Good, concise post! Though I think it’d be helpful to differentiate the different types of creativity—e.g.) creativity required to solve a difficult math question for which a solution necessarily exists may be a different type of creativity required to approach a problem for which you are not even sure the solution exists in the first place. For me, this technique is more helpful when approaching the latter-type problem than the former: for already-solved math problems, for example, I find it helpful to fully try out one approach until I hit a dead-end and then apply the insights I learned from that approach to come up with another approach that I feel may work better. I personally never found coming up with a bunch of approaches before trying out each one particularly helpful in this case.
I’m a massive perfectionist, and I find it easy to slip into the failure mode of generating the perfect idea. This is incredibly unhelpful, because this is paralysing in practice, and means I struggle to come up with anything. Any weak and half-formed ideas are discarded before they can be fleshed out into something worthwhile
Hold Off On Proposing Solutions does a great job elucidating what you’ve described here!
While I agree that the recommendation to not wear a mask in public places due to the “astonishingly weak” evidence about the effectiveness of masks is very misguided at best, your analogies do not seem appropriate.
Not quite. This analogy would make sense if: (1) people are more incentivized to drive more dangerously when wearing their seatbelts AND (2) driving accidents are somehow contagious beyond the entities involved in the accident.
My personal experience, and I am sure the majority of people would agree, has been that wearing a seatbelt psychologically works simply as a safety net in case something goes wrong, and it’s never encouraged me to engage in driving behaviors that I would otherwise would not have engaged. I think this is due to a couple factors: (1) even if you wear a seatbelt, in the case of an accident, it is highly likely you will get injured, oftentimes in a non-trivial manner. Even if you are not physically injured, your car will be damaged, and the financial risk is often enough for people to avoid reckless behavior. (2) Driving with your seatbelt on has become such a norm that it has become just one of those things you do before you drive, and you are not even familiar with the feeling of driving without wearing a seatbelt.
Wearing a face mask for COVID-19 is a different situation altogether.
First, people ARE more incentivized to engage in more dangerous behaviors when wearing a mask. Even after a few months, social distancing is still not the norm of comfort-zone for most people, and there is strong inertial force for someone to find an excuse to return to the pre-COVID norm of public activities. The psychological comfort of wearing a face mask certainly provides one. Furthermore, the “damage” done by contracting COVID-19 is still hazy at best, and definitely not as clear-cut as fatal injury due to a car crash, for example. Most younger people do not seriously believe they will die from the virus, and are willing to take more risks; with this attitude, any unproven methods that provide psychological comfort will lead to some proportion of them taking risks that they would not have done otherwise (see pictures of protests).
Second, we are dealing with a contagious virus. Even if one misguidedly believes that wearing a seat belt may lead them to engage in reckless behavior as with the case of face masks and COVID, the moral argument to caution mask-wearers is significantly stronger as each “accident” is not isolated as is the case with car accidents.
Needless to say, my objections apply even more strongly to these analogies as well as the parachuting one.