Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)
henrikkarlsson.xyz244 points by felixbraun a day ago
244 points by felixbraun a day ago
The "new ideas are fragile" is certainly true. I'm struggling with something I'm building which I think is extremely cool but technically difficult, but which if based on the reaction of friends and family I'd abandoned long ago. Only after having worked on it for 2 years and really got it working technically did I see a small spark in my dad's eyes as he said "oh, you can make MONEY off of this?". I feel like I have a strong internal compass but I have to admit external validation is needed at some point, but I noticed some people I just cannot share ideas with. They're in the habit of shooting down anything, and they would have found 100 reasons that any famous company or product would have failed. Unsurprisingly these people have not achieved much themselves, never taking any risk.
> I noticed some people I just cannot share ideas with. They're in the habit of shooting down anything, and they would have found 100 reasons that any famous company or product would have failed
You’re on the wrong message board then haha
You can't tell people anything (2004)
https://web.archive.org/web/20091025030730/https://habitatch...
I’ve known about the “new ideas are fragile” concept for a while and it’s why I generally will never criticize someone’s early work or ideas, but rather try to hype them up. Because of this, technical people with new ideas and projects have been more likely to come to me early on when they wanna show what they’ve been working on. Admittedly, I actually do think a lot of the ideas I’m presented with are bad, but a smart person starting with a seemingly bad idea may still end up somewhere very interesting. Never be the shooter down of new ideas.
I'd consider yourself blessed to be surrounded by cynics. I've always found myself with the opposite scenario where people are overly kind even when I specifically ask them not to be. If you're reasonably objective, I think you can tell if a criticism is garbage or warranted. But if whatever you're making is just the greatest thing since sliced bread then the feedback is completely useless.
People will sometimes wish you to follow their footsteps. That is because they wish you succeed and they have a framework that lead to their own success. And by success I mean something as simple as just surviving so far.
That means they may try to tell you to give up on any idea that does not fit their framework, simply because having no experience with means it’s riskier than things that do fit.
I don’t mean to defend this behavior, neither to say this is definitely what is happening here, but if it applies, I think it’s a good idea to frame this as people wishing you well, in their own twisted way.
I understand what you're saying but the last line is kind of weird no? Why do you need to villify them if they didn't give you good feedback? Why do you care so much that you have to mention they "have not acheived much themselves, never taken any risk" etc.
The entire point of feedback is to see it as impersonal and not a value judgement on you (the creator) vrs the project.
Like okay, what if someone was extremely successful and taken a lot of risks and repeats the same feedback you've gotten. Would that make the feedback magically true?
Instead of judging the people who give you feedback, judge the feedback itself and let it go. In the end, you disagreed with them because you knew what was right to do. There is no point thinking about them as good or bad people but just whose feedback was objectively wrong.
Again this is a bit of a ramble but my point is that "i will prove them stupid people wrong" can turn into internal resentment as well where you judge your victory by how much you "showed them" rather than how much you showed yourself. It is very likely you can get all the success in the world and those people will still think you are a loser. You cannot win that battle and if you actually believe them thinking that of you matters, you will not be happy even in success.
I don't mean to vilify them, I think it's just a matter of fact that if you habitually poke 100 holes in any idea, both your own and others, you will do the very safe thing.
If someone had taken risks, had ideas, seen some fail some work and they said my idea is bad, I would listen to them more for sure. Maybe my idea is bad, only time will tell. I'm not saying these people are stupid, many of them are smart. I think if you are smart it actually gets easier to poke holes in an idea.
Just read the beginning but I feel like there are obvious counter examples. Basically lots of academic environments. I personally (and somewhat sadly) did my best work in grad school, thanks entirely to the environment. All of us in the lab I studied in benefitted from being around each other every day. From what I’ve seen, this is very common throughout history in academia.
Maybe it’s pressure that kills ideas, or competition, or premature desire to commercialize, or just the kind of people that become founders; it’s definitely not co-working in and of itself.
Should add I agree that solitary reflection is important, just not that being surrounded by like minded people is detrimental.
