
Where Do New Ideas Come From? - whack
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2014/06/18/where-do-new-ideas-come-from/
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lordnacho
I often wondered about this while running a quant group at a hedge fund.

Once your domain is somewhat specific, you tend to understand your own action
constraints. We have this many guys with these particular skills (algos,
networks, etc) and we can only consider things that might make at least some
amount. And it needs to be done within some horizon.

Amazingly, it's much easier to have ideas if you have more constraints. Did
you ever get asked by your teacher to write a story about anything? I always
found that totally impossible. But a short story with a single protagonist, 4
pages long, occurring during some major life event, that's a lot easier to get
started on.

We built a page of potential things to investigate. They were always things
built around some observation someone had while becoming experts. So for
instance I'd stared at swap rates for a long time and wondered about whether
there were inefficiencies we could look at. Also there was a look at different
ways to use options, another thing we were strong in. Everything that worked
was something adjacent to existing knowledge. Ended up spinning out a currency
fund that did quite well.

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growlist
> Did you ever get asked by your teacher to write a story about anything? I
> always found that totally impossible.

You could have written a story about writing a story.

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decasteve
Reminds me of this Leonard Cohen quote: If I knew where the good ideas came
from, I'd go there more often.

I seem to remember him saying this a few times over the years and on occasion
he’d say it as ‘good songs’ rather than ‘good ideas’.

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djokkataja
> Todd: I’m thinking of something a bit like erm the flap on a video tape

This doesn't sound like his design thinking operates in terms of analogies. It
sounds more like he's imagining something which he feels he can best
_describe_ to his fellow designers by an analogy ("a bit like...").

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AndrewKemendo
We don't know enough about the brain/mind to give anything like a measurable
answer to this. It's all speculation.

However something rings true about the concept of analogies being instructive
in idea formation. I often think about it as adjusting the assumptions that
the mind uses when planning. In that sense, it looks just like improvisation
or what we call exploration in Reinforcement Learning.

Good mental models of the world will result in more accurate simulations when
you mix and match the assumptions/starting points. Some of those simulations
might not be extant and you can take action to test whether they work in the
real world. If they do, then boom you've got an idea made real.

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patcon
> We don't know enough about the brain/mind to give anything like a measurable
> answer to this. It's all speculation.

You might be interested in the Leiden Theory of linguistics. It basically
posits that language is an evolved semiotic organism that lives within the
hospitable ecological niche of our minds, and cohabits within the vessel of
our biology:
[http://www.himalayanlanguages.org/files/driem/pdfs/prague.pd...](http://www.himalayanlanguages.org/files/driem/pdfs/prague.pdf)

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contingencies
Actual study:
[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cogs.12127](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cogs.12127)

Method: _To explore this potential explanation of the association between far
analogies and reduced functional distance of search, we examined the concepts
immediately preceding far analogy-to-concept pairs (i.e., far concept-
generating or function-finding analogies), focusing on the distance of each
concept from its immediate predecessor (i.e., its JUST PRIOR value, derived
from Study 1). In building this sample of concepts, we screened out concepts
that were not in the same subproblem space as the concept following the
analogy, and concepts with predecessors in a different subproblem space. The
final sample consisted of 57 concepts._

So the whole study based based on 57 verbalised concept transitions and the
underlying assumption that iterative verbalised transitions within a group
discussion context are true proxies for meaningfully tracking significant
iterations in inventive thought process in the participants.

A counterexample would be our company, actively involved in R&D on a day to
day basis across a range of disciplines very similar to those cited within the
study, where far analogies _are_ used however they are typically analyzed
privately. The fruits of that thinking are presented for group discussion and
the potential for those avenues of thought identified within group discussion,
but they are almost never actually fleshed out verbally as a group.

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acvny
What a bad article. Started so well and then finished in a haste. There is a
whole theory of invention called TRIZ. One idea there is tht transcending
matter phase boundaries could lead to new inventions.. worth looking up.

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zupreme
The absence of innerspeak.

When you stop “talking”, you automatically start “listening”.

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coder1001
I feel new ideas come from the opposite, when thinking (and partly doing
inner-speak) and not listening.

Listening is just exploring whats already out there?

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tapdi
I feel like when i try to think about new idea it easy to come out. The
problem is how to make it come true and success

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matthewmorgan
You guessed it folks. Frank Stallone

