14 ms·

Krapivin made this breakthrough by being unaware of Yao's conjecture. The developer of Balatro made an award winning deck builder game by not being aware of ex

• aidenn0 2y ago
  > I'm beginning to think that the best way to approach a problem is by either not being aware of or disregarding most of the similar efforts that came before. This makes me kind of sad, because the current world is so interconnected, that we rarely see such novelty with their tendency to "fall in the rut of thought" of those that came before. The internet is great, but it also homogenizes the world of thought, and that kind of sucks. I think this is true only if there is a novel solution that is in a drastically different direction than similar efforts that came before. Most of the time when you ignore previous successful efforts, you end up resowing non-fertile ground.
  • layman51 2y ago
    Right, the other side is when you end up with rediscoveries of the same ideas. The example that comes to my mind is when a medical researcher found the trapezoidal rule for integration again[1]. [1]: https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/ https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...
    • sitkack 2y ago
      I think that shows how great the trapezoidal rule is. I feel like this is brought out too many times, that now it is used to make fun of people. It is 18 years old at this point.
      • FartyMcFarter 2y ago
        I mean, it sort of deserves being made fun of. 18 years ago Google existed, surely you'd search for "area under a curve" before going through all the effort of writing a paper reinventing integrals? Edit: actually the paper was written in 1994, not sure what the "18 years" was referring to. But still, peer review existed and so did maths books... Even if the author can be excused somewhat (and that's already a stretch), peer reviewers should definitely not let this fly.
        • fragmede 2y ago
          I'd argue this is an argument against purely peer review, as her peers also weren't mathematicians. Some of us when learning calculus wonder if we'd been alive before it was invented, if we'd be smart enough to invent it. Dr. Tai provably was. (the trapezoid rule, anyway) So I choose to say xkcd 1053 to her, rather than bullying her for not knowing advanced math.
          • eru 2y ago
            > Dr. Tai provably was. No, we have no proof of that. We just know that she published a paper explaining the trapezoidal rule. (A) That approximation for 'nice' curves was known long before calculus. Calculus is about doing this in the limit (or with infinitesimals or whatever) and also wondering about mathematical niceties, and also some things about integration. (B) I'm fairly certain she would have had a bit of calculus at some point in her education, even if she remembered it badly enough to think she found something new.
            • fragmede 2y ago
              I mean, it's possible she reinvented the wheel because what she really needed in her life is for the math department to laugh at her, but that seems far fetched to me.
        • ashoeafoot 2y ago
          Does it make you less of a peer to others who found it before ? At leas the author showed ability to think creative for himself , not paralyzed by the great stagnation like the rest of us.
    • gsf_emergency_2 2y ago
      This is the the strongest argument for not shaming reinvention... Unless the victims are world-class..? (Because it's not entirely not self-inflicted) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42981356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42981356 Shades of the strong-link weak-link dilemma too
      • eru 2y ago
        > This is the the strongest argument for not shaming reinvention... Sounds like a pretty weak argument? I'm sure there are some good arguments for re-invention. But this ain't one of them. Basically, re-invention for fun or to help gain understanding is fine. But when you publish a 'new' method, it helps to do a bit of research about prior work. Especially when the method is something you should have heard about during your studies.
    • Shorel 2y ago
      That's not really a problem. In one hand, it shows the idea is really useful on its own. And on the other hand, it shows that currently forgotten ideas have a chance to being rediscovered in the future.
      • blablablerg 2y ago
        It is, because you are wasting time reinventing the wheel. Also if something is already well researched, you might miss intricacies, traps, optimizations etc. previous researchers have stumbled upon.
        • Brian_K_White 2y ago
          This is a good example of how the most obvious intuition can be wrong, or at best incomplete.
        • dwaltrip 2y ago
          It isn’t necessarily “wasted” time. There are more ways to look at it, as well as 2nd order and 3rd order effects (and so on). It’s a powerful skill to be able to try to solve things from first principles. And it’s a muscle you can strengthen. It would be a bit silly to never look anything up, but it isn’t so black and white.
        • Shorel 2y ago
          You need to be able to do both. Only reading the existing literature is not good enough. The capacity to create ideas is also something that needs to be practiced.
      • p00dles 2y ago
        I agree -> even if someone spends their time "rediscovering" an existing solution, I think that the learning experience of coming up with a solution without starting from current best solution is really valuable. Maybe that person doesn't reach the local maximum on that project, but having a really good learning experience maybe enables them to reach a global maximum on one of their next projects. If I want some novel ideas from a group of people, I'm going to give them the framework of the problem, split them into groups so that they don't bias each other, and say: go figure it out.
    • djmips 2y ago
      I find a lot of the time concepts and patterns can be the same in different fields, just hidden by different nomenclature and constructed upon a different pyramid of knowledge. It's nice we have a common language that is mathematics, the science of patterns, to unify such things but it's still going to be a challenge because not everyone is fluent in all the various branches of mathematics. It's even mind-blowing how many ways you can approach the same problem with equivalencies between different types of mathematics itself.
  • Dansvidania 2y ago
    there might be a decent amount of "survivorship bias" too. meaning you only hear of the few events where someone starts from first principles and actually finds, be it luck or smarts, a novel solution which improves on the status quo, but i'd argue there are N other similar situations where you don't end up with a better solution. That being said, I so disagree with just taking the "state of the art" as written in stone, and "we can't possibly do better than library x" etc.
    • smaudet 2y ago
      Plenty of "state of the art", at least a decade ago, that was not very state of anything. I think bias is inherent in our literature and solutions. But also, I agree that the probability of a better solution degrades over time (assuming that the implementations themselves do not degrade - building a faster hash table does not matter if you have made all operations exponentially more expensive for stupid, non-computational, reasons)
    • karparov 2y ago
      [dead]
  • mmusson 2y ago
    Or worse, pursuing something already proven not to work.
    • porkbrain 2y ago
      Viewed through the lens of personal development I suppose one could make an argument that there wasn't much difference between rediscovering an existing valid or invalid solution. Both lead to internalisation of a domain's constraints.
    • somenameforme 2y ago
      The problem is that when the proof is wrong, as in this case a related conjecture held up for 40 years, which is not a "proof" per se, but still ostensibly an extremely high reliability indicator of correctness. Another example is when SpaceX was first experimenting with reusable self landing rockets. They were being actively mocked by Tory Bruno, who was the head of ULA (basically an anti-competitive shell-but-not-really-corp merger between Lockheed and Boeing), claiming essentially stuff along the lines of 'We've of course already thoroughly researched and experimented with these ideas years ago. The economics just don't work at all. Have fun learning we already did!' Given that ULA made no efforts to compete with what SpaceX was doing it's likely that they did genuinely believe what they were saying. And that's a company with roots going all the way back to the Apollo program, with billions of dollars in revenue, and a massive number of aerospace engineers working for them. And the guy going against them was 'Silicon Valley guy with no aerospace experience who made some money selling a payment processing tool.' Yet somehow he knew better.
