I was thinking in a very different direction upon reading “a lot of people also find that writing down your ideas, causes you to have even more ideas.” I know what you mean in the context of a reinforcement system, but I think it misses the more pressing phenomena, at least in my experience of uncertainty whether i’m inventing or indulging, of working on ideas.
The “even more ideas” part sounds to me like a sort of (combinatorial) explosion, when my stroke of inspiration is much more problematic, much less elegant than I thought. Sometimes this also means much less original than I thought, but this isn’t a bad thing—convincing oneself that something is being discovered is often the most effective way at grokking it! You don’t really lose anything when you find out that it’s, in fact, old news.
Sometimes all this means is it will take more work than I thought, to follow the idea through. Other times it means this is the wrong rabbit hole.
But I think many of us AD(H)Ders develop a suspicion or even hostility to this “indulgent” signal, the internal phenomena of believing oneself to be creative, because they’ve too easily looted the reward (been superficially creative) at the expense of rigor (“why finish all those exercises in that boring book when this system i just wrote down is totally AGI already?”)
(At the same time, you and Lawrence Block are 100% right about nurturing/environment as well)
All in all, I can’t wrap my head around “what is the difference between a producer and a consumer of thought?” because the question as posed seems to hold rigor, even quality, constant/irrelevant.
(Many years ago a composer told me that when Schoenberg was at UCLA, young composers had to spend hours with him for 3+ years just analyzing mozart before he would consider looking at your music, compared to conservatories now you’re expressing yourself from day one. There is doubtless an analogy to AI risk—which culture is more productive?)
All in all, I can’t wrap my head around “what is the difference between a producer and a consumer of thought?” because the question as posed seems to hold rigor, even quality, constant/irrelevant.
I’m not trying to hold it constant, I’m just trying to understand a relatively low standard, because that’s the part I feel confused about. It seems relatively much easier to look at bad intellectual output and say how it could have been better, think about the thought processes involved, etc. Much harder to say what goes into producing output at all vs not doing so.
I’m not trying to hold it constant, I’m just trying to understand a relatively low standard, because that’s the part I feel confused about. It seems relatively much easier to look at bad intellectual output and say how it could have been better, think about the thought processes involved, etc. Much harder to say what goes into producing output at all vs not doing so.
I think I understand the distinction, and I think if it was as simple as “people undershoot their actual capacities in favor of humility / don’t want to risk wasting anybody’s time” everyone would have adjusted social norms to remedy it by now.
I was thinking in a very different direction upon reading “a lot of people also find that writing down your ideas, causes you to have even more ideas.” I know what you mean in the context of a reinforcement system, but I think it misses the more pressing phenomena, at least in my experience of uncertainty whether i’m inventing or indulging, of working on ideas.
The “even more ideas” part sounds to me like a sort of (combinatorial) explosion, when my stroke of inspiration is much more problematic, much less elegant than I thought. Sometimes this also means much less original than I thought, but this isn’t a bad thing—convincing oneself that something is being discovered is often the most effective way at grokking it! You don’t really lose anything when you find out that it’s, in fact, old news.
Sometimes all this means is it will take more work than I thought, to follow the idea through. Other times it means this is the wrong rabbit hole.
But I think many of us AD(H)Ders develop a suspicion or even hostility to this “indulgent” signal, the internal phenomena of believing oneself to be creative, because they’ve too easily looted the reward (been superficially creative) at the expense of rigor (“why finish all those exercises in that boring book when this system i just wrote down is totally AGI already?”)
(At the same time, you and Lawrence Block are 100% right about nurturing/environment as well)
All in all, I can’t wrap my head around “what is the difference between a producer and a consumer of thought?” because the question as posed seems to hold rigor, even quality, constant/irrelevant.
(Many years ago a composer told me that when Schoenberg was at UCLA, young composers had to spend hours with him for 3+ years just analyzing mozart before he would consider looking at your music, compared to conservatories now you’re expressing yourself from day one. There is doubtless an analogy to AI risk—which culture is more productive?)
I’m not trying to hold it constant, I’m just trying to understand a relatively low standard, because that’s the part I feel confused about. It seems relatively much easier to look at bad intellectual output and say how it could have been better, think about the thought processes involved, etc. Much harder to say what goes into producing output at all vs not doing so.
I think I understand the distinction, and I think if it was as simple as “people undershoot their actual capacities in favor of humility / don’t want to risk wasting anybody’s time” everyone would have adjusted social norms to remedy it by now.
thanks