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.
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...
> 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.
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"
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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:
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...
> 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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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 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.
Because we don't want to be useless consumers of resources - it's embarrassing.
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.
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.
1. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/
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.
It's called a shower.
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 :\
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'.