Can this advice be generalized to other creative endeavors in general? There's an interesting article by Scott Alexander, "Negative Creativity" http://slatestar

Can this advice be generalized to other creative endeavors in general? There's an interesting article by Scott Alexander, "Negative Creativity" http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/05/negative-creativity/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/05/negative-creativity/ "It is said that one of the highest-level and most awe-inspiring of rationalist skills is Sitting And Thinking About Something For Five Minutes. The sitting part isn’t that difficult. It’s not even that hard to…how should I put it…apply mental effort at the problem. But that mental effort tends to be spent rehearsing the solutions already thought up, retreading worn paths, ruminating on how difficult the problem is. Coming up with entirely novel ideas is really, really hard." In other words, if we set out deliberately to "come up with a startup idea" or (in a completely different context) "plot for a short story" we're likely to fall into the "gaming" trap, that is coming up with what _sounds like_ a great idea and could potentially even convince others, e.g., professors in a "Creative Writing" class or investors that it is one. I've been applying this same tactic when dealing with "once in a million" (which at -- I hate to use this term, but it's actually a good one -- webscale can easily happen once an hour) Heisenbugs: fire up five processes in gdb (as to force contention around network, disk, and CPU), add a bunch of log statements, pepper the code with random usleep()s, and set assertions or watch/break points in "impossible" places -- as opposed to a more rookie approach of rewriting any suspect code ("let's put a lock around this just to be sure...") and hoping the problem goes away.