Seconded! I love Holden’s posts on wicked problems, I revisit them like once a week or whenever I’m feeling down about my work :p
I’ve also found it incredibly useful to read historical accounts of great scientists. There’s just all kinds of great thinking tips scattered among biographies, many of which I’ve encountered on LessWrong before, but somehow seeing them in the context of one particular intellectual journey is very helpful.
Reading Einstein’s biography (by Walter Isaacson) was by far my favorite. I felt like I got a really good handle for his style of thinking (e.g., how obsessed he was with unity—like how he felt it “unbearable” that there should be an essential difference between a magnet moving through a conducting coil and a coil moving around a magnet, although the theories at the time posited such a difference; his insistence on figuring out the physical meaning of things—with special relativity, this was the operationalization of “time,” with quanta this was giving meaning to an otherwise mathematical curiosity that Planck had discovered; his specific style of thought experiments; and just a sense of how wonderful and visceral his curiosity about the world was, like how as a very young child his father brought him a compass, and as he watched the needle align due to some apparently hidden force field he trembled and grew cold at the prospect of non-mechanical causes). He’s so cool!
Seconded! I love Holden’s posts on wicked problems, I revisit them like once a week or whenever I’m feeling down about my work :p
I’ve also found it incredibly useful to read historical accounts of great scientists. There’s just all kinds of great thinking tips scattered among biographies, many of which I’ve encountered on LessWrong before, but somehow seeing them in the context of one particular intellectual journey is very helpful.
Reading Einstein’s biography (by Walter Isaacson) was by far my favorite. I felt like I got a really good handle for his style of thinking (e.g., how obsessed he was with unity—like how he felt it “unbearable” that there should be an essential difference between a magnet moving through a conducting coil and a coil moving around a magnet, although the theories at the time posited such a difference; his insistence on figuring out the physical meaning of things—with special relativity, this was the operationalization of “time,” with quanta this was giving meaning to an otherwise mathematical curiosity that Planck had discovered; his specific style of thought experiments; and just a sense of how wonderful and visceral his curiosity about the world was, like how as a very young child his father brought him a compass, and as he watched the needle align due to some apparently hidden force field he trembled and grew cold at the prospect of non-mechanical causes). He’s so cool!
Any other biography suggestions?