
Isaac Asimov Asks, “How Do People Get New Ideas?” (1959) - ohjeez
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/531911/isaac-asimov-asks-how-do-people-get-new-ideas/
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louprado
Asimov's point regarding "cross-connections" reminded me of V.S Ramachandran's
discussions on synesthesia. People with synesthesia have _insufficient_ neural
pruning and therefore more cross-talk between different areas of the brains.
V.S.R.'s hypothesis is that this condition could also make one more creative
because it facilitates the connection between two seemingly unrelated ideas.

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peter303
I view coding as a creative process. On a new, large project I visualize the
broad system. Then coding is filling in the details. Then I may go into a many
hour day coding trance to complete a large piece of it, much like Van Gogh
said he painted.

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contingencies
Same. When explaining programming to non-programmers, I use the metaphor of a
cleaner: walking in to a room, identifying the type of mess present, choosing
the right tool to clean it up, and the majority of time (your filling process)
is basically floor sweeping. Of course, there are better types of job, but
IMHO the majority of commercial coding is floor sweeping.

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peter303
Hofstader author of Goedel Escher Bach spent decades pursuing the idea of
analogies as creativity. I think he written some books about this.

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nashashmi
Previously discussed:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8484312](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8484312)

(These kinds of things never get old.)

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astazangasta
This is nice. Where I disagree with him is about "creativity being
embarrassing" \-- this might be true for some, but not all. I, personally,
thrive on having someone else hear my idea, and at least say, "Huh," which
gives me license to think further (rather than pause in despair, or remain
stuck on that one, unarticulated thought).

Something along these lines that I have been thinking about, yours for a
nickel, is applying some principles of evolutionary biology to other domains
with a selection process, specifically business and innovation.

Species need to innovate in order to survive the vagaries of time. The process
they use for doing this is selection, and the currency they spend is genetic
diversity. The more standing genetic variation a population can hold onto, and
the more freely it can move through the population, the more efficient
selection will be, and the more easily that population will adapt and develop
new features. These two quantities, the census population and overall
population structure, are usually summarized in a single variable in many
evolutionary models, the "effective population size" (which, for the curious,
is usually measured as about 10,000 individuals for humans).

We might apply the same principles to an economy in search of innovation. In
this case, our selection process is a bit different, since instead of
"survival and reproduction" we have something like "attracts capital and
grows", but ideas can also spread and grow via conversation, etc. In this way,
they are not atomic and indivisible like genetic variation, and their
segregation is perhaps subject to more than just a selection process.

The meat of the comparison, though, might hold true: we want both a large
census population of innovators (to generate a large pool of diverse ideas)
AND lack of "population structure", meaning things that prevent the flow of
new ideas in the population (to allow those ideas to be excavated and
exchanged efficiently rather than die on the vine unfulfilled). Monopoly is an
obvious bad one; but so is orthodoxy of any kind. For example, if the sources
of capital are highly constrained and are only willing or able to fund certain
sectors, are risk-averse, etc., then innovation will be correspondingly
constrained.

This sort of thinking appeals to me because it demands: 1) widespread
education in order to increase the pool of idea-generating individuals and 2)
easier access to capital worldwide. Racism or classism is an obvious kind of
'population structure' that prevents capital from flowing evenly to all
corners, and if our goal is an innovative (and therefore healthy) society, we
should remove these hazards.

Of course, this is only metaphorical and breaks down in many ways, but I find
it a fun thought.

