[HN Gopher] Where Do New Ideas Come From? ___________________________________________________________________ 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... ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-01-19 23:01 UTC)