Coming up with something truly new is much, much harder than people give it credit for. We take the sun being the center of the universe for granted today, but it was an extremely non-obvious fact for the smartest people in the world for millenia. One of my math professors had a great take on the difficulty of injecting a new idea into the world: he said that the greatest mathematical achievement that anyone had ever made was not anything like calculus - it was the realization that there was something similar between five stones and five fish.
Nietzsche describes the problem beautifully in Beyond Good and Evil:
"However independent of each other [philosophers] might feel themselves to be, with their critical or systematic wills, something inside of them drives them on, something leads them into a particular order, one after the other, and this something is precisely the innate systematicity and relationship of concepts. In fact, their thinking is not nearly as much a discovery as it is a recognition, remembrance, a returning and homecoming into a distant, primordial, total economy of the soul, from which each concept once grew: – to this extent, philosophizing is a type of atavism of the highest order."
..."Where there are linguistic affinities, then because of the common philosophy of grammar (I mean: due to the unconscious domination and direction through similar grammatical functions), it is obvious that everything lies ready from the very start for a similar development and sequence of philosophical systems..."
I know religion probably doesn’t play well around here, but your quote brought a memory rushing back that I feel like sharing.
My very Christian mother once asked me to help her come up with a slogan for the church. I know her pastor well, and know him to be an avid student of history and the literature.
After much thought, I told them this, with the warning that if they used it they’d better be willing to face the consequences of what it means: “The purpose of the church is to remind people who they are. As children, they know. Over time, the world makes them forget.”
In my estimation, Jesus’ goal, and the Church’s job should be guiding people back to what they once knew. Unbridled love and trust in others. Non-judgement. Absolute acceptance, before we learn there’s such thing as a stranger.
Thank you for sharing this passage.
“Their thinking is not nearly as much a discovery as it is a recognition, remembrance, a returning and homecoming into a distant, primordial, total economy of the soul, from which each concept once grew”
Later, my Mom sent me the link to the sermon where the pastor quoted my statement and my warning, and followed it with, “My friend might be onto something, because in thinking on the text with his proposal in mind, I recalled one of Jesus’ declarations, ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’”
> That's quite an optimistic assessment of little children.
I'm not sure if it is. Little children lack preconceived ideas, and, often, inhibition. That combination is a good recipe for accepting the unknown and coming up with new ideas. That is not to say they can't be cruel at times.
Little children are also easily led and controlled by other people like their parents. And no doubt that is what Mr. Preacher-man also wants: Followers. Thank the Lord and pass the bucket. Become dependent on me telling you what is the truth, you believing that if you just believe what I tell you you are granted the ticket to heaven, if not you go to Hell.
Very conveniently it is very easy to make little children believe all that, and now you tell us we should be like them little children too.
We should blindly trust the preacher-man, like little children, that's what he is telling us.
> Very conveniently it is very easy to make little children believe all that
My counter-intuitive opinion is that children are quite skeptical of religion. They may enjoy the make-believe part of it. Pretending, after all, is child play, but they will never take it for granted just because an adult tells them so. On the contrary, kids will know when something is made up. An adult seriously resorting to magic to answer a child's question will raise doubts. That kid is likely to question authority and religion ever after.
I think if adults SEEM to be believing it then kids will believe it too. Maybe you can say that then is not misleading them since you believe it to be true, but I don't think that proves that kids really have a critical thinking ability. That is why I think they are easily mislead. Of course there is much good to be said about having an "open mind", but having an "open mind" basically means anything can enter it. Kids' brains have their doors wide open. Is that good or bad? I don't think we can say it is just plain good. They need to learn critical thinking, all humans do, that is the skill to acquire.
That’s not my interpretation of the message at all. That was certainly not my intent.
My point was that the shaping of children by the world to hate, or judge, or otherwise adopt the beliefs of any given adult is exactly what corrupts them from who they truly are.
I’m referring to the goal as their state prior to those corrupting influences.
Right, but so the fact that they are so open-minded means they can be easily mislead which means they are corruptible.
It's not so good to be open-minded if that is the same thing as readily-corrupted. Or in other words we shouldn't strive to be in a child-like state where we are easily corrupted, easily mislead, because we are so open-minded.
I agree. I think judgement is a learned behavior, as most parents constantly judge their behaviors.
Can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched my one niece judge her little sister for a behavior that she herself had been admonished for a few minutes before. She just learned that bad girls do that, so now she’s informing her little sister that she’s a bad girl.
Awesome story, thanks for sharing and I'm glad the quote took you there :) I think reading Nietzsche from a christian perspective is a very interesting pursuit. The whole "God is dead" thing has been really misrepresented and if any religious person could get past that, I think they would find a lot to like in his writing.
> “Unbridled love and trust in others. Non-judgement. Absolute acceptance, before we learn there’s such thing as a stranger.”
i don't know if this is what you meant by "playing well around here", but what you wrote is a sentiment to which many secular humanists would wholeheartedly subscribe.
