7 ms·

Isaac Asimov Mulls “How Do People Get New Ideas?” (1959)

269 points by Dnguyen 12y ago

KhalilK 12y ago
This reminded me of Bret Victor's great talk Inventing on Principle[0]. 0.https://vimeo.com/36579366 https://vimeo.com/36579366
- nicklovescode 12y ago
  Since this Asimov essay is about groups functioning in a space, Brett Victor's seeing spaces talk also seems rather relevant. Give people new ways to think about things, and great places for them to think together.
- cpg 12y ago
  Great talk. Do you know what tools was he demonstrating? Are these tools available to use?
  - KhalilK 12y ago
    Though those exact tools are not really available, there are a couple of "alternatives" when it comes to live coding; a HTML5 canvas playground[0] and another similar one[1]. If you are interested more in live coding you might want to check http://toplap.org/?title=ToplapSystems http://toplap.org/?title=ToplapSystems 0.http://htmlivecode.com/canvas-animation-playground/ http://htmlivecode.com/canvas-animation-playground/ 1.http://tnlogy.github.io/tnlogy/ http://tnlogy.github.io/tnlogy/
sayemm 12y ago
This reminds me of Walter Isaacson's biography on Steve Jobs and how it detailed his many eccentric habits and behaviors early on before starting Apple... how he never took showers while working at Atari, his odd dietary habits, his daily wardrobe, etc. But that's why he was able to "think different"... "A person willing to fly in the face of reason, authority, and common sense must be a person of considerable self-assurance. Since he occurs only rarely, he must seem eccentric (in at least that respect) to the rest of us. A person eccentric in one respect is often eccentric in others. Consequently, the person who is most likely to get new ideas is a person of good background in the field of interest and one who is unconventional in his habits. (To be a crackpot is not, however, enough in itself.)" Also very good is Richard Hamming's "You and Your Research" talk - http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html
- emotionalcode 12y ago
  I think things are a bit different in the age of the internet. Seeing into the private lives of others, their quirks and eccentricities, you might find that these traits are fairly common, and even desirable by certain sociocultural groups to be as 'odd' and 'quirky' as possible, as it seems to correlate with success and the capacity to think differently. Self confidence, I agree is huge, but it can't be faked. It has to actually be known. Sometimes that seems to mean letting your mind go for a loop, coming back again, and realizing you can never know anything while also knowing something. I just don't really think any of the side effects of being a percieved genius matter as much as the work actually done. Sometimes it means going against the crowd, sometimes it means going with.
- grecy 12y ago
  That reminds me of the story of how Walt built Disneyland. When he went around asking others what they thought, every single person said he was nuts and it would never work. That made him extremely excited - and more determined than ever - because he knew he was on the path of doing something truly different.
anmonteiro90 12y ago
A bit offtopic, but a necessary interpretation from my perspective is how the so-called "corporate culture" with all its dresscodes and formal manners doesn't promote the ascent of new ideas - Asimov even goes on to suggest they could actually come from an informal dinner, etc. I'll be sure to save this one to read periodically. Thanks for the submission.
cantlin 12y ago
"It seems to me then that the purpose of cerebration sessions is not to think up new ideas but to educate the participants in facts and fact-combinations, in theories and vagrant thoughts." For me the best meetings, conferences and conversations are the ones that come closest to this description.
segmondy 12y ago
Permutation. You take an old idea, and you pull out all the variables and you start permuting upon them.
- tiger10guy 12y ago
  Yes! ... but which variables? Permutations grow exponentially as you add dimensions, so you can't have too many.
  - theoh 12y ago
    You want Systematic Inventive Thinking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_inventive_thinking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_inventive_thinking
scobar 12y ago
"If a single individual present is unsympathetic to the foolishness that would be bound to go on at such a session, the others would freeze. The unsympathetic individual may be a gold mine of information, but the harm he does will more than compensate for that. It seems necessary to me, then, that all people at a session be willing to sound foolish and listen to others sound foolish." This is something I've always felt, but remained unable to express as well as Asimov did here. I'm so grateful for those with a gold mine of information who resist temptation toward arrogance and scornful correction, and instead show patience and joy in teaching the foolish.
legohead 12y ago
Reading biographies about Einstein, I came to the conclusion that the man wasn't really a genius in the intellectual sense, but a genius when it came to ideas, and had the passion to pursue them.
jjoe 12y ago
Does this mean Reddit is a more auspicious environment for new ideas to flourish? HN is way too confined of a place for "foolishness", that Asimov sees as conductive, to be permitted without things going haywire.
- AndrewKemendo 12y ago
  Even more-so a place like 4chan, hence why it seems to churn out memes and follow on's more than anywhere else.
- delecti 12y ago
  I would absolutely agree with that assessment. One of the (potentially) negative sides of the same phenomenon is the acceptance of and tendency towards memes. They can certainly be annoying, but a strong flow of memes is indicative of a lot of culture and ideas bashing up against each other until some of the bits stick together in a novel way. A cleverly applied meme comment on a Reddit thread can easily get hundreds or thousands of upvotes. Front page HN threads don't even get any meme comments, because people here know that their comment would be buried immediately, if not outright deleted (I admit to being much less familiar with the inner workings of HN than Reddit). Reddit threads are definitely a place of quantity over quality, but the sheer volume of creativity swirling around is bound to uncover a couple gems. All of that said, I've never viewed HN as a place for ideas to be generated. This is a fantastic whetstone with some brilliant minds, but it can also be merciless.
  - scrollaway 12y ago
    HN is a fantastic display of creativity, but it is certainly not one where creativity happens. That's OK and I bet most of us prefer it this way. To put it in simpler terms, Reddit is more input-oriented, while HN is more output-oriented.
    - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