      • necovek 2y ago
        All the cases you bring up are not "proofs": a conjecture is very much not one, it's just that nobody bothered to refute this particular one even if there were results proving it isn't (cited in the paper). Similarly, ULA had no "proof" that this would be economically infeasible: Musk pioneered using agile ship-and-fail-fast for rocket development which mostly contradicted common knowledge that in projects like these your first attempt should be a success. Like with software, this actually sped things up and delivered better, cheaper results.
  • lo_zamoyski 2y ago
    Right. FWIW, Feynman predicted that physics would become rather boring in this regard, because physics education had become homogenized. This isn't to propose a relativism, but rather that top-down imposed curricula may do a good deal of damage to the creativity of science. That being said, what we need is more rigorous thinking and more courage pursuing the truth where it leads. While advisors can be useful guides, and consensus can be a useful data point, there can also be an over-reliance on such opinions to guide and decide where to put one's research efforts, what to reevaluate, what to treat as basically certain knowledge, and so on. Frankly, moral virtue and wisdom are the most important. Otherwise, scientific praxis degenerates into popularity contest, fitting in, grants, and other incentives that vulgarize science.
    • MVissers 2y ago
      I think that's why most innovative science today happens at the intersection of two domains– That's where someone from a different field can have unique insights and try something new in an adjacent field. This is often hard to do when you're in the field yourself.
  • godelski 2y ago
    I'm not sure this is true, though I think it looks true. I think the issue is that when a lot of people have put work into something you think that the chances of success yourself are low. This is a pretty reasonable belief too. With the current publish or perish paradigm I think this discourages a lot of people from even attempting. You have evidence that the problem is hard and even if solvable, probably is timely, so why risk your entire career? There are other interesting things that are less risky. In fact, I'd argue that this environment in of itself results in far less risk being taken. (There are other issues too and I laid out some in another comment) But I think this would look identical to what we're seeing.
  • phyzix5761 2y ago
    But how can you ever discover a novel solution without attempting to resow the ground?
  • taylorius 2y ago
    So if there's no solution in a particular area, you won't find it? You may be on to something there! :-)
  • croo 2y ago
    In 1973 Clifford Cock solved the problem of public keys first time in history that no one in GCHQ managed to solve in the past 3 years. He jolted down the solution in half hour after hearing about it then wondered why is it such a big thing for everyone else. A fresh view unclouded by prejudice can make all the difference.
  • bluedino 2y ago
    Run a mile in 4 minutes. Eat 83 hot dogs in 10 minutes. Everything is impossible until someone comes along that's crazy enough to do it.
• layer8 2y ago
  It’s important to think outside the box, and that’s easier when you’re not aware of the box, but we also stand on the shoulders of giants, and are doomed to repeat history if we don’t learn from it. As usual, things aren’t clear-cut.
  • selimthegrim 2y ago
    Have the herd of wildbeest been hunting for room to stow their carry-on luggage?
    • Nevermark 2y ago
      Nothing is more depressing than hunting for a parking spot, down a long one-way strip of parked cars, right behind another car hunting for a parking spot.
  • itwasntexample 2y ago
    Plus, their choice of bringing up Balatro wasn't correct either. The developer DID play other deck builders, just not that many. Particularly, they played Slay the Spire which is the genre's most influential "Giant" and the entire reason for the game's progression structure (Small fights leading to a known big fight with particular anti-strategy gimmicks).
    • zimpenfish 2y ago
      > Particularly, they played Slay the Spire [0] links to an interview where the developer says they didn't play Slay The Spire ("the truth is that I hadn't played that game or seen footage of it when I designed Balatro") [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43009738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43009738
  • GuB-42 2y ago
    > It’s important to think outside the box, and that’s easier when you’re not aware of the box I don't think so. If you are not aware of the box, there is a much greater chance for you to be well within the box and not realizing it. By that, I mean that either you rediscovered something, or you are wrong in the same way as many others before you. By chance, you may find something new and unexpected, but that's more of an exception than the rule.
• awesome_dude 2y ago
  There's a problem in all human understanding - knowing when, and knowing when not to apply pre-existing knowledge to a problem. Have we been grinding away in the right direction and are only moments away from cracking the problem, or should we drop everything and try something completely new because we've obviously not found the solution in the direction we were heading. To put it into a CS type context - Should we be using a DFS or BFS search for the solution, because we don't have knowledge of future cost (so UCS/Djikstra's is out) nor do we know where the solution lies in general (so A* is out, even if you ignore the UCS component)
• smj-edison 2y ago
  I think of Andre Geim as a great example of balancing the two. I couldn't find the exact quote, but he said something to the effect of "when I enter a new field, I make sure I learn the basics so I don't spend all my time making dumb mistakes. But I don't get so into it that I get stuck in the mindshare." I'll also say I think that diversity in approaches is more important than One Right Way. Some people need to set out on their own, while others spend decades refining one technique. Both have led to extraordinary results!
• shkkmo 2y ago
  > I'm beginning to think that the best way to approach a problem is by either not being aware of or disregarding most of the similar efforts that came before. Extrapolating a "best way" from a couple of examples of success is bad reasoning. There are definitely ways in which it can be necessary to ignore the standing wisdom to make progress. There are also definitely ways in which being ignorant of the knowledge gained by past attempts can greatly impede progress. I would point out, that it is also possible to question and challenge the assumptions that prior approaches have made, without being ignorant of what those approaches tried. Figuring which is which, is indeed hard. Generally, it seems like it works well to have a majority of people expanding/refining prior work and a minority people going in and starting from scratch to figure out which of the current assumptions or beliefs can be productively challenge/dropped. The precises balance point is vague, but it seems pretty clear that going to far either direction harms the rate of progress.
• obelos 2y ago
  I think you're forgetting to put “all the times ignorance didn't produce a breakthrough” in the denominator.
  • causal 2y ago
    Yeah. Classic base rate neglect.
  • arcxi 2y ago
    and compare it to all the times breakthrough is made by iteration
  • ballenf 2y ago
    That misses the point that there may be breakthroughs that are much harder or near impossible to make if you're familiar with the state-of-the-art.
    • sangnoir 2y ago
      What's the proportion to breakthroughs that are easier with familiarity? How many accidental discoverers do we need to match the output of a Terrance Tao or an Erdős?
      • dmurray 2y ago
        That seems like the wrong question to ask. After all, there's no shortage of people who are unfamiliar with Yao's conjecture. Or alternatively, even the most well-read person is not au fait with the state of the art in almost all subjects, so they have a chance to make an accidental discovery there. But this kid wasn't an outsider: he was already studying computer science at perhaps the most rigorous and prestigious institution in the world, and it's not a coincidence that he made this discovery rather than an equally talented twenty-year-old who works in a diamond mine in Botswana. There's no risk that we'll reduce the number of accidental discoveries by educating people too much.
