While I’m here, I’ll echo several other commenters in pushing back against the insinuation that reinventing ideas is a sign of something going wrong. There are only so many hours in a day, and they trade off between
(A) “try to understand the work / ideas of previous thinkers” and
(B) “just sit down and try to figure out the right answer”.
It’s nuts to assert that the “correct” tradeoff is to do (A) until there is absolutely no (A) left to possibly do, and only then do you earn the right to start in on (B). People should do (A) and (B) in whatever ratio they expect to be most effective for figuring out the right answer. I often do (B), and I assume that I’m probably reinventing a wheel, but it’s not worth my time to go digging for it. And then maybe someone shares relevant prior work in the comments section. That’s awesome! Much appreciated! And nothing went wrong anywhere in this process! See also here.
I didn’t read http://www.probabilityandfinance.com/ but I heard (maybe Vanessa Kosoy was saying this?) that it has a lot of ideas that people around here would attribute to logical induction.
While I’m here, I’ll echo several other commenters in pushing back against the insinuation that reinventing ideas is a sign of something going wrong. There are only so many hours in a day, and they trade off between
(A) “try to understand the work / ideas of previous thinkers” and
(B) “just sit down and try to figure out the right answer”.
It’s nuts to assert that the “correct” tradeoff is to do (A) until there is absolutely no (A) left to possibly do, and only then do you earn the right to start in on (B). People should do (A) and (B) in whatever ratio they expect to be most effective for figuring out the right answer. I often do (B), and I assume that I’m probably reinventing a wheel, but it’s not worth my time to go digging for it. And then maybe someone shares relevant prior work in the comments section. That’s awesome! Much appreciated! And nothing went wrong anywhere in this process! See also here.
Very cool! Thanks for linking the book.