I understand, for someone with a strong drive to solve hard problems, there’s an urge for conversations to serve a function, exchange information with your interlocutor so things can get done. There’s much to do and communication is already painfully inefficient at it’s best.
The thing is, I don’t think the free-association game is inefficient, if one is skilled at it. It’s also not all that free. The reason it is something humans “developed” is because it is the most efficient way to exchange rough but extensive models of our minds with others via natural language. It acts a bit like a ray tracer, you shoot conversational rays and by how they bounce around in mental structures, the thought patterns, values and biases of the conversation partners are revealed to each other. Shapes become apparent. Sometimes rays bounce off into empty space, then you need to restart the conversation, shoot a new ray. And getting better at this game, keeping the conversation going, exploring a wider range of topics more quickly, means building a faster ray tracer, means it takes less time to know if your interlocutor thinks in a way and about topics which you find enlightening/aesthetically pleasing/concretely useful/whatever you value.
Or to use a different metaphor, starting with a depth-first search and never running a breadth-first search will lead to many false negatives. There are many minds out there that can help you in ways you won’t know in advance.
So if the hard problems you are working on could profit from more minds, it pays off to get better as this. Even if it has not much intrinsic value for you, it has instrumental value.
Hope this doesn’t come across as patronizing, definitely not meant that way.
I understand, for someone with a strong drive to solve hard problems, there’s an urge for conversations to serve a function, exchange information with your interlocutor so things can get done. There’s much to do and communication is already painfully inefficient at it’s best.
The thing is, I don’t think the free-association game is inefficient, if one is skilled at it. It’s also not all that free. The reason it is something humans “developed” is because it is the most efficient way to exchange rough but extensive models of our minds with others via natural language. It acts a bit like a ray tracer, you shoot conversational rays and by how they bounce around in mental structures, the thought patterns, values and biases of the conversation partners are revealed to each other. Shapes become apparent. Sometimes rays bounce off into empty space, then you need to restart the conversation, shoot a new ray. And getting better at this game, keeping the conversation going, exploring a wider range of topics more quickly, means building a faster ray tracer, means it takes less time to know if your interlocutor thinks in a way and about topics which you find enlightening/aesthetically pleasing/concretely useful/whatever you value.
Or to use a different metaphor, starting with a depth-first search and never running a breadth-first search will lead to many false negatives. There are many minds out there that can help you in ways you won’t know in advance.
So if the hard problems you are working on could profit from more minds, it pays off to get better as this. Even if it has not much intrinsic value for you, it has instrumental value.
Hope this doesn’t come across as patronizing, definitely not meant that way.