    • nimih 2y ago
      > That misses the point that there may be breakthroughs that are much harder or near impossible to make if you're familiar with the state-of-the-art. If that's the point, you should maybe try and find even a single example that supports it. As the article points out, Krapivin may not have been familiar with Yao's conjecture in particular, but he was familiar with contemporary research in his field and actively following it to develop his own ideas (to say nothing of his collaborators). Balatro's developer may not have been aware of a particular niche genre of indie game[1], but they were clearly familiar with both modern trends/tastes in visual and sound design, and in the cutting edge of how contemporary video games are designed to be extremely addictive and stimulating. To me, these examples both seem more like the fairly typical sorts of blind spots that experts and skilled practitioners tend to have in areas outside of their immediate focus or specialization. Clearly, both examples rely to some extent on a fresh perspective allowing for a novel approach to the given problem, but such stories are pretty common in the history of both math research and game development, neither (IMO) really warrants a claim as patently ridiculous as "the best way to approach a problem is by either not being aware of or disregarding most of the similar efforts that came before." [1] And as good of a video game as Balatro is, there are plenty of "roguelite deckbuilder" games with roughly the same mechanical basis; what makes it so compelling is the quality of its presentation.
• deleted 2y ago
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• abetusk 2y ago
  I disagree. Many problems are abstract and so we have to build "cartoon" models of what's going on, trying to distill the essence of the problem down to a simple narrative for what the shape of the problem space is and where the limitations are. That often works but backfires when the cartoon is wrong or some assumptions are violated about when the cartoon description works. Results like this are pretty rare, nowadays, and I suspect this happened because the problem was niche enough or some new idea has had time to ferment that could be applied to this region. This seems like a pretty foundational result, so maybe I'm wrong about that for this case. A lot of progress is made when there's deeper knowledge about the problem space along with some maturity for when these cartoon descriptions are invalid.
• SideQuark 2y ago
  Picking two examples out of all people approaching problems, while ignoring wasted effort and failures to make progress because of not understanding current knowledge, is an absolutely terrible reason to approach from ignorance. The biggest gains in theory and in practice are far more often obtained by masters of craft, giving much more weight to attacking problems from a position of knowledge. In fact, even in this case, this progress required that the author was aware of very recent results in computer science, was thinking deeply about them, and most likely was scouring the literature for pieces to help. The “Tiny Pointers” paper is mentioned directly.
  • mangodrunk 2y ago
    Well said. I really dislike the narrative here, that ignorance is something that leads to discovery. One, the poster gives two examples, as if there's something we should gain for such a small sample. In addition to that, one of the examples isn't valid. The student's former professor is a co-author of the "Tiny Pointers" [1] paper that he was reading and working through. And, it was a conjecture, I don't see how someone should think that it would mean it's impossible. I would rather, instead of thinking ignorance is a key ingredient to discovery, that instead it's the willingness to try things. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.12800 https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.12800
• kbenson 2y ago
  It's less that it's the best way to approach a problem, but that it optimizes for a different goal. Building on existing knowledge is how you find the local maxima for a problem by moving along the slop you have. Starting from scratch is how you find different slopes, which may lead to higher local maximas. Of course, if you happen to be on a slope that leads to the global maxima, starting from scratch is far less effective. We don't really know where we are usually, so there's a trade-off. There was a good article posted to HN years ago that covered this and used rocketry as one of the examples, but I don't recall what it was. The author was well known, IIRC.
• pjc50 2y ago
  I believe Ramanujan did the same with various maths problems. The Cambridge undergrad course sprinkles a few unsolved problems in the practice questions just in case someone does this again.
  • mangodrunk 2y ago
    Ramanujan read many math books.
• deleted 2y ago
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• chikere232 2y ago
  Last year's Advent of Code had a task that was NP complete and lacked good well known approximation algorithms. I almost gave up on it when I realised as that feels impossible In practice the data was well behaved enough and small enough that it was very doable.
• 77pt77 2y ago
  This is nothing but extreme selection/survivor bias.
• dinkumthinkum 2y ago
  I get what you are saying but what if the amount of breakthroughs by people that did know about what came before was orders of magnitude higher than this number, would that change your mind?
• dataviz1000 2y ago
  A similar idea came up in Veritasium's latest video today. Training AI by DeepMind to predict protein folding greatly improved by withholding the most evident information about a protein's primary structure — its linear polypeptide chain — within the The Structure Module step. [0] After asking ChatGPT not to agree with me that your comment and these two different approaches to solving problems are the alike, it concluded there still might be similarities between the two. [0] https://youtu.be/P_fHJIYENdI?feature=shared&t=1030 https://youtu.be/P_fHJIYENdI?feature=shared&t=1030 [1] https://chatgpt.com/share/67aa8340-e540-8004-8438-3200e0d4e82d https://chatgpt.com/share/67aa8340-e540-8004-8438-3200e0d4e8...
• deleted 2y ago
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• ajross 2y ago
  > I'm beginning to think that the best way to approach a problem is by either not being aware of or disregarding most of the similar efforts that came before. This is an "Einstein failed Math" fallacy. It's true that novel and notable work tends strongly not to be bound by existing consensus, which when you say it that way is hardly surprising. So yes, if consensus is wrong in some particular way the people most likely to see that are the ones least invested in the consensus. But most problems aren't like that! Almost always the "best" way to solve a problem, certainly the best way you're going to solve the problem, is "however someone else already solved it". But sometimes it's not, and that's when interesting stuff happens.
• dabeeeenster 2y ago
  Interesting idea! Clifford Cocks also made a breakthrough in/invented Public Key Encryption without realising it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Cocks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Cocks
• immibis 2y ago
  Well, sometimes. Other times, perhaps even most times, you bang your head against a wall for weeks and get nowhere. George Dantzig also solved two open problems because he thought they were homework.
• andai 2y ago
  In university lectures, we'd be presented with a problem on one slide, and then like ten seconds later the solution on the next. I'd usually cover my ears and look away because I was still busy coming up with my own solution!
• robotelvis 2y ago
  In my experience the best approach is to first try to solve the problem without having read the prior work, then read the prior work, then improve your approach based on the prior work. If you read the prior work too early to you get locked into existing mindsets. If you never read it then you miss important things you didn’t thought of. Even if your approach is less good than the prior work (the normal case) you gain important insights into why the state of the art approach is better by comparing it with what you came up with.
  • brookst 2y ago
    What if you’ve already read the prior work before trying to solve the problem?
    • kortilla 2y ago
      Then you’re very unlikely to come up with a novel approach. It’s very difficult to not let reading “state of the art” research put up big guardrails in your mind about what’s possible. All of the impressive breakthroughs I saw in academia in the CS side were from people who bothered very little with reading everything related in literature. At most it would be some gut checks of abstracts or a poll of other researchers to make sure an approach wasn’t well explored but that’s about it. The people who did mostly irrelevant incremental work were the ones who were literature experts in their field. Dedicating all of that time to reading others’ work puts blinders on both your possible approaches as well as how the problems are even defined.
      • agumonkey 2y ago
        Maybe some people tried to develop out-of-the-box sessions to force investigating absurd axioms and see how it goes.
    • HelloNurse 2y ago
      Worst case: you don't have a fresh perspective, but you have learned something and you can try plenty of other problems. There's also a fair chance of finding possibilities that are "obviously" implicit in the prior work but haven't yet been pursued, or even noticed, by anyone.
• ComplexSystems 2y ago
  This is also apparently true for playing Go.