I thought Grothendieck's "example" was a good one. It's not that the academic environment stymied him, it's that he built up a practice of solitary creativity that helped him take inputs from his surroundings and fold them into his own framework. Both the solitary practice and the communication with fellow leading mathematicians was essential for his growth and output.
I think the point the post was trying to make was that; spend too long in an "academic" or "professional" environment and you become too contoured by the mores of the establishment to truly innovate. Spend too little time and you toil away in a cave, at best reinventing things that were invented already without your knowledge. I think in a heavily networked world like today, where there's also a lot of competitive pressure in these establishments, the solitude is probably worth thinking about more.
It's something I think a lot about in terms of capital allocation in academia and in tech, both in terms of monetary capital and the capital of time (which is limited by its very nature.) Investors and funds are heavily affected by the trends surrounding them but a minimum amount of funding and social buy-in is needed to really develop ideas. There's a lot more I have to say on the topic but it's perhaps a little too tangent to this article itself.
To academics, how often do you end up chasing an idea because it was popular in a conference? How often do you chase grants? Math might be one of the "easier" fields to be adventurous since mathematical innovation can be independently verified relatively simply compared to many other fields.
I didn't invent IoT. But in 2001 I independently proposed building something we'd now immediately recognise as IoT, and my lecturer dismissed it as simplistic and pointless for my dissertation..
Academia is only as good as the people in it.
I ended up doing traffic shaping in the Linux kernel because my house mate had edonkey running all day..
Ha! In 97 on I proposed a web page that would read content from a database (for multilingual support). My supervisor demanded I decide if I was building a web page or a database because I couldn’t do both!
Other examples like Grothendieck: Wiles (Fermat), Perelman (Poincare), Newton (calculus), Ramanujan.
> Spend too little time and you toil away in a cave, at best reinventing things that were invented already without your knowledge.
Grothendieck disputes this point. He reinvented the wheel many times when he was 17-20 years old, but believes it was training for accessing the required cognitive spaces. He says:
A few years after I finally established contact with the world of mathematics at Paris, I learned, among other things, that the work I’d done in my little niche [. . . had] been long known to the whole world [. . .]. In the eyes of my mentors, to whom I’d described this work, and even showed them the manuscript, I’d simply “wasted my time”, merely doing over again something that was “already known”. But I don't recall feeling any sense of disappointment. [. . .] Without recognizing it, I’d thereby familiarized myself with the conditions of solitude that are essential for the profession of mathematician, something that no-one can teach you. [. . .]And here I am thinking that I should simply give some more compliments to my colleagues because I want to spread genuine good vibes. Even if it already has been “invented” by others, I am not hearing enough genuine compliments in the workplace.
Meaning that even if an idea already has been invented, that doesn’t mean there’s no room for your implementation of it. There still may be room.
I struggled with the same in academia. I found genuine beauty and value in improving something implemented. But I also felt a bit "stuck", as if I was just stuck in a groove unable to pedal up. I wasn't the only PhD that felt this way and spoke with others at the time about the feeling.
I think there's a point of diminishing returns where improving something isn't worth it. But I mean, if you're innovating at the level of a PhD, does anyone really know anything at all? You are, by definition, pushing the boundary of human knowledge.
One of the least innovative teams I've worked on involved engineers that would try to force group discussion on ideas early on. Nearly every project or initiative I tried to build there met significant friction.
The most innovative teams I've worked on implored, and maybe incentivized, periods of reflection and evolution of ideas. Often we built POCs along side that evolution. They'd often juggle many different new ideas. Each, often, had its own evolution. Whatever shook out is what won and we often had pivots in line if we needed them.
I think in general it's what Sam says it is: if you artificially force people to defend their ideas early on then you end up coming up with pretty mid ideas.
History of creativity, I reckon. There's always been places and times that are just fertile. 470BCE Athens, the Renaissance, 1900 Vienna, 1990s Bristol...
#1: Fantastic article. #2: I wonder if, (Overly reductionist take on a nuanced and carefully composed article...) a key element, in addition to the solitude central requirement. (Note: Must it be during youth? That was a trend observed in the article. Brain plasticity, habits etc. And does this mean truly being alone and free from distractions, or just away from negative nancies, bosses, and similar arechetypes?) It must be balanced with the ability to collaborate with the right people. (Or the sort mentioned in the article)
Both in balance. Freedom to work out the ideas in whatever direction you want, "It's been done before"; "this won't work", "This is bad for your career" aside, along with smart, open, supportive people who you can exchange ideas with and collaborate on.
