I haven't had time to read your post yet, but you might appreciate Elizabeth's post on Butterfly Ideas.

Curated. 

In some sense some of these ideas are "obvious" to me, but I nonetheless realized I hadn't really deeply integrated them into my models of rationalsphere progress. (In particular since a lot of my work is connected to "campus building", which is sort of pushing in the opposite direction of this post's model)

I feel a bit confused about to evaluate the validity of the model here (seems like the sort of thing where all the data about is intrinsically going to be pretty messy?), but appreciate it as a datapoint.

This post feels like it is claiming that removing the need to conform to others' beliefs is important for creativity, and speculating how you might do so. Is that right? If it is, then I'm eager to hear more. (And yes, I understand the irony of saying that.) This is an important topic to me as I can feel my thoughts are bent out of shape by social pressures. 

Being able to sense these pressures is a good thing, in my view. I'm not sure why I can; perhaps my "social detection" circuitry is one of the few parts of my brain which aren't crippled? But the upshot is that I might learn how to notice when I can think freely, and then cultivate those mind-states. 

And though I didn't intend to use some of the techniques you've described for exactly this purpose,  I have used them. And variants, too. 

Knausgaard's technique: I've tried writing so fast I can't self censor, but only for a few paragraphs at most. At least, for writing down thoughts whilst focusing/tuning cognitive strategies. Though in those cases, the censor isn't social. Instead, it is past trauma. When I'm babbling ideas and writing them as a series of bullet points, I might get to a page or so. On some occasions when I've had to write something before a deadline, I will explicitly use Knausgaard's technique to get past a block. But without focusing on what I don't like, it doesn't help. Really, all of the techniques I've tried in this space require Gendlin's focusing to fully work.

Introducing a long delay: This technique generalizes beyond averting social pressure, in my experience. If you're stuck on a problem, there's probably something wrong with your framing. Coming back to it after you've forgotten the framing lets you automatically see it with fresh eyes. In practice, this looks like storing a problem in an Anki deck and thinking about it once you see it again. It works suprisingly often. Which makes me wonder if there's some sort of optimal scheduling to revisit old problems. If I remember correctly, Anki reminds you of a card when you've begun to forget it, so maybe you just need to increase durations by a tad. 

And speaking of software solutions, one idea I had whilst reading your post was to automatically re-name all individuals in a text you're reading. This software would replace Alexander Grothendieck with ... Kübra Éliane throughout the essay. Likewise for the other names. The problem with this technique is if the individual's depicted in an awesome manner within the text, you may still associate their ideas with awe. 

A potential fix might be tuning your ontology to decouple ideas from the people who generated them. Unfortunately, BWT doesn't explain what that means. Here's someone else's description of the skill from a commen on LW:

I didn't know them and can only speak to how I did the tuning ontology thing. For about 2 weeks, I noted any time I was chunking reasoning using concepts. Many of them familiar LW concepts, and lots of others from philosophy, econ, law, common sense sayings, and some of my own that I did or didn't have names for. This took a bit of practice but wasn't that hard to train a little 'noticer' for. After a while, the pace of new concepts being added to the list started to slow down a lot. This was when I had around 250 concepts. I then played around with the ontology of this list, chunking it different ways (temporal, provenance, natural seeming clusters of related concepts, domain of usefulness, etc.). After doing this for a bit it felt like I was able to get some compressions I didn't have before and overall my thinking felt cleaner than before. Separately, I also spent some time explicitly trying to compress concepts into as pithy as possible handles using visual metaphors and other creativity techniques to help. This also felt like it cleaned things up. Compression helps with memory because chunking is how we use working memory for anything more complicated than atomic bits of info. Augmenting memory also relied on tracking very closely whether or not a given representation (such as notes, drawing etc.) was actually making it easier to think or was just hitting some other easily goodharted metric, like making me feel more organized etc.

With regard to 'tracking reality with beliefs' the most important thing I ever noticed afaict is whether or not my beliefs 1. have fewer degrees of freedom than reality and thus have any explanatory power at all and avoid overfitting, 2. vary with reality in a way that is oriented towards causal models/intervention points that can easily be tested (vs abstraction towers).

