I would add that we should remember that proposing “categories in which solutions might fall” might itself be subject to priming/anchoring within category-space. =)
So for example, we could consider systematized ways to map the idea-space—I imagine that certain categories could be easily missed, and/or are very likely to show up for specific classes of problems.
I’m sure it is! In fact, when writing the “jobs, personal life, the natural world, engineering, other” list, I noted that “jobs” and “personal life” have a sort of opposite category connection for me, as does “the natural world” and “engineering” (i.e. human inventions), so I definitely primed myself to come up with areas that are somewhat related.
Fortunately, it’s less of a problem for really broad categories, since there are just so much fewer of them, so you should end up accidentally too focused or missing stuff less often. Not so fortunately, I’m not sure how to fix the problem, short of maybe having a giant list pre-written and picking up all that apply, or something laborious like that.
I noted that “jobs” and “personal life” have a sort of opposite category connection for me, as does …
You know, you might be up to something here. At least in the “find examples of” category, having a list of opposite concepts, picking a few pairs at random and trying to find examples associated with each member of each pair should do quite well to force your brain to detach from whatever it’s primed on. (Since, being opposites, examples of one would usually not apply to the other.)
I’m primed to this idea so maybe my brain is just making this up, but this seems to be what’s going on in your climate change example, too, there’s a fix the cause/fix the effect dichotomy there (stop change/adapt to change, fix the input (emissions) / fix the input processor (climate)).
We might be able to find a list of dichotomies that are helpful for general problem solving. A larger list of essentially random opposites would be nicer, but I suspect most would not work for a particular problem. Though we could just try using an antonym dictionary and see what happens.
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking of when I suggested that it might be done systematically. I hope that a pre-written list wouldn’t be necessary though, since I think such a list would also cause priming unless it were completely exhaustive.
Also, a separate idea I just thought of—although making a list as you suggest is a big step forward in generating ideas, I would speculate that every idea is still primed in some way, even if only by your previous thoughts. (For example, if I forget a thought that I wanted to consider more, often thinking about what I was thinking about right before will let me produce that thought again, even though the previous thoughts were ostensibly unrelated. Similarly, a category like “jobs” will tend to elicit different initial thoughts in different people, which would then prime their next thoughts, etc.) So I’m suggesting that making a list could perhaps be interpreted as “preparing many unrelated ways of priming yourself beforehand so that when you exhaust one search you can re-prime yourself from another starting point.” And then you would cover a much larger region of idea-space as a result—although I’m not sure how this different interpretation might help in the search for more ideas.
I would add that we should remember that proposing “categories in which solutions might fall” might itself be subject to priming/anchoring within category-space. =)
So for example, we could consider systematized ways to map the idea-space—I imagine that certain categories could be easily missed, and/or are very likely to show up for specific classes of problems.
I’m sure it is! In fact, when writing the “jobs, personal life, the natural world, engineering, other” list, I noted that “jobs” and “personal life” have a sort of opposite category connection for me, as does “the natural world” and “engineering” (i.e. human inventions), so I definitely primed myself to come up with areas that are somewhat related.
Fortunately, it’s less of a problem for really broad categories, since there are just so much fewer of them, so you should end up accidentally too focused or missing stuff less often. Not so fortunately, I’m not sure how to fix the problem, short of maybe having a giant list pre-written and picking up all that apply, or something laborious like that.
You know, you might be up to something here. At least in the “find examples of” category, having a list of opposite concepts, picking a few pairs at random and trying to find examples associated with each member of each pair should do quite well to force your brain to detach from whatever it’s primed on. (Since, being opposites, examples of one would usually not apply to the other.)
I’m primed to this idea so maybe my brain is just making this up, but this seems to be what’s going on in your climate change example, too, there’s a fix the cause/fix the effect dichotomy there (stop change/adapt to change, fix the input (emissions) / fix the input processor (climate)).
We might be able to find a list of dichotomies that are helpful for general problem solving. A larger list of essentially random opposites would be nicer, but I suspect most would not work for a particular problem. Though we could just try using an antonym dictionary and see what happens.
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking of when I suggested that it might be done systematically. I hope that a pre-written list wouldn’t be necessary though, since I think such a list would also cause priming unless it were completely exhaustive.
Also, a separate idea I just thought of—although making a list as you suggest is a big step forward in generating ideas, I would speculate that every idea is still primed in some way, even if only by your previous thoughts. (For example, if I forget a thought that I wanted to consider more, often thinking about what I was thinking about right before will let me produce that thought again, even though the previous thoughts were ostensibly unrelated. Similarly, a category like “jobs” will tend to elicit different initial thoughts in different people, which would then prime their next thoughts, etc.) So I’m suggesting that making a list could perhaps be interpreted as “preparing many unrelated ways of priming yourself beforehand so that when you exhaust one search you can re-prime yourself from another starting point.” And then you would cover a much larger region of idea-space as a result—although I’m not sure how this different interpretation might help in the search for more ideas.