
Claude Shannon’s “Creative Thinking” Speech (2017) - Hooke
https://medium.com/the-mission/a-genius-explains-how-to-be-creative-claude-shannons-long-lost-1952-speech-fbbcb2ebe07f
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astazangasta
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.

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

~~~
netman21
Authors and artists seem to collect into milieu. Thinking the Pre-Raphaelites
or The Algonquin Roundtable, or Hemingway's friends in Paris.

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veli_joza
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

~~~
mettamage
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

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

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

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rgbrenner
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.

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melling
“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“

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ball_of_lint
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.

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ineedasername
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.

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sus_007
Here's the talk the author gave at Code Mesh LDN last year:
[https://youtu.be/elwKUJg4-Ko](https://youtu.be/elwKUJg4-Ko)

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netman21
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.

