9 ms·

The magic of generating new ideas

208 points by rolling_robot 7y ago

osullivj 7y ago
The article is about maths, but could equally apply to debugging or software design. The overworking a problem phenomenon described earlier in the article sounds like "analysis paralysis".
melling 7y ago
“ These stories suggest that an initial period of concentration—conscious, directed attention—needs to be followed by some amount of unconscious processing.”
- hans1729 7y ago
  -> mandatory reference to Rich Hickeys Hammock Driven Development [0], watch it if you find the time! [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc
- EFFALO 7y ago
  This. The give and take between conscious focus and unconscious mind wandering has never let me down when working on complex ideas. Before I had children, I found the "unconscious processing" part more difficult, because my time was simply _my time_ to do with what I pleased... so I would often try to work harder, leading to less productivity and more spinning in circles. After having children, my time is obviously more structured and I've found the regimen of childcare to be a wonderful diversion from thinking about systems and complexity. Taking multiple walks a day also helps immensely. The trick is not trying to think about my work when walking, just absorbing the sounds, sights, and smells of the world around.
- fudged71 7y ago
  These (unconscious processing) moments for me almost always happen in the shower. I'd love to find another ritual that gets me in a similar mindspace.
  - notadoc 7y ago
    For many, exercise works for that purpose
  - Hoasi 7y ago
    > I'd love to find another ritual that gets me in a similar mindspace. Long walks, perhaps?
  - unicod3 7y ago
    I usually find it in the bed at night time. Like I am going to bed and my brain starts to dig deeper for the problem and finds a solution.
paideic 7y ago
Coming up with something truly new is much, much harder than people give it credit for. We take the sun being the center of the universe for granted today, but it was an extremely non-obvious fact for the smartest people in the world for millenia. One of my math professors had a great take on the difficulty of injecting a new idea into the world: he said that the greatest mathematical achievement that anyone had ever made was not anything like calculus - it was the realization that there was something similar between five stones and five fish.
- 7777fps 7y ago
  Perhaps you could edit for clarity, as you seem to be suggesting that the Sun is the center of the universe. As far as I know, that was only an accepted point of view for a few hundred years.
- hacker_9 7y ago
  > We take the sun being the center of the universe for granted today, but it was an extremely non-obvious fact for the smartest people in the world for millenia. It seems new ideas truly are difficult to inject..
  - rladd 7y ago
    Because the sun is not the center of the universe in any sense other than that everything can always be considered the "center".
- davnicwil 7y ago
  > Coming up with something truly new is much, much harder than people give it credit for 100% agree, and yet harder still is to keep working on something truly new, trying to drive it forwards, when at best nobody cares and at worst people actively resist the implicit challenge to the status quo. Even, perhaps especially, smart and conscientious people who are already authorities in the field. I think when people think about innovation being hard, there is a lot of focus on creating good new ideas. They're right, that's really hard, but innovation is about much more than that - it's really about sticking with the good new idea for a long period of time when there are no obvious (to most people) incentives to do so, economic or otherwise.
flyGuyOnTheSly 7y ago
>In this view of creative momentum, the key to solving a problem is to take a break from worrying, to move the problem to the back burner, to let the unwatched pot boil. I noticed the same thing about my poker game back when I used to play religiously. Taking a week or two long break from playing invariably improved my game. None of my poker buddies understood the phenomena, but every single one of us experienced it.
otras 7y ago
These two different ways your brain works on ideas, focused and diffused, were my biggest takeaways from Barbara Oakley's Learning How To Learn class. I've found that actively going between them, say by studying hard for 90 minutes and then going for a long walk, has been tremendous for learning. Highly recommend the course (or the book form, A Mind for Numbers).
whalesalad 7y ago
This feels appropriate: Hammock-driven development by Rich Hickey https://youtu.be/f84n5oFoZBc https://youtu.be/f84n5oFoZBc
pugworthy 7y ago
I'm curious if anyone has run into situation where being an "idea" person has been a negative at work. Sometimes there is the perception of ideation as a waste of time, or that the ideator (is that a word?) is one of those "whacky ideas" people. "Why are you going for walks, don't you have work to do?"
- gitgud 7y ago
  It can be frustrating if the idea person is constantly talking about them, but doesn't act on any. It's easy to have ideas... validating/building them, that's the hard part
  - jbms 7y ago
    Talking about them may be to see which ones resonate with people and are perhaps more valuable to do. Ideas people can be full of ideas and so they don't hold them too dearly because they'll have more ideas tomorrow. Sharing them's a way of testing and dismissing the majority that won't get traction.
- sdenton4 7y ago
  As a former mathematician who can relate very well to the article, I can say that most of the self-described 'ideas people' I've met are charlatans who really aren't doing the necessary groundwork.
andrewstuart 7y ago
As DeBono says "Good ideas are obvious in hindsight". I have no shortage of ideas, most pretty ordinary, some very small number good. It's a very long journey though from good idea to release of a successful software product. Takes time, money, motivation, technical skill, not making big mistakes and that absolutely required ingredient, luck.
kart23 7y ago
I can relate to that feeling. When you just figure it out, not even thinking about your problem, just doing something mundane and unrelated. But that stage of concentration and struggle is crucial. You need to care about the problem, have some investment in it. And it's so satisfying seeing the solution work, especially if you don't know the correctness 100%.
dwd 7y ago
James Altucher, who's posts used to appear frequently on HN maybe 6 or so years ago and had a few good ones about how he would write down every idea (10-20 a day) and his methods for validating them. I haven't read anything of his for a while, but he still seems to write a lot about ideas. https://jamesaltucher.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-for-becoming-an-idea-machine/ https://jamesaltucher.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-for-becomi...
tabtab 7y ago
There's plenty of new ideas around, you don't have to generate them yourself. If you ask in forums or search the web you can get a big list. The problem is culling the list for practical and successful ideas. Somebody has to invest the time and/or money do actually do it, and accept the high risk of failure typical of startups and new open-source projects. That's probably the bottleneck. Ideas are cheap, execution is not. Here's a free sample tip: Dynamic Relational. It's the new "plastic" (a movie reference). The NoSql movement has shown a market/desire for dynamic databases. But with Dynamic Relational you get dynamism AND sql; you don't have to choose one or the other. And you can set constraints/rules to gradually make it more "static" like traditional RDBMS.
- iKevinShah 7y ago
  I feel, in my opinion, getting an idea and generating something comparatively easier part compared to actually educating the market / users about what the idea is and what is the solution we have generated, we all see / are a part of so many good products which just had a steep learning curve and hence failed / didnt get accepted.
  - tabtab 7y ago
    I'm curious of specific examples. Functional programming is possibly an example. It takes a good long time for many to become productive with it, and with some it will never click. It's hard to actually know if its a personal preference or something inherently better. After all, code is more for humans to read than it is for computers.

