I actually think people who have lots of intellectual output do tend to come up with lots of interesting, zany hypotheses—some of which end up looking obvious in retrospect. They don’t necessarily present their work as zany when they’re trying to get prestigious journals to publish it. But when I read great inventors describing their process, this comes up in different forms. Here’s Claude Shannon:
Another approach for a given problem is to try to restate it in just as many different forms as you can. Change the words. Change the viewpoint. Look at it from every possible angle. After you’ve done that, you can try to look at it from several angles at the same time and perhaps you can get an insight into the real basic issues of the problem, so that you can correlate the important factors and come out with the solution. It’s difficult really to do this, but it is important that you do. If you don’t, it is very easy to get into ruts of mental thinking. You start with a problem here and you go around a circle here and if you could only get over to this point, perhaps you would see your way clear; but you can’t break loose from certain mental blocks which are holding you in certain ways of looking at a problem. That is the reason why very frequently someone who is quite green to a problem will sometimes come in and look at it and find the solution like that, while you have been laboring for months over it. You’ve got set into some ruts here of mental thinking and someone else comes in and sees it from a fresh viewpoint.
Another thought from Shannon I think LW could stand to internalize:
The first [research trick] that I might speak of is the idea of simplification. Suppose that you are given a problem to solve, I don’t care what kind of a problem — a machine to design, or a physical theory to develop, or a mathematical theorem to prove, or something of that kind — probably a very powerful approach to this is to attempt to eliminate everything from the problem except the essentials; that is, cut it down to size. Almost every problem that you come across is befuddled with all kinds of extraneous data of one sort or another; and if you can bring this problem down into the main issues, you can see more clearly what you’re trying to do and perhaps find a solution. Now, in so doing, you may have stripped away the problem that you’re after. You may have simplified it to a point that it doesn’t even resemble the problem that you started with; but very often if you can solve this simple problem, you can add refinements to the solution of this until you get back to the solution of the one you started with.
I don’t think Shannon is the sort of person who would use multiple different terms to describe the same thing without a good reason. If you use a single term, all of your knowledge about that concept gets consolidated on a single mental handle. IMO, this kind of thinking can be an extremely powerful way to generate insights. Shannon’s greatest work was arguably on Boolean logic and electronic circuits. In a certain way, all he was doing there was consolidating two different areas onto a single vocabulary.
[As a case study, let’s consider whether we should consolidate “generative” and “creative”. Asking that question generates its own question: what are the fundamental differences between “generativity” and “creativity”? In this case I’d argue there aren’t really any. But if there were, we’d get something else interesting: The beginning of a taxonomy.]
Notice again how the prestige view of research differs from how Shannon does it. In the prestige view, you accumulate technical vocabulary like a war hero accumulates medals. Mastering vocabulary becomes a way to gain insider status. My impression is the best researchers tend to be Richard Feynman types who care more about playing with ideas than winning these kind of status games. (Note: It’s valuable to master lots of concepts. Shannon has a section on that too. But I think it’s a bit better to be motivated by expanding your mental toolkit than demonstrating your superior vocabulary—though obviously you should use whatever motivation works best for you.)
BTW, Shannon himself seemed comfortable with the term “creative”—he used it in the title of the talk I linked.
I actually think people who have lots of intellectual output do tend to come up with lots of interesting, zany hypotheses—some of which end up looking obvious in retrospect. They don’t necessarily present their work as zany when they’re trying to get prestigious journals to publish it. But when I read great inventors describing their process, this comes up in different forms. Here’s Claude Shannon:
Another thought from Shannon I think LW could stand to internalize:
I don’t think Shannon is the sort of person who would use multiple different terms to describe the same thing without a good reason. If you use a single term, all of your knowledge about that concept gets consolidated on a single mental handle. IMO, this kind of thinking can be an extremely powerful way to generate insights. Shannon’s greatest work was arguably on Boolean logic and electronic circuits. In a certain way, all he was doing there was consolidating two different areas onto a single vocabulary.
[As a case study, let’s consider whether we should consolidate “generative” and “creative”. Asking that question generates its own question: what are the fundamental differences between “generativity” and “creativity”? In this case I’d argue there aren’t really any. But if there were, we’d get something else interesting: The beginning of a taxonomy.]
Notice again how the prestige view of research differs from how Shannon does it. In the prestige view, you accumulate technical vocabulary like a war hero accumulates medals. Mastering vocabulary becomes a way to gain insider status. My impression is the best researchers tend to be Richard Feynman types who care more about playing with ideas than winning these kind of status games. (Note: It’s valuable to master lots of concepts. Shannon has a section on that too. But I think it’s a bit better to be motivated by expanding your mental toolkit than demonstrating your superior vocabulary—though obviously you should use whatever motivation works best for you.)
BTW, Shannon himself seemed comfortable with the term “creative”—he used it in the title of the talk I linked.
Good comment. Strong upvote.