Insight is hard to talk about, even harder to sound sane and logical while discussing. We could perhaps model “having an insight” as 2 stages: Asking an interesting new question, and producing a useful answer to that question. These 2 steps can often be at odds with each other: Improving the skill of making your answers more useful risks falling into habits of thought where you don’t ask certain possibly-interesting questions because you erroneously assume that you already know their whole answers. Improving the skill of asking wild questions risks forming too strong a habit of ignoring the kind of common sense that rules out questions with “that shouldn’t work”, and yet is essential to formulating a useful answer once an interesting question is reached.
The benefits of erring toward the “produce useful answers” skillset are obvious, as are the drawbacks of losing touch with reality if one fails to develop it. I think it’s easy to underestimate the benefits of learning the skills which one can use to temporarily boost the “ask interesting questions” side, though. Sadly most of the teachable skills that I’m aware of for briefly letting “ask interesting questions” override “produce useful answers” come packaged in several layers of woo. Those trappings make them more palatable to many people, but less palatable to the sorts of thinkers I typically encounter around here. The lowest-woo technique in that category which comes to mind is oblique strategies.
Insight is hard to talk about, even harder to sound sane and logical while discussing. We could perhaps model “having an insight” as 2 stages: Asking an interesting new question, and producing a useful answer to that question. These 2 steps can often be at odds with each other: Improving the skill of making your answers more useful risks falling into habits of thought where you don’t ask certain possibly-interesting questions because you erroneously assume that you already know their whole answers. Improving the skill of asking wild questions risks forming too strong a habit of ignoring the kind of common sense that rules out questions with “that shouldn’t work”, and yet is essential to formulating a useful answer once an interesting question is reached.
The benefits of erring toward the “produce useful answers” skillset are obvious, as are the drawbacks of losing touch with reality if one fails to develop it. I think it’s easy to underestimate the benefits of learning the skills which one can use to temporarily boost the “ask interesting questions” side, though. Sadly most of the teachable skills that I’m aware of for briefly letting “ask interesting questions” override “produce useful answers” come packaged in several layers of woo. Those trappings make them more palatable to many people, but less palatable to the sorts of thinkers I typically encounter around here. The lowest-woo technique in that category which comes to mind is oblique strategies.