You will note that almost all the mathematical, and renowned natural sciences people of history and contemporary took traditional education paths, i.e. phds at research universities. Hmm.
Reminds me of this quote:
> "A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a joke or worried to death by a frown on the right person's brow."
-Charles Browder
I think that teams can be very creative; with a “whole is greater than the sum of the parts” effect, but it has to be the right team.
Personality fit, and synergy have as much to do with it, as raw talent.
I have worked with teams of highly-talented and educated people that actually had a “whole is less than the sum of the parts” effect.
I think efforts to commodify creativity are doomed to fail.
Perhaps this too explains the frustration one may feel at times working with LLMs to code - the steering/interpretation by the LLM may distract and second-guess our process within our cognitive space.
There are a few mathematicians that have analyzed and wrote about their process. A recent (IMO) good writing on the subject is David Bessis' "Mathematica" (I found this review https://siliconreckoner.substack.com/p/review-of-mathematica... which I haven't had a chance to fully read). It covers both a personal perspective as well as examples from Grothendieck, Descartes and others.
Having had the opportunity to have ideas and pursue them extensively as a corporate employee, startup founder, and independent researchers, all I can say is that there seems to be a violent agreement of how stuff actually happens and that it's almost never fully made possible in either industry or academia. It's like a living irony.
For a deeper treatment of the broader subject - one of the most cited books is the "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"
> there seems to be a violent agreement of how stuff actually happens and that it's almost never fully made possible in either industry or academia.
what does this mean?
Writing down potential corporate strategy has made me consider how to incorporate such ideas in my own Startups with much greater success - https://s-1.vercel.app/
> what they are referring to as solitude is rather something like “a state of mind.” They are putting themselves in a state where the opinions of others do not bother them and where they reach a heightened sensitivity for the larval ideas and vague questions that arise within them.
Reminds me of that Rick Rubin quote:
The confidence that I have in my taste and my ability to express what I feel has proven helpful for artists.
Owl in owl's way I in mine Can't get to sleep
Wind from the sea Butterflies in embankment weeds Never resting (1915) Taneda Santoka
I think solitude is great. The hard part is finding the right people to talk to. I'm not sure if this is a Silicon Valley thing, but I've met some people who use a lot of jargon in a way that feels partly about status. At first I thought they just had a lot of ideas. Then they started talking about things in my own field, and I realized they were getting some pretty basic concepts wrong.
My guess is that some of this comes from listening to too many podcasts. You can pick up a lot of jargon and big ideas pretty quickly, and some podcasts are better at giving you that "oh, now I get it" feeling than actually helping you understand the ideas.
I don't live in Silicon Valley but dealing with same issue, finding people brainstorm or discuss ideas is very hard these days. A lot of trend following, listening to same podcast and reading same books, emphasis being on non fiction, using terms like neuroplasticity, neurodivergence etc. Then I end up talking with with Claude, which can be useful sometimes but cant replace human creativity.
> but I've met some people who use a lot of jargon in a way that feels partly about status.
You mean basically every HN commenter nowadays?
Big words. Big terms. Heavy phrasing. All to say a bunch of nothing. True knowledge lies in simplicity. True wisdom lies in humility. Both of which are sorely missing around here.
Probably not enough data on this yet since it's a new unlock, but I think it's perfectly possible to do great work today without interfacing with other humans directly. Some weird off-spectrum people (the kind this article is talking about) might even prefer to or work better this way.
It seems social dynamics exist all the same in technology, the internet, and AI. The evidence is obvious - all of these things were created by humans with social goals and conditioning. I'd say truly distancing is not a new unlock but something very old. It's so hard to get away.
Why is there always a self-imposed need to extract something from ourselves instead of just being? I really hate this in the modern world. Maybe one of the worst defining traits of industrial times.