Great, apparently I'm in just the right place... I'm always alone and have few friends who might influence me to give up my wacky ideas! Wonderful.....

crickets

+9. This argues that some key puzzle pieces of genius include "solitude," and "sitting with confusion until open-curiosity allows you to find the right questions." This feels like an important key that I'm annoyed at myself for not following up on more. 

The post is sort of focused on "what should an individual do, if they want to cultivate the possibility of genius?".

One of the goals I have, in my work at Lightcone, is to ask "okay but can we do anything to foster genius at scale, for the purpose of averting x-risk?". This might just be an impossible paradox, where trying to make it on purpose intrinsically kills it before it can flower. I think it might be particularly impossible to do at massive scale – if you try to build a system for 1000s of geniuses, that system can't help but develop the pathologies that draw people into fashions that stifle the kind of thinking you need.

But, it doesn't seem impossible to foster-genius-on-the-margin at smallish scales.

Challenges that come immediately to mind:

1. how do you actually encourage, or teach people (or arrange for them to discover for themselves), how to sit with confusion, and tease out interesting questions?
2. by default, if you suggest a bunch of people spend time alone in thought, I think you mostly end up wasting a lot of people's time (and possibly destroying their lives?). Many geniuses don't seem that happy, and people who don't actually have the right taste/generators for that thinking to be productive I bet end up even more unhappy. If you try to filter for "has enough taste and/or IQ to have a decent shot", you probably immediately reintroduce all the problems this post argues against.
3. somehow the people need enough money to live, but any system for allocating money for this would either be hella exploitable, or very prone to centralization/fashion/goodhart collapse.
4. eventually, when an idea seems genuinely promising, your creativity needs to survive contact with others forming expectations of you.

I've been working on "how to encourage sitting with confusion." 

I think I've been less focused on "how to sit with open curiosity." (Partly because I am bad at it, and it feels harder to thread a needle between "enough open curiosity to identify novel important questions and reframings" without just failing to direct your attention towards the (rather quite dire and urgent) problems the x-risk community needs to figure out)

(But, Logan Strohl seems to be doing a pretty good job at teaching the cultivation of curiosity, which at least gives me hope that it is possible)

I think the unfortunate answer to the third bullet is "well, probably people basically need to self-finance during a longish period where they don't have something legibly worth funding." (But, this maybe suggests an ecosystem where it's sort of normal to have a day job that doesn't consume all your time)

...

What sort of in-person community is good for intellectual progress?

Notably: Lightcone had been working on the sort of coworking space this post argues against. We did stop work on the coworking space before this post even came out. I did have some concrete thoughts when reading this "maybe, with Lighthaven, we'll be able to correct this – Lighthaven more naturally fits into an ecosystem where people are off working mostly alone, but periodically they gather to share what they're working on, in a space that is optimized for exploring curiosity in a spacious way."

But, we haven't really put much attention into "foster a thing where more people make some attempt to go off and think alone on purpose" part.

This post rings true to me because it points in the same direction as many other things I've read on how you cultivate ideas. I'd like more people to internalise this perspective, since I suspect that one of the bad trends in the developed world is that it keeps getting easier and easier to follow incentive gradients, get sucked into an existing memeplex that stops you from thinking your own thoughts, and minimise the risks you're exposed to. To fight back against this, ambitious people need to have in their heads some view of how uncomfortable chasing of vague ideas without immediate reward can be the best thing you can do, as a counter-narrative to the temptation of more legible opportunities.

In addition to Paul Graham's essay that this post quotes, some good companion pieces include Ruxandra Teslo on the scarcity and importance of intellectual courage (emphasising the courage requirement), this essay (emphasising motivation and persistence), and this essay from Dan Wang (emphasising the social pulls away from the more creative paths). 

