
John Carmack on Idea Generation - amasad
http://amasad.me/2016/03/09/john-carmack-on-idea-generation/
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pbw
I like the buildup here with "Antifragile". Sounded very cool and I was eager
to see how it would apply to "Idea Generation". But Carmack's 5 steps seem to
boil down to "Try to tear down ideas before you implement them" don't they?
Just needlessly expressed as 5 separate steps?

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amasad
It's just me paraphrasing. You have to take my word that the talk is much more
interesting. Although it does boils down to that, he spoke for an hour
recounting ideas from game development and rocket science that he applied this
on.

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ramkarthikk
This is one of the reasons I don't always support TLDRs or the apps that try
to read an article and give you the important points. Yes, most of the
articles can be explained in a sentence or two. But then there are articles or
talks from which you take away new points every time you read it/re-read it.

Your article is important for people who didn't have the privilege to listen
to the talk (like me). So thank you for writing. It would also be interesting
to read the takeaways of other people in the room even though the talk could
be boiled down to "Tearing down ideas".

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amasad
Totally. Take Antifragile for example, the "boiled down" version is a
paragraph length, but it took a book for me to really internalize it. There is
a big difference between getting the tl;dr of something and actually
internalizing it. The latter takes a many examples, and takes looking at the
subject in multiple ways and through different lenses. Which reminds me of a
famous quote by the late Marvin Minsky: "You don't understand anything until
you learn it more than one way."

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rdudekul
"Failure events must end up making our system stronger. Meaning when an idea
fails it needs to make the overall system better."

"As soon as you get an idea you try to defeat it. You’ll be able to generate
more ideas because you freed up mental space."

These are good ideas, both from coding as well as entrepreneurial
perspectives. Every failure you encounter, if taken as a learning lesson, will
make you or your ideas stronger.

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programminggeek
I tend to write my ideas down in a Google doc as a way of throwing them away.
Then I keep going on my current one focus. If the idea is good enough, I
always manage to come back to it and finish. If I don't, it probably sucked.

I wrote a more comprehensive essay on ideas here:
[http://brianknapp.me/books/creative-
pursuit/chapter-7/](http://brianknapp.me/books/creative-pursuit/chapter-7/)

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jsprogrammer
My ideas are too good and the main problem is getting enough time to complete
them all.

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cableshaft
We need an army of code servants that are cloned from our brains so they can
create all our ideas for us (and make it properly) while we sit back, relax,
and come up with the next idea.

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stuxnet79
No way, I want to have my cake and eat it too. Being an implementor is
arguably just as much fun as being an "ideas" person.

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smallhands
any chance of watching this carmack facebook video?

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lazyant
Looks to me like scientific ideas, first thing you do (or should do) is try to
shut it down.

Also as a counter-example, I've had ideas that I dismissed because I found
apparent flaws in them and then I've seen those ideas being built into
successful companies because users don't think like me and didn't care about
my issues.

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halayli
> Proprietary software is usually used in controlled environments all the
> while building up fragility for a major catastrophic event waiting to happen

Not necessarily true. OSX, Oracle, MS etc.. are used by many and are under
constant stress test.

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kruczek
I don't think OSX is a good example here. As far as I know Apple builds both
hardware and software, so even in hands of customers OSX still runs in quite
controlled environment.

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nevir
How much of this hinges on having enough tooling to be able to efficiently
explore/prototype/abuse your ideas?

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amasad
In my experience: a lot. Many of my projects have a `repl.sh` in the root dir
that sets up the environment and autoloads the library for quick hacking and
prototyping.

