[HN Gopher] Where Do New Ideas Come From?
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       Where Do New Ideas Come From?
        
       Author : whack
       Score  : 48 points
       Date   : 2020-01-19 14:49 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nationalgeographic.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nationalgeographic.com)
        
       | zupreme wrote:
       | The absence of innerspeak.
       | 
       | When you stop "talking", you automatically start "listening".
        
         | coder1001 wrote:
         | I feel new ideas come from the opposite, when thinking (and
         | partly doing inner-speak) and not listening.
         | 
         | Listening is just exploring whats already out there?
        
       | effnorwood wrote:
       | My butt.
        
       | matthewmorgan wrote:
       | You guessed it folks. Frank Stallone
        
       | decasteve wrote:
       | Reminds me of this Leonard Cohen quote: If I knew where the good
       | ideas came from, I'd go there more often.
       | 
       | I seem to remember him saying this a few times over the years and
       | on occasion he'd say it as 'good songs' rather than 'good ideas'.
        
       | lordnacho wrote:
       | I often wondered about this while running a quant group at a
       | hedge fund.
       | 
       | Once your domain is somewhat specific, you tend to understand
       | your own action constraints. We have this many guys with these
       | particular skills (algos, networks, etc) and we can only consider
       | things that might make at least some amount. And it needs to be
       | done within some horizon.
       | 
       | Amazingly, it's much easier to have ideas if you have more
       | constraints. Did you ever get asked by your teacher to write a
       | story about anything? I always found that totally impossible. But
       | a short story with a single protagonist, 4 pages long, occurring
       | during some major life event, that's a lot easier to get started
       | on.
       | 
       | We built a page of potential things to investigate. They were
       | always things built around some observation someone had while
       | becoming experts. So for instance I'd stared at swap rates for a
       | long time and wondered about whether there were inefficiencies we
       | could look at. Also there was a look at different ways to use
       | options, another thing we were strong in. Everything that worked
       | was something adjacent to existing knowledge. Ended up spinning
       | out a currency fund that did quite well.
        
         | growlist wrote:
         | > Did you ever get asked by your teacher to write a story about
         | anything? I always found that totally impossible.
         | 
         | You could have written a story about writing a story.
        
       | acvny wrote:
       | What a bad article. Started so well and then finished in a haste.
       | There is a whole theory of invention called TRIZ. One idea there
       | is tht transcending matter phase boundaries could lead to new
       | inventions.. worth looking up.
        
       | djokkataja wrote:
       | > Todd: I'm thinking of something a bit like erm the flap on a
       | video tape
       | 
       | This doesn't sound like his design thinking operates in terms of
       | analogies. It sounds more like he's imagining something which he
       | feels he can best _describe_ to his fellow designers by an
       | analogy ( "a bit like...").
        
       | AndrewKemendo wrote:
       | We don't know enough about the brain/mind to give anything like a
       | measurable answer to this. It's all speculation.
       | 
       | However something rings true about the concept of analogies being
       | instructive in idea formation. I often think about it as
       | adjusting the assumptions that the mind uses when planning. In
       | that sense, it looks just like improvisation or what we call
       | exploration in Reinforcement Learning.
       | 
       | Good mental models of the world will result in more accurate
       | simulations when you mix and match the assumptions/starting
       | points. Some of those simulations might not be extant and you can
       | take action to test whether they work in the real world. If they
       | do, then boom you've got an idea made real.
        
         | patcon wrote:
         | > We don't know enough about the brain/mind to give anything
         | like a measurable answer to this. It's all speculation.
         | 
         | You might be interested in the Leiden Theory of linguistics. It
         | basically posits that language is an evolved semiotic organism
         | that lives within the hospitable ecological niche of our minds,
         | and cohabits within the vessel of our biology:
         | http://www.himalayanlanguages.org/files/driem/pdfs/prague.pd...
        
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