• emrah 2y ago
  Yes and we should have at least a few competing AI architectures too
• cdelsolar 2y ago
  I’ve been working on and off for years on a scrabble endgame solver; it uses all these techniques from chess like transposition tables, Negamax with alpha beta pruning, NegaScout, aspiration search and so on. There’s a French person who built his own endgame solver and this solver is significantly faster than mine, even with all of the optimizations that I’ve put into it. He is kind of secretive about it because it’s closed source and he makes some money on it, but we’ve talked a bit about it, compared some positions and we’ve determined that his move generation algorithm is actually not asoptimized as mine. But he can still solve the endgame faster despite seeing fewer positions, which implies to me that he’s doing a significantly better job of pruning the tree. But when we try to talk details, I asked him for example do you use minimax with alphabeta pruning and he told me like “I’m not sure if I am using minimax or what that is :(“ .. I ask him to describe what he does, he essentially describes minimax with pruning. I’ve sorta figured out that he must be doing some very intelligent version of an aspiration search. It’s really eye-opening because he doesn’t have any of this training. He’s never seen any related algorithms, he’s just figuring all this out on his own.
• godelski 2y ago
  I actually have a hot take that is related to this (been showing up in a few of my recent comments). It is about why there's little innovation in academia, but I think it generalizes. Major breakthroughs are those that make paradigm shifts. So, by definition, that means that something needs to be done that others are not doing. If not, things would have been solved and the status quo method would work. Most major breakthroughs are not the result of continued progress in one direction, but rather they are made by dark horses. Often by nobodies. You literally have to say "fuck you all, I'm doing this anyways." Really this is not so much different than the founder mentality we encourage vocally yet discourage monetarily[0]. (I'm going to speak from the side of ML, because that's my research domain, but understand that this is not as bad in other fields, though I believe the phenomena still exists, just not to the same degree). Yet, it is really hard to publish anything novel. While reviewers care a lot about novelty, they actually care about something more: metrics. Not metrics in the way that you provided strong evidence for a hypothesis, but metrics in the way that you improved the state of the field. We have 2 big reasons this environment will slow innovation and make breakthroughs rare. 1. It is very hard to do better than the current contenders on your first go. You're competing against not one player, but the accumulated work of thousands and over years or decades. You can find a flaw in that paradigm, address the specific flaw, but it is a lot of work to follow this through and mature it. Technological advancement is through the sum of s-curves, and the new thing always starts out worse. For example, think of solar panels. PVs were staggeringly expensive in the beginning and for little benefit. But now you can beat the grid pricing. New non-PV based solar is starting to make their way in and started out way worse than PV but addressed PV's theoretical limitations on power efficiency. 2. One needs to publish often. Truly novel work takes a lot of time. There's lots of pitfalls and nuances that need to be addressed. It involves A LOT of failure and from the outside (and even the inside) it is near impossible to quantify progress. It looks no different than wasting time, other than seeing that the person is doing "something." So what do people do? They pursue the things that are very likely to lead to results. By nature, these are low hanging fruit. (Well... there's also fraud... but that's a different discussion) Even if you are highly confident a research direction will be fruitful, it will often take too much time or be too costly to actually pursue (and not innovative/meaningful enough to "prototype"). So we all go in mostly the same direction. (3. Tie in grants and funding. Your proposals need to be "promising" so you can't suggest something kinda out there. You're competing against a lot of others who are much more likely to make progress, even if the impact would be far lower) So ironically, our fear of risk taking is making us worse at advancing. We try so hard to pick what are the right directions to go in, yet the truth is that no one has any idea and history backs this up. I'm not saying to just make it all chaotic. I think of it more like this: when exploring, you have a main party that travels in a set direction. Their strength together makes good progress, but the downside is there's less exploration. I am not saying that anyone should be able to command the ship on a whim, but rather that we need to let people be able to leave the ship if they want and to pursue their hunches or ideas. Someone thinks they saw an island off in the distance? Let them go. Even if you disagree, I do not think their efforts are fruitless and even if wrong they help map out the territory faster. But if we put all our eggs in one basket, we'll miss a lot of great opportunities. Right now, we let people off the main ship when there's an island that looks promising, and there are those that steal a lifeboat in the middle of the night. But we're all explorers and it seems like a bad idea to dissuade people who have that drive and passion in them. I know a lot of people in academia (including myself) who feel shackled by the systems, when really all they want to do is research. Not every one of these people are going to change things, in fact, likely most won't. But truth is, that's probably true if they stay on the ship too. Not to mention that it is incredibly common for these people to just leave academia all together anyways. Research really is just a structured version of "fuck around and find out". So I think we should stop asking "why" we should pursue certain directions. "Because" is just as good of an excuse as any. In my ideal world, we'd publish anything if there is technical correctness and lack of plagiarism. Because the we usually don't know what is impactful. There are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. We really are trying to pretend that the unknown unknowns either don't exist, are not important, or very small. But we can't know, they're unknown unknowns, so why pretend? [0] An example might be all the LLM based companies trying to make AGI. You want to compete? You're not going to win by making a new LLM. But one can significantly increase their odds by taking a riskier move, and fund things that are not well established. Other types of architectures. And hey, we know the LLM isn't the only way because we humans aren't LLMs. And we humans also use a lot less energy and require far less data, so even if you are fully convinced that LLMs will get us all the way, we know there are other ways to solve this problem.
• deleted 2y ago
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• jay_kyburz 2y ago
  According to RPS the quote is that he had "barley played any roguelikelike deckbuilders" not that he was not aware of them. There are a lot of great deck builders that are not roguelike. Has he played Dominion, Magic the Gathering, Hearthstone?
• kristopolous 2y ago
  I used to think this a few decades ago. I think it's just as accessible with some mix of anti-authoritarianism and defiant personality. Essentially you learn a thing, you accept it for now and you think "well but maybe!" Like I personally think there should be multiple mathematical zeroes but I accept it as wackiness unless I can clearly demonstrate coherency and utility as to why.
• latexr 2y ago
  That is called Shoshin, or Beginner’s Mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin
• ijustlovemath 2y ago
  This is the biggest risk of AI imo; almost by definition your thoughts regress to the mean when using it
  • encipriano 2y ago
    This is nonsense. You need to double check the answers, spot mistakes, adapt the code to your needs and go to the sources it lists to learn rapidly about that particular thing.
    • ijustlovemath 2y ago
      it's fundamentally how these things work; learning token distribution given prior context. The expected output over time is the mean value of that distribution. Regression to the mean is the danger I'm talking about.
• schneems 2y ago
  Sounds like a bit of survivorship bias. Every success from people following well known principles does not translate into a blog post or research paper. You also don’t hear about all of the people who failed because they tried something novel and it didn’t work. I would suggest positive takeaways is to: trust but verify. If you’ve got a novel solution idea and don’t understand why others aren’t doing it that way, do both and compare. You’re guaranteed to learn something one way or another. Also: if you reinvent the wheel or do something suboptimal then that’s okay too. Sometimes the solutions don’t make sense until you see what doesn’t work. Likewise: be open to learning from others and exploring solutions outside of your predefined notion of how things should work.