> Coming up with something truly new is much, much harder than people give it credit for.
I absolutely agree. Actually, I think that truly original thought is something that the majority of the population never experiences in their lifetime. Most thoughts that seem original are just recombinations or reinterpretations of existing ideas.
Want to test just how hard original thought is? Try to visualize exactly what it would be like to be a 4-dimensional being. Or how about a 2-dimensional being. You might be able to form an abstract idea based on examples (like the “flat lander” concept), but you will find it pretty much impossible to hold in your mind a visualization of what it would really be like. Why? Because due to the physical laws that govern our universe, it is impossible for you to have ever experienced this or anything even close to it. Therefore, it is left purely to your mind to create the visualization from nothing. This is like a neural net that has been trained with little or no data. There’s just nothing to go on, so extrapolations cannot be made.
Now visualize an elephant standing on a chair on top of the Empire State Building. Easy, right? But surely you’ve never seen that with your own eyes. Why can you imagine it so easily? Because you’ve seen enough parts of the visualization that you can recombine them in your mind to create whatever reality you wish.
Whether we’re artists or engineers, we’re all just thieves in the end. Most of us, that is. The few who are truly original create the fuel that pushes our civilization forward.
I don't know how you expect people to challenge this, because any original thought has to be built on a structure to be valuable. I could shuffle a deck of cards and get a permutation that has never existed before and which I could not have pre-visualized, but is not that valuable. The inability to visualize a perspective is not a good test.
The idea of a 4d space grew out of STEM through transforming symbols. Taking the leap of faith from one action to the next until you have something transformed or created is original and valuable.
> We take the sun being the center of the universe for granted today, but it was an extremely non-obvious fact for the smartest people in the world for millenia.
It seems new ideas truly are difficult to inject..
> Coming up with something truly new is much, much harder than people give it credit for
100% agree, and yet harder still is to keep working on something truly new, trying to drive it forwards, when at best nobody cares and at worst people actively resist the implicit challenge to the status quo. Even, perhaps especially, smart and conscientious people who are already authorities in the field.
I think when people think about innovation being hard, there is a lot of focus on creating good new ideas. They're right, that's really hard, but innovation is about much more than that - it's really about sticking with the good new idea for a long period of time when there are no obvious (to most people) incentives to do so, economic or otherwise.
Re: Coming up with something truly new is much, much harder than people give it credit for.
I have to disagree. The ancient Greeks played with idea of the Sun being the center of the solar system, along with inventing gear systems, and programmable mechanical robots (sometimes using wound thread). Ideas similar to natural selection preceded Darwin, but in some cases apparently kept quiet or wrapped in metaphor out of fear of religious backlash.
There is almost no invention that didn't have similar or simultaneous invention counterparts. It seems when the surrounding technology or precursors are in place, people put 2 + 2 together relatively quickly.
The only "one big leap" I can name right now is the piano. It did borrow from the harpsichord, but appears to be a single-minded attempt to make the volume of a note controllable, like a clavichord, but loud enough for performances. One needed a lot more parts than a harpsichord or clavichord had to do this well. Basically a wealthy person of royalty gave the inventor lots of time and resources to tinker.
From Fabian Tassano: "Regarding the version of “genius” that is currently in retreat but still occasionally used: many people seem to have a simplistic idea of what it takes to be one. According to one popular model, all that is required is an increase in the magnitude of certain qualities which everyone already possesses in some measure. Make the particular qualities pronounced enough, and you get to genius. But a better way to understand the concept — assuming we’re applying the word to (say) Gauss or Picasso, rather than John Cleese or Wayne Rooney — may be that a genius has a particular capacity, which on a certain level can seem obvious or unremarkable, but which no one else has. A genius, on this understanding, is a person uniquely capable of making a leap ‘off the path’. With hindsight the leap may seem simple or obvious, but at the time no one else was, apparently, capable of making it. A potential leap of this kind is made possible by preceding leaps. Nevertheless its actual occurrence may go on not happening for decades. During that time there may be clear pointers towards it. Yet it is not until a genius comes along that the leap actually happens."
On the general topic of ideas, I think necessity really is the mother of invention.
Even if it's just the need to make a living, or a desire to see something that you think would be cool but doesn't exist.
As for coming up with "something truly new", sometimes it's just about re-arranging what already exists into a never-before tried configuration.
e.g. Some people would say the iPhone was nothing new, how it borrowed/stole something from everyone going back to the first caveman etc., while others remember how different the industry (I daresay, world even) was before and after it.
It would be nice if there was a public git repository of random ideas for everyone to add to and build upon. A crowdsourced brainstorming session over time.
Truly new ideas are so hard because they require an entirely new mindset to contain them. First you need the mindset or else the ideas look like nonsense.
Like your example, leaps in math may be easy to see in retrospect but were hard to come by without anticipating a world that supports their existence: The concept of zero. The concept of limits. The concept of imaginary numbers. None of these are hard concepts, but on face value they seem arbitrary and "not entirely real". It is only deeply through exploring their implications that they have value. This is difficult not only because there are so many possible random ideas that lead to nowhere but also because fruitful ones seem like they must have been considered already.