I did like this post and, as a rather uncreative and boring mind most of the time, I find one aspect a bit understated. This comment is largely aligned with the old adage about inventiveness being 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

I don't think it's the ideas that are removed but the willingness to put some work into exploring the idea when other's are perhaps not on board. I do think that fits well with the point about not bringing an idea out into the world right away. Suggesting to me that one does spend some time teasing out various aspect of the core idea before trying to get much feedback from others. But one could then share in a partial way -- for instance, when stuck on some specific aspect of the general working out of the idea -- in order to get over some block/hurdle without really getting into the is this good or bad. That avoids the external disincentive to pursue or even succeed.

I think it also points to who you will seek help/assistance from as your creative efforts proceed. Generally you're looking for support and help not merely critical feedback. In the group setting like the shared workspace bit you loose control of that I suspect. 

Great post!

As much as a I like LessWrong for what it is, I think it's often guilty of a lot of the negative aspects of conformity and coworking that you point out here. Ie. killing good ideas in their cradle. Of course, there are trade-offs to this sort of thing and I certainly appreciate brass-tacks and hard-nosed reasoning sometimes. There is also a need for ingenuity, non-conformity, and genuine creativity (in all of its deeply anti-social glory).

Thank you for sharing this! It helped me feel LessWeird about the sorts of things I do in my own creative/explorative processes and it gave me some new techniques/mindset-things to try.

I suspect there is some kind of internal asymmetry between how we process praise and rejection, especially when it comes to vulnerable things like our identities and our ideas. Back when I used to watch more "content creators" I remember they would consistently gripe that they could read 100 positive comments and still feel most affected by the one or two negative ones.

Well, cheers to not letting our thinking be crushed by the status quo! Nor by critics, internal or otherwise!

See also John Cleese on creativity, subsequently turned into a short book when it went viral.

And The Net and the Butterfly by Olivia Fox Cabane

Might the pressure you're referring to be described as the value/pursuit of monotonic improvement?

Might the solutions you're suggesting be described as techniques for getting out of local maxima in a field?

The isolation that I hear you pointing at, I would describe as thinking two moves ahead in a game to seek optimal states, instead of immediately ruling out all possible sets of moves where the first makes things "worse" in some way.

Is there an article that will help me have LESS ideas?

The LessWrong Review runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2024. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.

Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?

I really liked this essay a lot, especially how it shows the importance and necessity of creativity in such a rigorous field like mathematics for being able to explore and potentially end up wrong. This sprung up many thoughts:

• Advice I had heard from Jacob Lagerros, "If you're not embarrassed by what you ship, you ship too late."

  • Contra the first technique the author mentions, having the audacity to put out a bad product seems good for feeling the fear but continuing to work anyways, continuing to explore what's unknown to you.

• The etymology of the words experiment, experience, and finally expert all are based on the root "-per", meaning "to try, to dare, to risk".

  • In "Lean Manufacturing" Eric says "I’ve come to believe that learning is the essential unit of progress for startups." This is in response to putting out features of a product, finding out they don't work but realizing what it is that they got wrong and being able to update accordingly and reorient in the direction that leads to a better product.

• Tip: work so fast you don't have time to self-censor:

  • Writing and editing are two very different processes, and writing as if you're writing the final result will be will stunt you.
  • I often write without spellcheck on, otherwise it stops the flow.

• Quote from another Paul Graham essay "How to Think for Yourself", "To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel."

  • In your post you mention "being exceptionally talented and trained was, in the long run, not enough to do groundbreaking work because they lacked the capacity to go beyond the context they had been raised in"
  • There's also reminiscing of "definition of sanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results"; if you don't do something different then you won't get different things.
  • The author mentions "But strangely enough, this fragile margin is where the ideas that make our society possible come from" and I think that doesn't get emphasized enough in most formal schooling I've been a part of; instead of asking what people can bring to the table it's mostly "only make time for what others have done".

• Personal advice on doing projects: Instead of waiting for the perfect opportunity, find a good one, do good and optimize from there (if you're in the state of not being established and aren't sure what to do). (This advice may be wrong, not certain.)

• When writing a more important email I can't draft the response in the email response, I have to write it out in my notes. I type out the shitty, low quality ideas and then am able to see most importantly 1. the full idea, and 2. exactly what it is that doesn't work. If it's not being observed though, I stay with writer's block.