      >but it is certainly not one where creativity happens // I disagree - I've had a few novel ideas here, they may not have been universally novel but were definitely ideas that came up from threads I read, that I'd not seen or considered previously. Sure HN isn't structured towards this sort of creativity but it still provokes it on occasions. Forums are as input or output orientated as one chooses IME. Edit: this, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8487385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8487385, might be an example - I've not seen config undo-history in browsers before?
genericone 12y ago
Interesting idea here: Draw from a pool of people who wish to be involved in cerebratory pursuits, and who are willing to accept and give ideas freely to others. Out of this pool, some combination of 4 or 5 individuals within the same geographical region can be drawn randomly from this group for cerebration sessions following a few Asimov Cerebration Guidelines (ACGs): -"ease, relaxation, and a general sense of permissiveness." -"short reports to write, or summaries of their conclusions, or brief answers to suggested problems, [and be paid for that]" -"educate the participants in facts and fact-combinations, in theories and vagrant thoughts." -"meeting in someone’s home or over a dinner table at some restaurant" -"a session-arbiter will have to sit there, stirring up the animals, asking the shrewd question, making the necessary comment, bringing them gently back to the point." After the session, the session can be given an evaluation by each of the participants: A. did the session feel neutralized by any of the participants reputations? B. was any insight gained? C. was the session jovial? I think I, as well as some others, would be interested in attending something like this if it could be organized well.
- laglad 12y ago
  This is a very interesting idea. Perhaps taping a sample session with some extraordinarily easeful people and showing it to participants can help model the openness involved. I'd be game.
  - filoeleven 12y ago
    I am not sure that one can learn to have that kind of openness without practicing it oneself. An equally esoteric practice that might help to foster this is the Bohm Dialogue.[1] [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohm_Dialogue http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohm_Dialogue
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  This sounds like a Melvyn Bragg radio show on BBC Radio 4 ...
- theoh 12y ago
  “Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.” http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/01/30/groupthink http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/01/30/groupthink
xsmasher 12y ago
"Feynman's Rainbow" has a dialog on how to get new ideas, with some advice from Feynman. Chapter five I think.
ronilan 12y ago
Very disappointing. The author seems ignorant of the entire science of Psychohistory. Since it is now possible to predict human development hundreds of years into the future no idea is really new anymore.
- siscia 12y ago
  May you elaborate ? How you claim that is possible to predict the human development ? In which way ? It to me seems a very over-simplification... Anyway, from the wikipedia the first time the term "psycho-history" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory#Emergence_as_a_discipline http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory#Emergence_as_a_di...) is been used is 1958, it is a good guess to say that the article is been written no later than the 1960... I guess we can forgive Asimov...
  - snowwrestler 12y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_%28fictional%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_%28fictional%29
    - siscia 12y ago
      Thanks
  - rfrey 12y ago
    ronilan is referencing Asimov's Foundation trilogy, which has the premise that psycho-history has developed into a hard science and a reliable technology.
    - siscia 12y ago
      Still I don't get it... > Since it is now possible to predict human development hundreds of years into the future no idea is really new anymore. It is just sarcasm then ? If not can somebody elaborate ?
      - 12y ago
dkarapetyan 12y ago
> To feel guilty because one has not earned one’s salary because one has not had a great idea is the surest way, it seems to me, of making it certain that no great idea will come in the next time either. Feynman has a similar story about playing with ideas and just enjoying the process instead of worrying about the pressures associated with being great: https://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html https://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html.
- joaorico 12y ago
  From the same book, there's also his comment on Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study from which he refused an invitation: "When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they're not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come. Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge: You're not in contact with the experimental guys. You don't have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!"
noproblemo 12y ago
I am reading a short story collection of Asimov compiled in a book called Gold. The second half of the book contains extensive commentary by Asimov on how to write science fiction. He delves into a lot of topics like writing style, grammer, ideas and many other things. There is a whole chapter on a how to generate a story from an idea and how to get the idea to start with. In it, he stresses on thinking. As in real, solid literal thinking, what we would normally call brainstorming. As a science fiction author, he says that the brainstorming is not something that he used to do in short bursts like someone would normally do. He writes that a science fiction author has to think to a point where her/his head starts aching, literally.
pitchups 12y ago
For anyone interested in this subject, highly recommend reading Steven Johnson's book "Where Good Ideas Come From". To get a summary of the book you can also view his TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_come_from?language=en http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_com...
pm 12y ago
I don't come to HN looking to generate new ideas. I come to be exposed to things I might potentially be interested in, and to learn from those who might know more than me. If I generate any new ideas at all, it's outside of the time I'm engaged here (when things have time to percolate and my focus isn't so narrow).
kumarharsh 12y ago
Just last month, I finished reading "Magic", Asimov's collection of small witty stories, which were NOT SF, but Fantasy. Although the stories themselves were quite mundane, what struck me as I somehow forced my way forward in the stories, was Asimov's clairvoyant tone while writing. Most of the things he wrote, even in apparent jest, hold true today. And never have I been so enthralled by a bunch of essays as Asimov has done it... Reading his second momoir and many more essays underline his wisdom more and more.