  • danpalmer 2y ago
    > You also don’t hear about all of the people who failed because they tried something novel and it didn’t work. Or all the people who, through ignorance or hubris, thought they could do better than the state of the art. Or all the people who independently invent things that already exist. These may be what you're referring to, but thought it's worth re-stating these as they are far more common cases than people inventing truly novel approaches.
  • postalrat 2y ago
    A while back I was asked to write some software to make print out labels small enough to fit through a button hole. I convinced myself it wasn't possible because the spacing between the cutter and the print head. Then my boss showed me a label that was printed by a competitors system and I had it figured out within an hour or so. Although this was a minor thing it convinced how powerful knowing something is possible (or not) really is.
    • schneems 2y ago
      That’s a wonderful and visceral story. To me science is about defining the bounds of the possible. To do that you also need to push the bounds and occasionally update everything you thought you knew. In the case of CS where we find new, lower bounds, I find that especially exciting. I meant to append this to my original reply but I’ll say here: I enjoyed Knowledge Based AI from Georgia Tech. The lectures tallied about different types of knowledge acquisition as it applies to humans and them how we’ve mapped that to machines. That along with HCI were my favorite OMSCS courses. In your case, seeing a new, lower bounds helped push you to look in different directions and re-examine your assumptions. In KBAI we weren’t allowed to share code (of course) but were given very wide leniency in what we could share. Posing my performance numbers and reading other’s gave me a sense of what’s possible and had a similar effect as your story.
• swayvil 2y ago
  I think it's 2 different approaches, some enjoy the one (playing with the thing itself) and some enjoy the other (playing with the various secondhand abstractions that refer to the thing). They are different tastes. They deliver different results.
• resters 2y ago
  All scientific progress consists of leveraging some past work and overturning other past work. This is no different.
• TZubiri 2y ago
  When training physically, you can overtrain one muscle and depend on them. By not using those muscles on purpose you can improve your other muscles. It is well known that limitations improve creativity. That said I still think the best path is to learn a classical path, if you want you can question some axioms, but it's mostly irrational in that there's almost no reward for you personally, except clout, most of the reward goes to the whole science.
• UltraSane 2y ago
  For every case like this you have thousands of people who waste a huge amount of time and mental effort recreating something that has already been invented.
• kazinator 2y ago
  It takes time to read all the prior research. You could grow old by the time you get through it all. Likelihood of contributing to the field declines with age. You might believe someone's proof of a conjecture and then be discouraged from delving any more into that rabbit hole. More often than not you will be reinventing something. But that's not necessary less productive than reading other people's work. In the former case, you're at least making something, if not new. So there are some arguments for being fresh in a well-trodden field with an ocean of research that you cannot boil all at once. On the other hand, there is the publish-or-perish pressure in academia, which requires original research. You could just keep busy and throw enough shit agains the wall such that enough of it sticks.
• skgough 2y ago
  Maybe the best way to have the best of both worlds is to ensure well-established areas of research are open to “outsider art” submissions on the topic?
• indymike 2y ago
  > I'm beginning to think that the best way to approach a problem is by either not being aware of or disregarding most of the similar efforts that came before. Everyone likes to focus on why you cannot do and why trying will be futile. You don't have to disregard prior efforts. You just have to focus on one simple question: "how can I do ______ ?"
• delichon 2y ago
  Unaccompanied Sonata is a 1979 short story by Orson Scott Card that takes this to an extreme, and has haunted me since I read it in the eighties.
• wnolens 2y ago
  I had to delete Balatro last week to break an addiction. It's so so good
• temporallobe 2y ago
  We’re too afraid of violating some unwritten rule about reinventing the wheel. Or something.
• genghisjahn 2y ago
  This reminds me of the Neal Stephenson article "Innovation Starvation" from 2011: >A number of engineers are sitting together in a room, bouncing ideas off each other. Out of the discussion emerges a new concept that seems promising. Then some laptop-wielding person in the corner, having performed a quick Google search, announces that this “new” idea is, in fact, an old one—or at least vaguely similar—and has already been tried. Either it failed, or it succeeded. If it failed, then no manager who wants to keep his or her job will approve spending money trying to revive it. If it succeeded, then it’s patented and entry to the market is presumed to be unattainable, since the first people who thought of it will have “first-mover advantage” and will have created “barriers to entry.” The number of seemingly promising ideas that have been crushed in this way must number in the millions. What if that person in the corner hadn’t been able to do a Google search? >In a world where decision-makers are so close to being omniscient, it’s easy to see risk as a quaint artefact of a primitive and dangerous past (…) Today’s belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation-killer of our age
• redcobra762 2y ago
  https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/availability-heuristic https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/availability-heuristic You've remembered two examples of this (arguably) happening, so you attempt to draw a conclusion based on the ease with which you came up with those examples. But in reality, this method of inference is prone to error, as it doesn't consider the denominator, or how many attempts were made to achieve the results you're able to remember.
• xyzzy_plugh 2y ago
  Domain knowledge is valuable as you can wield it as opportunities arise to great effect. This lets you leap frog problems by applying known solutions. There's risk of being blind to novel approaches that require innovation. Being capable of tackling problems from first principles is invaluable because we frequently encounter problems that are novel in some dimension, even if that dimension is the combination of dimensions. This lets you leap frog large problems by decomposition, possibly going against the grain and innovating by, hopefully, simplifying. However there is risk in falling into traps that countless others have already learned the hard way. This may come as a surprise to some but, believe it or not, you can have both. In fact, you should.
• rincebrain 2y ago
  A professor I had in college, whose first published result was from a piece of homework he turned in where he incidentally solved an open question about bound on a problem, had a curious habit. I ended up failing and taking his course again (because I had A Lot going on in college), and thus, noticed something. Each semester, on one of the assignments in the latter half of the class, he assigned one problem out of, perhaps, 30 in the problem set, where as written, it was actually an open problem, and then a day or two before they were due, he'd send out an "oops, my bad" revised version. I suspect that this was not an accident, given that it always happened only once.
  • vitus 2y ago
    > A professor I had in college, whose first published result was from a piece of homework he turned in where he incidentally solved an open question about bound on a problem, had a curious habit. A related anecdote is about George Dantzig (perhaps best known for the simplex algorithm): > During his study in 1939, Dantzig solved two unproven statistical theorems due to a misunderstanding. Near the beginning of a class, Professor Spława-Neyman wrote two problems on the blackboard. Dantzig arrived late and assumed that they were a homework assignment. According to Dantzig, they "seemed to be a little harder than usual", but a few days later he handed in completed solutions for both problems, still believing that they were an assignment that was overdue. Six weeks later, an excited Spława-Neyman eagerly told him that the "homework" problems he had solved were two of the most famous unsolved problems in statistics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig#Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig#Education
• Xcelerate 2y ago
  Now we just need a smart person who is somehow unaware of the halting problem.
