cultivated by the environment at large. Try telling people you're in between jobs or taking a sabbatical, they'll just assign you to the "loser" or "unemployed" class automatically.
If you don't self-impose, society will structurally impose it on you.
Unfortunately, the modern world is run not by empaths, but by psychopaths. Even if we get to a state where we look out for each other, I fear it would be quickly subverted.
He said, back home, he would have been getting dirty looks, if he wasn't constantly justifying his existence in a place by either consuming or producing something.
But what I can do is ensure that I orient my own life around contribution and pass that on to my kids.
> Ideas are like fish.
> If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper.
> Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They're huge and abstract. And they're very beautiful.
Even though he liberally sprinkled pseudoscientificism into his metacognition, the older I get, the more I think he really got it.