269 points by Dnguyen 12y ago

This reminded me of Bret Victor's great talk Inventing on Principle[0]. 0.https://vimeo.com/36579366 https://vimeo.com/36579366

nicklovescode 12y ago
Since this Asimov essay is about groups functioning in a space, Brett Victor's seeing spaces talk also seems rather relevant. Give people new ways to think about things, and great places for them to think together.
cpg 12y ago
Great talk. Do you know what tools was he demonstrating? Are these tools available to use?
- KhalilK 12y ago
  Though those exact tools are not really available, there are a couple of "alternatives" when it comes to live coding; a HTML5 canvas playground[0] and another similar one[1]. If you are interested more in live coding you might want to check http://toplap.org/?title=ToplapSystems http://toplap.org/?title=ToplapSystems 0.http://htmlivecode.com/canvas-animation-playground/ http://htmlivecode.com/canvas-animation-playground/ 1.http://tnlogy.github.io/tnlogy/ http://tnlogy.github.io/tnlogy/

sayemm 12y ago

This reminds me of Walter Isaacson's biography on Steve Jobs and how it detailed his many eccentric habits and behaviors early on before starting Apple... how he never took showers while working at Atari, his odd dietary habits, his daily wardrobe, etc. But that's why he was able to "think different"... "A person willing to fly in the face of reason, authority, and common sense must be a person of considerable self-assurance. Since he occurs only rarely, he must seem eccentric (in at least that respect) to the rest of us. A person eccentric in one respect is often eccentric in others. Consequently, the person who is most likely to get new ideas is a person of good background in the field of interest and one who is unconventional in his habits. (To be a crackpot is not, however, enough in itself.)" Also very good is Richard Hamming's "You and Your Research" talk - http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html

emotionalcode 12y ago
I think things are a bit different in the age of the internet. Seeing into the private lives of others, their quirks and eccentricities, you might find that these traits are fairly common, and even desirable by certain sociocultural groups to be as 'odd' and 'quirky' as possible, as it seems to correlate with success and the capacity to think differently. Self confidence, I agree is huge, but it can't be faked. It has to actually be known. Sometimes that seems to mean letting your mind go for a loop, coming back again, and realizing you can never know anything while also knowing something. I just don't really think any of the side effects of being a percieved genius matter as much as the work actually done. Sometimes it means going against the crowd, sometimes it means going with.
grecy 12y ago
That reminds me of the story of how Walt built Disneyland. When he went around asking others what they thought, every single person said he was nuts and it would never work. That made him extremely excited - and more determined than ever - because he knew he was on the path of doing something truly different.