• rincebrain 2y ago
  Kind of? You get novel branches of thought, but in the limit case, you're also reinventing the universe to bake an apple pie. So there's something of a tradeoff between attempting to ensure people can do more than mimic existing doctrine and efficiency of getting up to speed without having to re-prove existing math and science. The Balatro dev also, for example, has talked about how he was heavily influenced by several specific other games.
• chambers 2y ago
  “They’re cheering for you,” she said with a smile. “But I could never have done it,” [Milo] objected, “without everyone else’s help.” “That may be true,” said Reason gravely, “but you had the courage to try; and what you can do is often simply a matter of what you will do.” “That’s why,” said King Azaz, “there was one very important thing about your quest that we couldn’t discuss until you returned.” “I remember,” said Milo eagerly. “Tell me now.” “It was impossible,” said the king, looking at the Mathemagician. “Completely impossible,” said the Mathemagician, looking at the king. “Do you mean … ,” said the bug, who suddenly felt a bit faint. “Yes, indeed,” they repeated together, “but if we’d told you then, you might not have gone … and, as you’ve discovered, so many things are possible just as long as you don’t know they’re impossible.” - The Phantom Tollbooth (1961)
• bweller 2y ago
  See einstellung effect: https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/einstellung-effect https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/einstellung-effect
• brookst 2y ago
  You’re hitting on innovation versus invention. True invention is getting more and more rare. Innovation is alive and well.
• throwaway519 2y ago
  In the spirit of your observation, I encourage you to make your observation again.
• voidhorse 2y ago
  There's a reason the phrase "beginner's luck" exists. I'm not sure the naïveté and success are causally related so much as they might be coincident. Could knowing about prior research skew one's perspective and tarnish novel thought? Sure. But we don't know. Maybe we'd have an even better Balatro if the creator knew about some other deck builders. Maybe we wouldn't, we don't know. We cannot prove the counterfactual. On the opposite extreme, there are examples of thinkers whose success stemmed from knowing much about one domain or much about many domains and integrating (Luhmann, Goethe, Feynman, Von Neumann etc.). In the general case, I think we are probably much better off promoting knowledge and study, and not ignorance and chance. That said, I do think we should retain our willingness to play and to try things that are "out of bounds" with respect to the existing accumulated knowledge. We should live informed lives, but play and explore like unschooled children.
• somenameforme 2y ago
  I think going one layer lower - the fundamental issue is that the internet drives people to unrealistic perceptions of the competence of others. Think about all of the undeniably brilliant people that have been involved in software over the past 40 years, and how many of them used hash tables in performance critical environments. Let alone mathematicians and others using them in applied domains. And you think there's something fundamental that all of these people just somehow missed? The argument of 'if that's such a good idea, why wouldn't somebody have just done it already?' seems to have grown exponentially with the advent of the internet. And I think it's because the visibility of competence of other's became so much more clear. For those who lived through e.g. Carmack's Golden Age you knew you were never going to be half the coder he was, at least based on the image he successfully crafted. That 'slight' at the end is not to say he wasn't a brilliant developer or even perhaps the best in the world at his peak, but rather that brilliance + image crafting creates this Gargantuan beast of infallibility and exceptionalism that just doesn't really exist in reality. I think it's from this exact phenomena that you also get the practical fetishism of expertise.
• tehjoker 2y ago
  You hear about this stuff because it's notable. Almost 100% of the time, if you disregard what other people have done, you are going to waste a lot of time.
• necovek 2y ago
  > the authors have also learned of several other hash tables that make use of the same high-level idea in different settings [7, 9]. At least part of the result was already known, and the fact authors didn't know about it mostly goes to the large corpus of knowledge we already posses. But the core inspiration came from looking at another recent research paper "Tiny Pointers": that is totally against your premise. If Krapivin was a software engineer looking to implement this solution as optimization for a particular problem, he would have done so without ever thinking of making a research paper to prove it formally, but mostly relied on benchmarking to prove his implementation works better. Now, it has always been somewhat true that lots of existing knowledge limits our creativity in familiar domains, but you need both to really advance science.
• youniverse 2y ago
  I watched a casual youtube video by a philosophy professor talking about the same thing that great scholars are different than great thinkers. Many great thinkers came up with great philosophies because they misread past works. If anyone wants to watch: https://youtu.be/4vou_dXuB8M?si=Wdr7q96MFULPAEc4 https://youtu.be/4vou_dXuB8M?si=Wdr7q96MFULPAEc4 Definitely something we should all keep in mind that sometimes you just have to pave your own way and hope it is great on its own merits.
• 3abiton 2y ago
  This soinds like the approach deepseek CEO used for hiring. He favored young inexperienced teams so they can bring a fresh perspective and try things from new way. It paid off nicely.
• vkou 2y ago
  > I'm beginning to think that the best way to approach a problem is by either not being aware of or disregarding most of the similar efforts that came before. Survivorship bias, you aren't aware of all the failures where people who were unaware of prior art made all the mistakes predictable to people who were.
• huijzer 2y ago
  Walter Isaacson said something similar about Einstein and Steve Jobs. Sometimes you need to reject commonly held assumptions to make progress. Einstein rejected the idea of ether. According to Isaacson this was probably because Einstein was working outside of university. Inside university, professors would likely have pushed Einstein to stick to the idea of ether.
• taurknaut 2y ago
  > Krapivin made this breakthrough by being unaware of Yao's conjecture. I don't think there's any evidence of this. Yao's conjecture is not exactly standard undergraduate material (although it might be—this is a commentary on detail rather than difficulty. But i certainly didn't encounter this conjecture in school). If not knowing this conjecture was the key, millions and millions of students failed to see what Krapivin did. I imagine you'd have to ask him what the key to his insight is. Hashing is a pretty unintuitive sort of computation. I'm not surprised that there are still surprises.
  • mangodrunk 2y ago
    Great point. Also, Krapivin was working on another paper co-authored by his former professor. He in fact was not working from ignorance. And like you said, most of everyone didn’t know anything about this conjecture, so ignorance certainly wasn’t an ingredient here.
• helloplanets 2y ago
  > The developer of Balatro made an award winning deck builder game by not being aware of existing deck builders. He was aware of deck builders and was directly inspired by Luck be a Landlord, but he was not aware of just how massive the genre is. Direct quote from the developer: > The one largest influence on Balatro was Luck Be a Landlord. I watched Northernlion play for a few videos and loved the concept of a non-fanatsy themed score attach roguelike a ton, so I modified the card game I was working on at the time into a roguelike. > I cut myself off from the genre at that point intentionally, I wanted to make my own mistakes and explore the design space naively just because that process is so fun. I hear the comparison to Slay the Spire a lot but the truth is that I hadn't played that game or seen footage of it when I designed Balatro, not until much later. https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1bdtmlg/comment/kup7qnq/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1bdtmlg/comment/kup7...
  • HelloUsername 2y ago
    Exactly, more info in this interview on Bloomberg on 7-feb-2025: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-02-07/maker-of-smash-indie-hit-balatro-talks-about-what-s-next https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-02-07/maker-...
    • jqr- 2y ago
      https://archive.ph/FwBtY https://archive.ph/FwBtY
• bigbacaloa 2y ago
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• moi2388 2y ago
  No, but starting from first principles does work. And being unaware of previous work helps you do this.