• A note on the EA / Rat culture that I've been a part of; I've seen people move into this community and if they say something that's possibly not true / even moderately disagreeable, people will quip back some sort of "That's not true:" and dominate the conversation for a while. The intention is to update, but I see people instead stop adding to the conversation out of fear of being wrong and chastised.

• I like this twitter thread that aims in a similar direction of this post, and exploring one's own thoughts

• Maybe a more palatable piece of advice comes from "Sailling True North" by James Stavridis mentions "Creativity and innovation can be paralyzed by fear of failure."

  • In this context he's speaking of war (where some of the advice in the post isn't applicable), but being able to not cave into pressure from outside forces but still recognize and allow those pieces of you that very well could be wrong to surface. This is quite delicate, but I'd argue is massively important.

Paul Graham

Link for the curious http://www.paulgraham.com/greatwork.html

Thanks for this post, and in particular for including Grothendieck as one of the examples to illustrate your ideas. I have thought that most people outside of mathematics, and even many that are studying math, are not familiar with him. So I like how you assume that such a reader will accept this and just start to read, in the first section, about a guy that is unknown to said theoretical reader. I think that shows respect for your audience.

There is one thing not related to your points but more to the work of Grothendieck that I would like to mention; your statement "It is his capacity to surface questions that set Grothendieck apart, more so than his capacity to answer them." (which I now took out of context, but still): I don't agree completely with this. For example, to a person not familiar with his work it sounds like as if he basically only came up with new questions. But equally important is that he was also able envision and to implement a solution to many of them. His SGA-seminar that ran for 9 years at IHES laid the foundation for what became modern algebraic geometry, and being a new theory it required a huge amount of ground work carried out during this seminar, large parts of which was done by Grothendieck himself. He then published the more foundational parts of this research, including the theory of schemes, in EGA, which is written mainly by him, with assistants from Dieudonné. Without this to me absurd amount of work on Grothendiecks part there would likely be nothing. At the time there was a need to generalize the concept of a variety to something defined over first any field and then also over any (commutative) ring, in particular the integers. Grothendieck's generalization is what is called a scheme, and in modern terminology a variety is a special type of scheme. So this being in the air at the time, someone else would have come up with some version of this theory. But the version that Grothendieck envisioned was also the one that became standard, and I doubt that that would have happened if Grothendieck himself did not actually put in the crazy amount of work that it required to go from this beautiful idea to a (more or less) finished theory. 

Moreover, it is really fascinating now to be able to read an English translation of "Récoltes..." that you so kindly provided links to. (Back when I was into this subject I could not find any translation and so I had not read it before.) In there he talks about his motivation for developing algebraic geometry over the integers, namely the Weil conjectures (already proved for curves by André Weil himself); these conjectures relate geometric properties (topology) of the the complex points of a variety to arithmetic properties of the defining polynomial equations of the variety (the behavior of the integer solutions to these equations). A simpler to state example of another conjecture relating topology to arithmetic, proved later by Faltings using Grothendieck's framework, is that there can only be a finite number of rational points on an algebraic curve of genus > 1. Here the genus is an invariant of the curve that becomes visible when we view the curve over the complex numbers. So the simplest example is the projective line, which can be defined by the equation x^2 + y^2 = 1 together with a point at infinity; viewed over the complex numbers this looks like a sphere (another name for this object is the Riemann sphere); it has genus 0 since there are no "holes" in it. (I should say that it is a curve due to it's algebraic dimension being 1; and if you look at its points with real coordinates you will see a curve (a circle); now we look at the points where the coordinates are allowed to be complex numbers, and then it will look like a sphere, hence a surface, this can potentially be a little confusing.) Next, an elliptic curve looks like a torus when viewed over the complex numbers, and so has it has one hole, hence genus 1. And if we look at a given curve over the complex numbers and it turns out that it has even more holes, then its genus will be greater than 1. So the genus is a topological invariant of the curve that we can see if we view the curve over the complex numbers. Now, the equation above has infinitely many solutions that are rational numbers; the number of rational points on an elliptic curve can vary and there is a whole theory for describing their structure; and what Faltings proved is that if a curve has genus >1 it can only have a finite number of rational points. For example, the projective curve defined by x^4+y^4=1 has genus 3, so by Faltings theorem it can only have a finite number of rational points, or in other words, the equation can only have a finite number of solutions where both x and y are rational numbers. (But for this particular equation it was proved already by Fermat that it only have the trivial rational solutions, or stated differently, the equation x^4+y^4=z^4 has only the trivial integer solutions where at least one of the coordinates are 0. As I'm sure everybody knows, Fermat also claimed to have a proof that this was true for all exponents larger than 2, but that wasn't proved until the 1990:s by Andrew Wiles, again using the framework laid out by Grothendieck as a foundation.) In short: The Weil-conjectures indicated a link between the topology (form) of the points with complex coordinates on a variety, and the integer solutions of the equations that defines the variety (arithmetic). Grothendieck envisioned a method to make use of this link that would first require him to generalize the definition of a variety to something that could exist over the integers. That generalization is what is known as a scheme.

