
The magic of generating new ideas - rolling_robot
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-myth-and-magic-of-generating-new-ideas
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paideic
Coming up with something truly new is much, much harder than people give it
credit for. We take the sun being the center of the universe for granted
today, but it was an extremely non-obvious fact for the smartest people in the
world for millenia. One of my math professors had a great take on the
difficulty of injecting a new idea into the world: he said that the greatest
mathematical achievement that anyone had ever made was not anything like
calculus - it was the realization that there was something similar between
five stones and five fish.

~~~
dawg-
Nietzsche describes the problem beautifully in _Beyond Good and Evil_ :

"However independent of each other [philosophers] might feel themselves to be,
with their critical or systematic wills, something inside of them drives them
on, something leads them into a particular order, one after the other, and
this something is precisely the innate systematicity and relationship of
concepts. In fact, their thinking is not nearly as much a discovery as it is a
recognition, remembrance, a returning and homecoming into a distant,
primordial, total economy of the soul, from which each concept once grew: – to
this extent, philosophizing is a type of atavism of the highest order."

..."Where there are linguistic affinities, then because of the common
philosophy of grammar (I mean: due to the unconscious domination and direction
through similar grammatical functions), it is obvious that everything lies
ready from the very start for a similar development and sequence of
philosophical systems..."

~~~
thrav
I know religion probably doesn’t play well around here, but your quote brought
a memory rushing back that I feel like sharing.

My very Christian mother once asked me to help her come up with a slogan for
the church. I know her pastor well, and know him to be an avid student of
history and the literature.

After much thought, I told them this, with the warning that if they used it
they’d better be willing to face the consequences of what it means: “The
purpose of the church is to remind people who they are. As children, they
know. Over time, the world makes them forget.”

In my estimation, Jesus’ goal, and the Church’s job should be guiding people
back to what they once knew. Unbridled love and trust in others. Non-
judgement. Absolute acceptance, before we learn there’s such thing as a
stranger.

Thank you for sharing this passage.

“Their thinking is not nearly as much a discovery as it is a recognition,
remembrance, a returning and homecoming into a distant, primordial, total
economy of the soul, from which each concept once grew”

Later, my Mom sent me the link to the sermon where the pastor quoted my
statement and my warning, and followed it with, “My friend might be onto
something, because in thinking on the text with his proposal in mind, I
recalled one of Jesus’ declarations, ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and
become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’”

~~~
tim333
> back to what they once knew. Unbridled love and trust in others. Non-
> judgement...

That's quite an optimistic assessment of little children.

~~~
Hoasi
> That's quite an optimistic assessment of little children.

I'm not sure if it is. Little children lack preconceived ideas, and, often,
inhibition. That combination is a good recipe for accepting the unknown and
coming up with new ideas. That is not to say they can't be cruel at times.

~~~
galaxyLogic
Little children are also easily led and controlled by other people like their
parents. And no doubt that is what Mr. Preacher-man also wants: Followers.
Thank the Lord and pass the bucket. Become dependent on me telling you what is
the truth, you believing that if you just believe what I tell you you are
granted the ticket to heaven, if not you go to Hell.

Very conveniently it is very easy to make little children believe all that,
and now you tell us we should be like them little children too.

We should blindly trust the preacher-man, like little children, that's what he
is telling us.

~~~
Hoasi
> Very conveniently it is very easy to make little children believe all that

My counter-intuitive opinion is that children are quite skeptical of religion.
They may enjoy the make-believe part of it. Pretending, after all, is child
play, but they will never take it for granted just because an adult tells them
so. On the contrary, kids will know when something is made up. An adult
seriously resorting to magic to answer a child's question will raise doubts.
That kid is likely to question authority and religion ever after.

~~~
galaxyLogic
> kids will know when something is made up.

I think if adults SEEM to be believing it then kids will believe it too. Maybe
you can say that then is not misleading them since you believe it to be true,
but I don't think that proves that kids really have a critical thinking
ability. That is why I think they are easily mislead. Of course there is much
good to be said about having an "open mind", but having an "open mind"
basically means anything can enter it. Kids' brains have their doors wide
open. Is that good or bad? I don't think we can say it is just plain good.
They need to learn critical thinking, all humans do, that is the skill to
acquire.

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otras
These two different ways your brain works on ideas, focused and diffused, were
my biggest takeaways from Barbara Oakley's _Learning How To Learn_ class. I've
found that actively going between them, say by studying hard for 90 minutes
and then going for a long walk, has been tremendous for learning.

Highly recommend the course (or the book form, _A Mind for Numbers_ ).

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melling
“ These stories suggest that an initial period of concentration—conscious,
directed attention—needs to be followed by some amount of unconscious
processing.”