• karparov 2y ago
  [dead]
• thenoblesunfish 2y ago
  Ok, but you are disregarding the 1000s of things the undergrad was aware of and the fact that he worked with other researchers who were aware of the existing results enough to understand the significance of the result. The real trick is simply to try to understand things directly and not rely on proof by authority all the time.
• hassleblad23 2y ago
  You have to be naive to be an innovator.
• NohatCoder 2y ago
  There is certainly a need for ignoring common wisdom if you want to make something new. I don't think being unaware of it is necessary as long as you are willing to go forward while being told that you are on a fool's errand.
• globular-toast 2y ago
  > I'm beginning to think that the best way to approach a problem is by either not being aware of or disregarding most of the similar efforts that came before. I think sometimes this is true. On the time I've had new starters on my engineering team I've always tried to teach them about the problem before they get exposed to any of our solutions. Sometimes they will have brand new insights that we've been completely blind to. It doesn't always happen, but there is only one opportunity for this, once they've seen the solutions they can't be unseen.
• lysecret 2y ago
  I feel like there is already a movement, "thinking from first principles" along this direction.
• ibejoeb 2y ago
  This is a really tough problem. I don't think ignorance is the answer, but it's also difficult to set aside things that seam legitimate and go down a rabbit hole of reinventing something on a hunch. I guess the saving grace is that it's impossible to know enough about such a wide swathe that it's often a problem. With large models that conceivably can encode the collective knowledge, though, we have to be vigilant about creating an orthodoxy that ultimately constrains us.
• bell-cot 2y ago
  > I'm beginning to think that the best way to approach a problem is by either not being aware of or disregarding most of the similar efforts that came before... That depends... - Krapivin was an undergrad, tinkering with stuff for fun. If he'd put a couple months into this, and just ended up re-inventing a few things? That'd be decently educational. - Vs. if your team needs to ship product, on something resembling the schedule? Yeah. You definitely stick to tried-and-true algorithms.
• Shorel 2y ago
  No, no, no. That's the wrong thing to take away from it. Something I got from Richard Feynman descriptions of his method of study, was to first and foremost, read the prompt of the problems, and work diligently trying to solve the problems by himself, for a reasonable amount of time. Then, and only then, go and read the other solutions. The solutions can be the same, they can be different, and by doing all this preliminary work the researcher can truly understand the nuances of these solutions, something they can't grasp if the solutions were shown just after reading the problem. So, the best way to approach a problem is: - Try to solve it by yourself. Several times if necessary, give it an honest effort. - Then, solved or not, go and read other people's solutions.
• speleding 2y ago
  Somewhat surprisingly (to me), this is also found for User Interfaces [0]. The best initial design for a User Interface for a feature phone was done by designers who were not shown previous work by other designers. Iterations based on previous designs were only better if they were shown the "winning" initial design". [0] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/parallel-design/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/parallel-design/
• rollcat 2y ago
  In terms of practical engineering, this is also why I love to do side projects that reject existing bodies of libraries, and try to work up from first principles, and/or focus on composability rather than integration. It's a trade-off, at first it takes longer to iterate on features, but sometimes a more minimal and/or composable tool finds its way to production. Real Systems are made of duct tape anyways.
• dathinab 2y ago
  I would say not letting your thoughts be constrained by the bias of existing approaches. This isn't easy, at all. It requires training yourself into having a open and flexible mind in general. Not knowing about something is more like a cheat to get there easier. But it's supper common that innovation involves a lot of well known foundation work and just is very different in one specific aspects, and it's quite hard to know about the other foundation work but not that specific aspect especially if you don't even know which aspect can be fundamentally be "revolutionized"/"innovated". But what always help if you learn about a new topic is to try blindly first yourself and then look at what the existing approaches do. Not just for doing ground braking work but even for e.g. just learning math. One of the math teachers I had over the school years before university used this approach for teaching math it yielded way better independent understanding and engagement it helped me a lot later one. Sadly I only had that teacher for 2 years.
• implmntatio 2y ago
  Yup. And we programmed all that into LeGenAIs and LeGPTs and so on ... a splendidly perfect annihilation of all things evolutionary.
• eterevsky 2y ago
  If we achieved local maximum at something, the only way to progress is to make a big leap that brings you out of it. The trouble is that most of such big leaps are unsuccessful. For every case like you are describing there are probably hundreds or thousands of people who tried to do it and ended up with something worse than the status quo.
• tgauda 2y ago
  Every notable discovery has disproved something that everyone else thought was true. Naivety can be a superpower when inventing.
• yodsanklai 2y ago
  > I'm beginning to think that the best way to approach a problem is by either not being aware of or disregarding most of the similar efforts that came before. Maybe it's just because there are more people working on these problems who don't know previous approaches than the opposite.
• rnewme 2y ago
  I think it's more about working on a problem you spotted instead of endlessly reading, hoarding info, literature etc.
• giantg2 2y ago
  I've always had a mind that worked that way - I can imagine how something works or could work before looking up how it actually does work. But there's no real benefit to thinking that way in my experience. Thinking differently has only been a career impediment or gotten on my teachers nerves for being "smart" in my experience. For example, as a young kid I saw a geometric ball made up of hinges that allow it to expand and contract, and in some stages it looks a little like a gear. So then I started wondering if you change gears instead of switching gears in a car. Then a decade or so later I started seeing CVT transmissions in cars, which is the same concept where you can change the size/ratio by expanding or contracting the roller instead of switching gears.
• Owlettotoo 2y ago
  Sometimes insight can come by evaluating the problem at its rawest form. In short, a wild but fresh perspective.
• eru 2y ago
  > I'm beginning to think that the best way to approach a problem is by either not being aware of or disregarding most of the similar efforts that came before. I don't think that's warranted. You will find that the vast majority of lottery winners have bought lottery tickets. However that doesn't mean that buying lottery tickets is a good idea financially.
• RALaBarge 2y ago
  There is a book about this theory written in the 1960's called 'The Structure of Scientific Revolution' by Kuhn that talks about some sciences which progress one funeral at a time and how progress is not linear. He also remarks how people from outside the standard thoughts and education surrounding the current system are typically the ones to actually progress science. One example is Geocentrism vs Copernican astronomical models -- Copernican could never have sprung from the status quo because everything revolved around the Earth in Geocentrism instead of around the Sun. You can't square that circle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...
  • zellyn 2y ago
    Having just finally read (well, listened to) Kuhn's book, I can say: (a) I wouldn't quite characterize the book as being "about this theory" — it's a bit more nuanced. He definitely says that it's usually younger scientists with less invested in the currently reigning theory that are most likely to push forward a revolution. However, I don't recall any examples in the book of people who where wholly _unaware_ of the previous theory. (b) You should absolutely, definitely read it. It's a classic for a reason, and the writing style is a delight.