So before Grothendieck it was only possible to talk about varieties as something that is defined over an algebraically closed field like the complex numbers. That's why I said "arithmetic properties of the defining equations" earlier. But from developing the theory of schemes, which can be define even over the integers while at the same time has classical varieties as a special type of scheme, it becomes possible to replace "arithmetic properties of the defining equations" with "properties of the rational points on the variety", thereby opening up the field of Arithmetic geometry. 

So back to "Récoltes...", Grothendieck talks about how he investigated this new undiscovered land; in this land, the Weil-conjectures was the capital, always visible at the horizon. But Grothendieck was exploring the whole country, down to the smallest cottage out in some distant province. I have to interpret this as that he was proving theorem after theorem that was needed for the foundation of his new theory but not directly related to the Weil-conjectures. In the end, Grothendieck and collaborators was able to prove 3 of the 4 Weil-conjectures using this newly developed theory. (The first of them had also been proved earlier using other methods). Then in 1970 Grothendieck left his position at IHES, to my understanding because they received funds from the military. Some years later, his student Deligné managed to prove the last of the Weil-conjectures, using the methods of Grothendieck, but not in the way that Grothendieck had envisioned (he wanted to do it by proving the so called "Standard conjectures", from which he already had showed that the last part of the Weil-conjectures would follow). He also left research mathematics for many years, but came back briefly in the 1980's with "Esquisse d'un Programme", including his "Dessins d'enfants" that can be used to describe Riemann surfaces, more precisely exactly those Riemann surfaces that arises as the complex points on an algebraic curve defined over the algebraic numbers. (Above we had two examples of such curves, the projective line and the Fermat-curve of genus 3). So in this program he actually surfaced the questions, whereas in the development of algebraic geometry there was already a need for a new framework, although your point that he was able to surface the right questions are valid also there. Anyway, this last research program is active to this day, but Grothendieck left it after a couple of years, during which he worked on the program alone. So in this case he was no longer able to put in the extreme work required to go from a question and idea to finished results. And I think this was my point (although it took a little more words than expected to convey it); that what really made Grothendieck so outstanding was not only ability to surface questions and his seminal ideas and visions, but equally much his ability to implement those ideas. (And to do that a second time was too much to ask; I assume that you are already familiar with what happened to Grothendieck later in his life, but if someone happens to read this and are not, I encourage you to read more about his life; in a way this is as close to the stereotypical mad genius that you can get, and it feels like a sad story, although that is not for me to judge but more up to Grothendieck himself when he was still alive.) 

I thoroughly enjoyed your article and believe you could delve deeper into various topics you touched on. You've raised some compelling ideas, such as achieving a flow state and the importance of solitude in certain stages of a process. However, you don't present these as rigid rules for success, leaving room for flexibility and exploration.

This reminds me of historical figures like Ramanujan. Despite lacking a formal institutional mathematics education, his determination and, possibly, his solitary work style enabled him to contribute significantly to mathematics by pushing boundaries and innovating.

Going to save this because I am sure to come back to it and read it a few more times, thank you!