Posted by felixbraun 13 hours ago
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.
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?
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 :\
(Allowed by space and time, I mean)
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'.