How many people thought that "zero" might be a useful abstraction but didn't go further because it seemed like it must already have been considered? If you want to have a new idea, take a germ of a simple idea and follow it curiously without self-doubt. Think of the famous story of how Feynman came up with quantum electrodynamics: trying to understand the physics of a wobbling plate.
Most of the ideas that already exist in the world, I would actively reject out of fear, examples, putting current carrying wires into water (heater), metals weighing 800 kg moving with high speed (cars).
So I guess we (at least I) are rejecting quite a lot of potentially useful ideas?
> We take the sun being the center of the universe for granted today, but it was an extremely non-obvious fact for the smartest people in the world for millenia
When did the sun become the center of the universe? I thought it wasn't even near the center of our galaxy, much less the universe, though I seem to recall that expansion makes it look that way because all the other galaxies we can see are moving away from us.
True, but unfortunately the whole story of that is lost in time and we can not accurately gauge the brilliance of their execution in relation to the brilliance of the idea itself.
These two different ways your brain works on ideas, focused and diffused, were my biggest takeaways from Barbara Oakley's Learning How To Learn class. I've found that actively going between them, say by studying hard for 90 minutes and then going for a long walk, has been tremendous for learning.
Highly recommend the course (or the book form, A Mind for Numbers).
“ These stories suggest that an initial period of concentration—conscious, directed attention—needs to be followed by some amount of unconscious processing.”
This. The give and take between conscious focus and unconscious mind wandering has never let me down when working on complex ideas.
Before I had children, I found the "unconscious processing" part more difficult, because my time was simply _my time_ to do with what I pleased... so I would often try to work harder, leading to less productivity and more spinning in circles.
After having children, my time is obviously more structured and I've found the regimen of childcare to be a wonderful diversion from thinking about systems and complexity.
Taking multiple walks a day also helps immensely. The trick is not trying to think about my work when walking, just absorbing the sounds, sights, and smells of the world around.
There's plenty of new ideas around, you don't have to generate them yourself. If you ask in forums or search the web you can get a big list. The problem is culling the list for practical and successful ideas. Somebody has to invest the time and/or money do actually do it, and accept the high risk of failure typical of startups and new open-source projects. That's probably the bottleneck.
Ideas are cheap, execution is not.
Here's a free sample tip: Dynamic Relational. It's the new "plastic" (a movie reference). The NoSql movement has shown a market/desire for dynamic databases. But with Dynamic Relational you get dynamism AND sql; you don't have to choose one or the other. And you can set constraints/rules to gradually make it more "static" like traditional RDBMS.
I feel, in my opinion, getting an idea and generating something comparatively easier part compared to actually educating the market / users about what the idea is and what is the solution we have generated, we all see / are a part of so many good products which just had a steep learning curve and hence failed / didnt get accepted.
I'm curious of specific examples. Functional programming is possibly an example. It takes a good long time for many to become productive with it, and with some it will never click. It's hard to actually know if its a personal preference or something inherently better. After all, code is more for humans to read than it is for computers.
James Altucher, who's posts used to appear frequently on HN maybe 6 or so years ago and had a few good ones about how he would write down every idea (10-20 a day) and his methods for validating them. I haven't read anything of his for a while, but he still seems to write a lot about ideas.
I can relate to that feeling. When you just figure it out, not even thinking about your problem, just doing something mundane and unrelated. But that stage of concentration and struggle is crucial. You need to care about the problem, have some investment in it.
And it's so satisfying seeing the solution work, especially if you don't know the correctness 100%.
As DeBono says "Good ideas are obvious in hindsight".
I have no shortage of ideas, most pretty ordinary, some very small number good.
It's a very long journey though from good idea to release of a successful software product. Takes time, money, motivation, technical skill, not making big mistakes and that absolutely required ingredient, luck.
The article is about maths, but could equally apply to debugging or software design. The overworking a problem phenomenon described earlier in the article sounds like "analysis paralysis".
>In this view of creative momentum, the key to solving a problem is to take a break from worrying, to move the problem to the back burner, to let the unwatched pot boil.
I noticed the same thing about my poker game back when I used to play religiously.
Taking a week or two long break from playing invariably improved my game.
None of my poker buddies understood the phenomena, but every single one of us experienced it.
I'm curious if anyone has run into situation where being an "idea" person has been a negative at work. Sometimes there is the perception of ideation as a waste of time, or that the ideator (is that a word?) is one of those "whacky ideas" people. "Why are you going for walks, don't you have work to do?"
As a former mathematician who can relate very well to the article, I can say that most of the self-described 'ideas people' I've met are charlatans who really aren't doing the necessary groundwork.
Talking about them may be to see which ones resonate with people and are perhaps more valuable to do. Ideas people can be full of ideas and so they don't hold them too dearly because they'll have more ideas tomorrow. Sharing them's a way of testing and dismissing the majority that won't get traction.