208 points by rolling_robot 7y ago

The article is about maths, but could equally apply to debugging or software design. The overworking a problem phenomenon described earlier in the article sounds like "analysis paralysis".

melling 7y ago

“ These stories suggest that an initial period of concentration—conscious, directed attention—needs to be followed by some amount of unconscious processing.”

hans1729 7y ago
-> mandatory reference to Rich Hickeys Hammock Driven Development [0], watch it if you find the time! [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc
EFFALO 7y ago
This. The give and take between conscious focus and unconscious mind wandering has never let me down when working on complex ideas. Before I had children, I found the "unconscious processing" part more difficult, because my time was simply _my time_ to do with what I pleased... so I would often try to work harder, leading to less productivity and more spinning in circles. After having children, my time is obviously more structured and I've found the regimen of childcare to be a wonderful diversion from thinking about systems and complexity. Taking multiple walks a day also helps immensely. The trick is not trying to think about my work when walking, just absorbing the sounds, sights, and smells of the world around.
fudged71 7y ago
These (unconscious processing) moments for me almost always happen in the shower. I'd love to find another ritual that gets me in a similar mindspace.
- notadoc 7y ago
  For many, exercise works for that purpose
- Hoasi 7y ago
  > I'd love to find another ritual that gets me in a similar mindspace. Long walks, perhaps?
- unicod3 7y ago
  I usually find it in the bed at night time. Like I am going to bed and my brain starts to dig deeper for the problem and finds a solution.

paideic 7y ago

Coming up with something truly new is much, much harder than people give it credit for. We take the sun being the center of the universe for granted today, but it was an extremely non-obvious fact for the smartest people in the world for millenia. One of my math professors had a great take on the difficulty of injecting a new idea into the world: he said that the greatest mathematical achievement that anyone had ever made was not anything like calculus - it was the realization that there was something similar between five stones and five fish.