Because people generally will not pay for others to "be". And they will not give you food or shelter if you don't pay. And the money has never been more concentrated away from the people who would prefer to just be.
If you don't self-impose, society will structurally impose it on you.
Well of course but there are many ways to survive very close to “just being” that are seen as not fulfilling potential or a wasted life. It’s not a full binary but living close to one end is shunned and we internalize it as a waste of space when really it is more sustainable for the planet and mind.
I saw this video of an American tourist in the Mediterranean, stunned that people would drink one coffee for hours and didn't feel pressured to order more.
He said, back home, he would have been getting dirty looks, if he wasn't constantly justifying his existence in a place by either consuming or producing something.
That coffee shop isn't paying much rent. When your local leech increases the rent, you have to sell more coffees, and kick people out who don't buy more coffees.
I lament the state of the modern world too.
Unfortunately, the modern world is run not by empaths, but by psychopaths. Even if we get to a state where we look out for each other, I fear it would be quickly subverted.
The article is about aligning yourself to a higher goal of creation, not extraction. Several of the examples given show ideas as something that is received, not created. That's why simply hard work and focus don't result in them.
Accessing the kind of "feminine" mental states that Grothendieck talks about, basically a type of creative flow state, is not an example of that. It's in the realm of meditative, passionate and artistic.
Because we don't want to be useless consumers of resources - it's embarrassing.
Why would you want to create things for people to use if you regard them as "useless"? This attitude is so alien and repulsive to me.
I don't get to control whether someone is motivated to contribute to society. If someone was raised to not care about contributing - to me that feels like an ultimate limit on how meaningful their life can be but that's their problem (and their parents shortcoming)
But what I can do is ensure that I orient my own life around contribution and pass that on to my kids.
Not at all a modern idea. Pico della Mirandola would rank mere being the lowest form of existence, the same sort of existence a plant has.
Mirandola's is the oldest source for the ranking of being that I can recall off the top of my head, but the idea is almost certainly even older.
> On man when he came into life the Father conferred the seeds of all kinds and the germs of every way of life. Whatever seeds each man cultivates will grow to maturity and bear in him their own fruit. If they be vegetative, he will be like a plant. If sensitive, he will become brutish. If rational, he will grow into a heavenly being. If intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God.
- Oration on the Dignity of Man
It goes even farther back than that, I mean the stoics were preaching things like live each day like it's your last, and there are proverbs from ancient China like "being the rat in the granary than the rat in the toilet". At the same time there are plenty of counter examples and people teaching the opposite, like Diogenes.
I think it's useless trying to find councel regarding these things, people will just say what they believe is right. It's mostly just seeking external validation.
The end state should just be a lack of judgement -- right now we are too preoccupied with minmaxing so called productivity which is mostly an illusion most times. Much of this comes from a self imposed sense of guilt, in that doing nothing becomes like eating junk food. And this sense of guilt is in turn cultivated by the environment at large. Try telling people you're in between jobs or taking a sabbatical, they'll just assign you to the "loser" or "unemployed" class automatically.
Interesting thank you. Mirandola is still modern in my eyes. Btw I really enjoy marginalia. Helped me find Tom Murphy [1], which I’m kind of basing this being modern off of, through the explore page. Crazy full circle moment.
Why is there a need to extract nectar from flowers, instead of just beeing? —Bee
That sounds like a recipe for living like hunter/gatherers. I for one appreciate modern medecine, indoor plumbing, and hope to live long enough to see someone step foot on Mars. Each to their own, but I appreciate all the work our ancestors have put forth, planting the trees whose shade they knew they wouldn't enjoy.
I’m going to sound rude here but I think the debate around solitudal achievements suffers a great deal from bias. For one, survivor bias favours the ideas emerging from deep thinking work. We overestimate however how much of that is the deep thinking vs quantity tradeoff. Einstein had many, many, many ideas and the majority of them were pretty bad if not outright outrageous. If you have the time and environment to produce a million ideas and pursue them, your likelihood of a good idea goes up. A second issue is that ideas almost never come up in isolation. The countless women behind the men erased from history tell exactly this story. Nowadays we fight the same fights about attribution. I should write a detailed account on why the arguments named in the article are not supported by evidence from cognitive research, but I for one am convinced a conductive environment is 1000% the ingredient necessary to come up with revolutionary work, rather than some magical great man thinking fantasy.
