Simplicity – A major reason to recommend minimalism is that it’s simple, and therefore relatively hard to mess up. I’m personally a big fan of well-executed maximalism, with lots of loud colors and patterns everywhere, but I wouldn’t know how to explain how to pull that off.
Visual clutter = mental clutter – Rationalist spaces are often used for working, so you don’t want to fill them with things that will be too visually distracting.
I’d like to invert and then combine these. As concrete examples for illustration, I would like to point to religious architecture and interior decoration, like stained glass windows, murals, friezes, alcoves with statues, all the way down to the baseball-Jesus level of tchotchke.
The idea here is to use maximalism to provide deliberate saturation of things which should always be kept in mind. I am confident that—but not how—this could be used for productive purposes like general problem solving, or rationality, or working in a particular field or even a specific (hard) problem.
Examples of the kind of thing I would want to include in such saturation are:
widely applicable problem solving techniques (like breaking the problem into parts or solving a simpler problem first)
important/fundamental constraints (like the laws of thermodynamics)
historical examples of important problems being solved (note that to do the thing I want I require a historical and correct example, not an inspirational and apocryphal one which is the norm in textbooks and non-specialist histories)
there is still room for the philosophical/moral/inspirational stuff (the 12 virtues, say)
I’d like to invert and then combine these. As concrete examples for illustration, I would like to point to religious architecture and interior decoration, like stained glass windows, murals, friezes, alcoves with statues, all the way down to the baseball-Jesus level of tchotchke.
The idea here is to use maximalism to provide deliberate saturation of things which should always be kept in mind. I am confident that—but not how—this could be used for productive purposes like general problem solving, or rationality, or working in a particular field or even a specific (hard) problem.
Examples of the kind of thing I would want to include in such saturation are:
widely applicable problem solving techniques (like breaking the problem into parts or solving a simpler problem first)
important/fundamental constraints (like the laws of thermodynamics)
historical examples of important problems being solved (note that to do the thing I want I require a historical and correct example, not an inspirational and apocryphal one which is the norm in textbooks and non-specialist histories)
there is still room for the philosophical/moral/inspirational stuff (the 12 virtues, say)