~~~
fudged71
These (unconscious processing) moments for me almost always happen in the
shower. I'd love to find another ritual that gets me in a similar mindspace.

~~~
unicod3
I usually find it in the bed at night time. Like I am going to bed and my
brain starts to dig deeper for the problem and finds a solution.

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tabtab
There's plenty of new ideas around, you don't have to generate them yourself.
If you ask in forums or search the web you can get a big list. The problem is
culling the list for practical and successful ideas. Somebody has to invest
the time and/or money do actually _do_ it, and accept the high risk of failure
typical of startups and new open-source projects. That's probably the
bottleneck.

Ideas are cheap, execution is not.

Here's a free sample tip: Dynamic Relational. It's the new "plastic" (a movie
reference). The NoSql movement has shown a market/desire for dynamic
databases. But with Dynamic Relational you get dynamism AND sql; you don't
have to choose one or the other. And you can set constraints/rules to
gradually make it more "static" like traditional RDBMS.

~~~
iKevinShah
I feel, in my opinion, getting an idea and generating something _comparatively
easier_ part compared to actually educating the market / users about what the
idea is and what is the solution we have generated, we all see / are a part of
so many good products which just had a steep learning curve and hence failed /
didnt get accepted.

~~~
tabtab
I'm curious of specific examples. Functional programming is possibly an
example. It takes a good long time for many to become productive with it, and
with some it will never click. It's hard to actually know if its a personal
preference or something inherently better. After all, code is more for humans
to read than it is for computers.

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dwd
James Altucher, who's posts used to appear frequently on HN maybe 6 or so
years ago and had a few good ones about how he would write down every idea
(10-20 a day) and his methods for validating them. I haven't read anything of
his for a while, but he still seems to write a lot about ideas.

[https://jamesaltucher.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-for-
becomi...](https://jamesaltucher.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-for-becoming-an-
idea-machine/)

------
whalesalad
This feels appropriate: Hammock-driven development by Rich Hickey
[https://youtu.be/f84n5oFoZBc](https://youtu.be/f84n5oFoZBc)

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kart23
I can relate to that feeling. When you just figure it out, not even thinking
about your problem, just doing something mundane and unrelated. But that stage
of concentration and struggle is crucial. You need to care about the problem,
have some investment in it.

And it's so satisfying seeing the solution work, especially if you don't know
the correctness 100%.

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andrewstuart
As DeBono says "Good ideas are obvious in hindsight".

I have no shortage of ideas, most pretty ordinary, some very small number
good.

It's a very long journey though from good idea to release of a successful
software product. Takes time, money, motivation, technical skill, not making
big mistakes and that absolutely required ingredient, luck.

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osullivj
The article is about maths, but could equally apply to debugging or software
design. The overworking a problem phenomenon described earlier in the article
sounds like "analysis paralysis".

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flyGuyOnTheSly
>In this view of creative momentum, the key to solving a problem is to take a
break from worrying, to move the problem to the back burner, to let the
unwatched pot boil.

I noticed the same thing about my poker game back when I used to play
religiously.

Taking a week or two long break from playing invariably improved my game.

None of my poker buddies understood the phenomena, but every single one of us
experienced it.

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pugworthy
I'm curious if anyone has run into situation where being an "idea" person has
been a negative at work. Sometimes there is the perception of ideation as a
waste of time, or that the ideator (is that a word?) is one of those "whacky
ideas" people. "Why are you going for walks, don't you have work to do?"

~~~
gitgud
It can be frustrating if the _idea person_ is constantly talking about them,
but doesn't act on any.

It's easy to have ideas... validating/building them, that's the hard part

~~~
jbms
Talking about them may be to see which ones resonate with people and are
perhaps more valuable to do. Ideas people can be full of ideas and so they
don't hold them too dearly because they'll have more ideas tomorrow. Sharing
them's a way of testing and dismissing the majority that won't get traction.