  • Galanwe 2y ago
    I'm being picky here, but I don't think you portray an fair view of Kuhn's epistemology here. Kuhn does not define a value-scale of both methods, on the contrary, he merely introduces the concept of different researchs: one being critical (developing new paradigms) and one being accumulating (further refining existing paradigms). He also hints to the almost inevitably organic interactions between the two, such that critical research naturally evolves from a pragmatic need to express things simply from a new paradigm when the old one becomes too clumsy for a use case. This is what happened in your example as well. Copernic (and later Galileo) did not invent heliocentrism out of the blue, the theory around it existed since antic Greece. It is even arguably the Renaissance, leading metaphysicists to revisit ancien texts, that spurred the idea to Copernic to consider it. But ultimately the need for the new paradigm was pushed by the need to revisit the calendar, which was drifting, and the difficulty to do it in a geocentric world, where you have to take planet retrocession into account.
• dumbfounder 2y ago
  It’s easy to think outside the box when you don’t know where the box is.
• SkyBelow 2y ago
  Best for an individual or for society? Consider a simplified example. There is some area of scientific research. Working within the framework gives you a 1 in 4 chance of making some minor improvement. Working outside the framework gives you a 1 in a million chance to create a great leap in knowledge. For any single individual, the best choice is the former. The latter is a gamble that most people will lose, wasting their lives chasing crazy theories. For society, you want a split. You need some doing the second option to have the eventual amazing discovery, but you also need to progress the current understanding further. If we introduce a chance for the minor progress to lead to the same major advancement, it becomes a bit more simple for society to calculate the best allocation of researchers, but for any single person, the best option still remains to dedicate themselves to the small advancement.
• fcq 2y ago
  Absolutely true! I concur 100% with your take. Funny this breakthrough happens at same time Antirez made this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42983275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42983275
• robblbobbl 2y ago
  This. I'm sorry for that guy but that is great news!
• germandiago 2y ago
  It is just easier to think out of the box when you do not have your mind "polluted" with previous ideas and from time to time someone appears that was thinking just in another way, probably the most obvious to them without knowing about the orthodox thinking in the subject. This is valuable.
• agumonkey 2y ago
  Similarly, the fortran or algol team implemented a lot of optimization tricks on first try, things that are now considered advanced, without "knowing it".
• namibj 2y ago
  Eventually I'll get to actually rolling a POC/tech demonstrator that just has less modules at perhaps less current density, for showing that even several kV DC can be efficiently transformed not just on paper to few or sub kV DC. At enough voltage grounding is no longer optional anyways, so might as well do essentially an auto transformer plus extra protection to protect humans against electric shock (RCD doesn't work directly, but the functionality can still be offered, it just has to sense quite differently). Why DC? An overhead line only limited by peak voltage (arc) and thermals can carry twice the power when running DC instead of AC, assuming both measured relative to ground. Also, you can run you transistors completely steady-state at all frequency components between their own switching fundamental and your load transients. No more over provisioning just to make up for legacy 50/60 Hz AC. Also, to a degree, you can just plug raw batteries in with that be DC grid, at most having a little bit of DC regulation to force the voltage a bit higher/lower than the batteries. Like, a power supply basically rated to a couple percent of the battery input/output max power: only need to move the small extra voltage, though ofc at the full current. Lastly, DC converters are just way smaller and lighter, so you could avoid the heavy bulky transformers in trains and alleviate power limiting from them. Relevant for fast double-decker trains because you'd prefer to have human space where you currently park the transformer. I have to say though, novel development of technology by pulling recent innovations in the fundamental/material science fields underlying the target, is very not an easy thing to do.
• hombre_fatal 2y ago
  The creator of Halo’s soundtrack didn’t listen to music in fear of it influencing him.
• 0x38B 2y ago
  "fall[ing] in the rut of thought" reminds me of this paragraph from "The Footpath Way": > So long as man does not bother about what he is or whence he came or whither he is going, the whole thing seems as simple as the verb "to be"; and you may say that the moment he does begin thinking about what he is (which is more than thinking that he is) and whence he came and whither he is going, he gets on to a lot of roads that lead nowhere, and that spread like the fingers of a hand or the sticks of a fan; so that if he pursues two or more of them he soon gets beyond his straddle, and if he pursues only one he gets farther and farther from the rest of all knowledge as he proceeds. You may say that and it will be true. But there is one kind of knowledge a man does get when he thinks about what he is, whence he came and whither he is going, which is this: that it is the only important question he can ask himself. (The Footpath Way, Introduction (1)) Even though the author is talking about a different kind of knowledge, the image of sticks of a fan - where going down one gradually excludes the others - stuck with me. 1: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/59813 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/59813
• hans-dampf 2y ago
  Your exact thoughts have already been put to paper by L.P.Hammet, godfather of physical organic chemistry (exact description of chemical reactions): one might “... overlook the great difference between exact theory and approximate theory. Again, let me emphasize my great respect for approximate theory. [...] if one starts looking for an effect predicted by this kind of theory to be impossible, the odds are against a favorable outcome. Fortunately, however, the community of scientists, like that of horseplayers, contains some people who prefer to bet against the odds as well as a great many who always bet on the favorite. In science we should, I think, do all we can to encourage the man who is willing to gamble against the odds of this sort. This does not mean that we should encourage the fool or the ignoramus who wants to play against suicidal odds, the man who wants to spend his time and usually someone else’s money looking for an effect incompatible with, let us say one of the conclusions reached by Willard Gibbs. Gibbs started from thoroughly proven generalizations, the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and reasoned from them by exact mathematical procedures, and his conclusions are the best example I know of exact theory, theory against which it is futile to struggle.”
• anvuong 2y ago
  This is confirmation/survivorship bias. You only hear about these positive cases. The vast majority just ends up rediscovering old techniques and their year-long paper/work got rejected.
• chasing 2y ago
  > I'm beginning to think that the best way to approach a problem is by either not being aware of or disregarding most of the similar efforts that came before. Both Danny Trejo and Tim Allen spent time in prison before becoming famous. While that's interesting, I'm not sure I'm ready to believe that's the best way to become a professional actor. Edit to be a little less snarky, apologies: "Outsiders" are great for approaching problems from fresh angles, but I can almost guarantee that the majority of nuts-and-bolts progress in a field comes from people who "fall in the rut of thought" in the sense that they area aware enough of the field to know which paths might be most fruitful. If I had to place a bet on myself, I wouldn't take a wild uninformed swing: I'd get myself up to speed on things first. Outsiders sometimes do great work. They also sometimes: https://www.reddit.com/r/mathmemes/comments/wq9hcl/terrence_d_howard_proves_that_1x1_2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mathmemes/comments/wq9hcl/terrence_...
• klik99 2y ago
  I agree in the specific case that the state of the art is in a local maxima, but saying "the best way to approach a problem is by not being aware of disregarding previous attempts" ignores the much more frequent banal work of iterative improvement. Leaping out of a local maxima is rare and sexy and gets articles written about you and is important, but the work of slowly iterating up to a nearby peak is also important. I think progress needs both individual achievements who break out of preconceived notions and the communal work of improving within the notions we currently have.
• fennecbutt 2y ago
  That's a load of selection bias though. I'm sure there have been many, many more people who don't know anything about deck builder games who tried to make one and didn't succeed.