What exactly are you ranting against? You complain about three unrelated points in your comments, all to say your belief is that a conductive environment is what is necessary for ideas to flourish. Yes, well of course, that is the point of the article.
Another take from David Lynch: https://www.amazon.com/Catching-Big-Fish-Meditation-Consciou...
> Ideas are like fish.
> If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper.
> Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They're huge and abstract. And they're very beautiful.
Even though he liberally sprinkled pseudoscientificism into his metacognition, the older I get, the more I think he really got it.
FYI the so-called Bertrand Russell quotation is apparently in fact an expanded paraphrase of Carl Sagan, The Burden of Skepticism (1987):
Britain has produced a range of remarkably gifted multidisciplinary scientists and scholars who are sometimes described as polymaths. The group included, in recent times, Bertrand Russell, A. N. Whitehead, J. B. S. Haldane, J. D. Bernal, and Jacob Bronowski. Russell commented that the development of such gifted individuals required a childhood period in which there was little or no pressure for conformity, a time in which the child could develop and pursue his or her own interests no matter how unusual or bizarre.
Still earlier Sagan The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (1977), Chapter 8, 'The Future Evolution of the Brain'.
This is so true. I've had some inventive ideas during certain phases of being a hobbyist and very small business owner. Sometimes I'd share them prematurely. Just killed the momentum, and I'd look back and say, "what happened?"
Ever hear the very early Talking Heads song, "Artists Only" - David Byrne remarks,
"pretty soon now, I will be bitter, pretty soon now, I will be a quitter. You... can't... see... it... til it's finished"
My father knew this too, intuitively. He did some really nice, not-for-profit, practical projects on a very low budget. He'd like to comment during those fruitful years, "now, that's a pregnant idea" - the point being, perhaps, that you want to allow the idea to develop way past the fertilization stage, before releasing it into the world. The British have a term, "half-baked idea" that may run along the same lines.
What a nice essay. Thank you, author! It's hard to imagine these insights being hatched by interactions on social media, where everyone is a critic, and always so cock-sure that their biases are so correct.
Of course, our educational system is loaded the the dialectic-style interaction style, where there is a dogma that the truth can be arrived at by negation of opinions through a Socratic question-and-answer dialogue, but that often often goes nowhere. In my most productive R&D experiences, where I was often the only guy in the lab who had various consultants milking the billable hours, the best bosses would give plenty of space for diving into trying this or that, because they respected that intuition needs to run free. Then, the numbers and other results would validate the assumptions or instincts. But just point-blank instinctively shooting down every new idea... often goes nowhere - and happens so often. Too often.
Thanks again.
Now that you bring up the British and bosses, I am reminded of the scene in the imitation game where Churchill just goes "give them whatever they want" to the general.
In most orgs nowadays, sometimes we are too tied down with pragmatism. Somehow we're asked for deadlines before even starting work. Somehow we need to define the end product and design before even starting. Only the most menial chores have their entire paths laid out. Anything great, by its virtue of being new, has unknowns that cannot be planned for beforehand.
The Socratic dialogue you bring up assumes that ideas can be interrogated to reveal itself to all members involved but frequently there's no way to put it into words until you do it. It morphs and changes as work is put into it. If Picasso described what he wanted to paint to some random artist would it have produced Picasso?
Under certain conditions you may get more good ideas than others.
This can be cultivated and if you end up with one or more ideas in excess of what you can possibly deploy, that would be a surplus.
Under ideal conditions that is.
So it stands to reason that ideally the same place that good ideas come from, is the exact same place where more of them die than anything else :\
I've always found it kind of oppressive that I'm only allowed to be one thing. There's simply too much to do!
(Allowed by space and time, I mean)
It's called a shower.
I feel like this is relevant to the takes of "ai psychosis". I spent about 600 hours working alone with AI before I was ready to collaborate, re-discovering things in my own process that others may have already known sprinkled throughout twitter and youtube, etc. and really being open to the wonder of it all.
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