anmonteiro90 12y ago

A bit offtopic, but a necessary interpretation from my perspective is how the so-called "corporate culture" with all its dresscodes and formal manners doesn't promote the ascent of new ideas - Asimov even goes on to suggest they could actually come from an informal dinner, etc. I'll be sure to save this one to read periodically. Thanks for the submission.

cantlin 12y ago

"It seems to me then that the purpose of cerebration sessions is not to think up new ideas but to educate the participants in facts and fact-combinations, in theories and vagrant thoughts." For me the best meetings, conferences and conversations are the ones that come closest to this description.

segmondy 12y ago

Permutation. You take an old idea, and you pull out all the variables and you start permuting upon them.

tiger10guy 12y ago
Yes! ... but which variables? Permutations grow exponentially as you add dimensions, so you can't have too many.
- theoh 12y ago
  You want Systematic Inventive Thinking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_inventive_thinking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_inventive_thinking

scobar 12y ago

"If a single individual present is unsympathetic to the foolishness that would be bound to go on at such a session, the others would freeze. The unsympathetic individual may be a gold mine of information, but the harm he does will more than compensate for that. It seems necessary to me, then, that all people at a session be willing to sound foolish and listen to others sound foolish." This is something I've always felt, but remained unable to express as well as Asimov did here. I'm so grateful for those with a gold mine of information who resist temptation toward arrogance and scornful correction, and instead show patience and joy in teaching the foolish.

legohead 12y ago

Reading biographies about Einstein, I came to the conclusion that the man wasn't really a genius in the intellectual sense, but a genius when it came to ideas, and had the passion to pursue them.

jjoe 12y ago

Does this mean Reddit is a more auspicious environment for new ideas to flourish? HN is way too confined of a place for "foolishness", that Asimov sees as conductive, to be permitted without things going haywire.

AndrewKemendo 12y ago
Even more-so a place like 4chan, hence why it seems to churn out memes and follow on's more than anywhere else.
delecti 12y ago
I would absolutely agree with that assessment. One of the (potentially) negative sides of the same phenomenon is the acceptance of and tendency towards memes. They can certainly be annoying, but a strong flow of memes is indicative of a lot of culture and ideas bashing up against each other until some of the bits stick together in a novel way. A cleverly applied meme comment on a Reddit thread can easily get hundreds or thousands of upvotes. Front page HN threads don't even get any meme comments, because people here know that their comment would be buried immediately, if not outright deleted (I admit to being much less familiar with the inner workings of HN than Reddit). Reddit threads are definitely a place of quantity over quality, but the sheer volume of creativity swirling around is bound to uncover a couple gems. All of that said, I've never viewed HN as a place for ideas to be generated. This is a fantastic whetstone with some brilliant minds, but it can also be merciless.
- scrollaway 12y ago
  HN is a fantastic display of creativity, but it is certainly not one where creativity happens. That's OK and I bet most of us prefer it this way. To put it in simpler terms, Reddit is more input-oriented, while HN is more output-oriented.
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    >but it is certainly not one where creativity happens // I disagree - I've had a few novel ideas here, they may not have been universally novel but were definitely ideas that came up from threads I read, that I'd not seen or considered previously. Sure HN isn't structured towards this sort of creativity but it still provokes it on occasions. Forums are as input or output orientated as one chooses IME. Edit: this, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8487385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8487385, might be an example - I've not seen config undo-history in browsers before?

