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Ada Lovelace called creativity "the combining faculty" that "brings together things, facts, conceptions in new, original, endless, ever-varying combinations." [
by forrestbrazeal 8y ago
Ada Lovelace called creativity "the combining faculty" that "brings together things, facts, conceptions in new, original, endless, ever-varying combinations." [0]
Reflection time is hugely needed. But I don't know that it's hugely important to distinguish in that time between reflection on your "own" thoughts and those that originated in some way outside your head, because at some level it's impossible to make the distinction. You'll need a huge base of exposure to other people's ideas if you hope to assemble them into a new and interesting combination of your own.
[0] https://www.elfproductions.com/news/2017/6/25/applying-imagination-to-science https://www.elfproductions.com/news/2017/6/25/applying-imagi...
- zamber 8y agoI think skepticism then is one of the devices of the Socratic method. You can't build on other people's work if you don't question and verify it's validity (or the lack of) on your own and build on top of that. Art history is riddled with such free-thinking products. To an extent punk is derived from the avant-garde movement. Closer to home, there wouldn't be data science without statistics though you can find data scientists that don't necessarily grok statistics. Same with full-stack JS devs that skimmed CSS and/or web design history because doing everything in JavaScript in the name of reusable components and reduced mental overhead is what Facebook does, so it applies to every case given the weight of the benefits (without taking app weight and projected expansion into consideration). This is IMO one of the reasons we get so much cargo-cults and tribalism around software development overall. Too much detachment in the name of abstracting complexity away.