7777fps 7y ago
Perhaps you could edit for clarity, as you seem to be suggesting that the Sun is the center of the universe. As far as I know, that was only an accepted point of view for a few hundred years.
hacker_9 7y ago
> We take the sun being the center of the universe for granted today, but it was an extremely non-obvious fact for the smartest people in the world for millenia. It seems new ideas truly are difficult to inject..
- rladd 7y ago
  Because the sun is not the center of the universe in any sense other than that everything can always be considered the "center".
davnicwil 7y ago
> Coming up with something truly new is much, much harder than people give it credit for 100% agree, and yet harder still is to keep working on something truly new, trying to drive it forwards, when at best nobody cares and at worst people actively resist the implicit challenge to the status quo. Even, perhaps especially, smart and conscientious people who are already authorities in the field. I think when people think about innovation being hard, there is a lot of focus on creating good new ideas. They're right, that's really hard, but innovation is about much more than that - it's really about sticking with the good new idea for a long period of time when there are no obvious (to most people) incentives to do so, economic or otherwise.

flyGuyOnTheSly 7y ago

>In this view of creative momentum, the key to solving a problem is to take a break from worrying, to move the problem to the back burner, to let the unwatched pot boil. I noticed the same thing about my poker game back when I used to play religiously. Taking a week or two long break from playing invariably improved my game. None of my poker buddies understood the phenomena, but every single one of us experienced it.

otras 7y ago

These two different ways your brain works on ideas, focused and diffused, were my biggest takeaways from Barbara Oakley's Learning How To Learn class. I've found that actively going between them, say by studying hard for 90 minutes and then going for a long walk, has been tremendous for learning. Highly recommend the course (or the book form, A Mind for Numbers).

whalesalad 7y ago

This feels appropriate: Hammock-driven development by Rich Hickey https://youtu.be/f84n5oFoZBc https://youtu.be/f84n5oFoZBc

pugworthy 7y ago

I'm curious if anyone has run into situation where being an "idea" person has been a negative at work. Sometimes there is the perception of ideation as a waste of time, or that the ideator (is that a word?) is one of those "whacky ideas" people. "Why are you going for walks, don't you have work to do?"

gitgud 7y ago
It can be frustrating if the idea person is constantly talking about them, but doesn't act on any. It's easy to have ideas... validating/building them, that's the hard part
- jbms 7y ago
  Talking about them may be to see which ones resonate with people and are perhaps more valuable to do. Ideas people can be full of ideas and so they don't hold them too dearly because they'll have more ideas tomorrow. Sharing them's a way of testing and dismissing the majority that won't get traction.
sdenton4 7y ago
As a former mathematician who can relate very well to the article, I can say that most of the self-described 'ideas people' I've met are charlatans who really aren't doing the necessary groundwork.

andrewstuart 7y ago

As DeBono says "Good ideas are obvious in hindsight". I have no shortage of ideas, most pretty ordinary, some very small number good. It's a very long journey though from good idea to release of a successful software product. Takes time, money, motivation, technical skill, not making big mistakes and that absolutely required ingredient, luck.

kart23 7y ago

I can relate to that feeling. When you just figure it out, not even thinking about your problem, just doing something mundane and unrelated. But that stage of concentration and struggle is crucial. You need to care about the problem, have some investment in it. And it's so satisfying seeing the solution work, especially if you don't know the correctness 100%.

dwd 7y ago

James Altucher, who's posts used to appear frequently on HN maybe 6 or so years ago and had a few good ones about how he would write down every idea (10-20 a day) and his methods for validating them. I haven't read anything of his for a while, but he still seems to write a lot about ideas. https://jamesaltucher.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-for-becoming-an-idea-machine/ https://jamesaltucher.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-for-becomi...

tabtab 7y ago

There's plenty of new ideas around, you don't have to generate them yourself. If you ask in forums or search the web you can get a big list. The problem is culling the list for practical and successful ideas. Somebody has to invest the time and/or money do actually do it, and accept the high risk of failure typical of startups and new open-source projects. That's probably the bottleneck. Ideas are cheap, execution is not. Here's a free sample tip: Dynamic Relational. It's the new "plastic" (a movie reference). The NoSql movement has shown a market/desire for dynamic databases. But with Dynamic Relational you get dynamism AND sql; you don't have to choose one or the other. And you can set constraints/rules to gradually make it more "static" like traditional RDBMS.

iKevinShah 7y ago
I feel, in my opinion, getting an idea and generating something comparatively easier part compared to actually educating the market / users about what the idea is and what is the solution we have generated, we all see / are a part of so many good products which just had a steep learning curve and hence failed / didnt get accepted.
- tabtab 7y ago
  I'm curious of specific examples. Functional programming is possibly an example. It takes a good long time for many to become productive with it, and with some it will never click. It's hard to actually know if its a personal preference or something inherently better. After all, code is more for humans to read than it is for computers.