genericone 12y ago

Interesting idea here: Draw from a pool of people who wish to be involved in cerebratory pursuits, and who are willing to accept and give ideas freely to others. Out of this pool, some combination of 4 or 5 individuals within the same geographical region can be drawn randomly from this group for cerebration sessions following a few Asimov Cerebration Guidelines (ACGs): -"ease, relaxation, and a general sense of permissiveness." -"short reports to write, or summaries of their conclusions, or brief answers to suggested problems, [and be paid for that]" -"educate the participants in facts and fact-combinations, in theories and vagrant thoughts." -"meeting in someone’s home or over a dinner table at some restaurant" -"a session-arbiter will have to sit there, stirring up the animals, asking the shrewd question, making the necessary comment, bringing them gently back to the point." After the session, the session can be given an evaluation by each of the participants: A. did the session feel neutralized by any of the participants reputations? B. was any insight gained? C. was the session jovial? I think I, as well as some others, would be interested in attending something like this if it could be organized well.

laglad 12y ago
This is a very interesting idea. Perhaps taping a sample session with some extraordinarily easeful people and showing it to participants can help model the openness involved. I'd be game.
- filoeleven 12y ago
  I am not sure that one can learn to have that kind of openness without practicing it oneself. An equally esoteric practice that might help to foster this is the Bohm Dialogue.[1] [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohm_Dialogue http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohm_Dialogue
pbhjpbhj 12y ago
This sounds like a Melvyn Bragg radio show on BBC Radio 4 ...
theoh 12y ago
“Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.” http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/01/30/groupthink http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/01/30/groupthink

xsmasher 12y ago

"Feynman's Rainbow" has a dialog on how to get new ideas, with some advice from Feynman. Chapter five I think.

ronilan 12y ago

Very disappointing. The author seems ignorant of the entire science of Psychohistory. Since it is now possible to predict human development hundreds of years into the future no idea is really new anymore.

siscia 12y ago
May you elaborate ? How you claim that is possible to predict the human development ? In which way ? It to me seems a very over-simplification... Anyway, from the wikipedia the first time the term "psycho-history" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory#Emergence_as_a_discipline http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory#Emergence_as_a_di...) is been used is 1958, it is a good guess to say that the article is been written no later than the 1960... I guess we can forgive Asimov...
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_%28fictional%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_%28fictional%29
  - siscia 12y ago
    Thanks
- rfrey 12y ago
  ronilan is referencing Asimov's Foundation trilogy, which has the premise that psycho-history has developed into a hard science and a reliable technology.
  - siscia 12y ago
    Still I don't get it... > Since it is now possible to predict human development hundreds of years into the future no idea is really new anymore. It is just sarcasm then ? If not can somebody elaborate ?
    - 12y ago

dkarapetyan 12y ago

> To feel guilty because one has not earned one’s salary because one has not had a great idea is the surest way, it seems to me, of making it certain that no great idea will come in the next time either. Feynman has a similar story about playing with ideas and just enjoying the process instead of worrying about the pressures associated with being great: https://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html https://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html.

joaorico 12y ago
From the same book, there's also his comment on Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study from which he refused an invitation: "When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they're not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come. Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge: You're not in contact with the experimental guys. You don't have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!"

noproblemo 12y ago

I am reading a short story collection of Asimov compiled in a book called Gold. The second half of the book contains extensive commentary by Asimov on how to write science fiction. He delves into a lot of topics like writing style, grammer, ideas and many other things. There is a whole chapter on a how to generate a story from an idea and how to get the idea to start with. In it, he stresses on thinking. As in real, solid literal thinking, what we would normally call brainstorming. As a science fiction author, he says that the brainstorming is not something that he used to do in short bursts like someone would normally do. He writes that a science fiction author has to think to a point where her/his head starts aching, literally.

pitchups 12y ago

For anyone interested in this subject, highly recommend reading Steven Johnson's book "Where Good Ideas Come From". To get a summary of the book you can also view his TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_come_from?language=en http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_com...

pm 12y ago

I don't come to HN looking to generate new ideas. I come to be exposed to things I might potentially be interested in, and to learn from those who might know more than me. If I generate any new ideas at all, it's outside of the time I'm engaged here (when things have time to percolate and my focus isn't so narrow).

kumarharsh 12y ago

Just last month, I finished reading "Magic", Asimov's collection of small witty stories, which were NOT SF, but Fantasy. Although the stories themselves were quite mundane, what struck me as I somehow forced my way forward in the stories, was Asimov's clairvoyant tone while writing. Most of the things he wrote, even in apparent jest, hold true today. And never have I been so enthralled by a bunch of essays as Asimov has done it... Reading his second momoir and many more essays underline his wisdom more and more.