I think that a lot of the answers here are touching upon aspects of the same thing: feedback and reward. The idea-generating mechanisms in our subconscious respond to rewards. If you want to have lots of ideas about something, try to ensure that it either feels as rewarding as possible intrinsically, or that you also get social rewards for them, or both.
Eli notes that writing up your thoughts is useful. As he notes, this is useful for iterating them: but a lot of people also find that writing down your ideas, causes you to have even more ideas. I think that a part of this is that when you write the ideas down, it can feel rewarding by itself, and if you also iterate them further and enjoy it, then that’s also a form of reward that can be propagated to the initial act of having thought them up.
Abram’s response is that an intellectual community or receptive audience is a big factor. This also matches: if you get to have enjoyable conversations about your ideas, that’s rewarding, and it also gives you leads for new ideas. E.g. if someone didn’t understand your explanation, it feel rewarding to have an idea of how you could explain it better; even moreso if you do actually succeed in explaining it.
John suggests reinforcing yourself for ideas regardless of their quality, and getting excited about having produced them. The connection here is presumably obvious. Also, “Most people are too judgemental of their ideas” is an important bit: avoiding negative reinforcement for generating ideas, can be as important as having positive reinforcement. If for each idea you generate you automatically think “but this idea sucks”, then that’s a bit of a negative valence associated with idea-generation, which can quickly stop you from coming up with anything at all.
Cousin It, in the comments: “sometimes people end up in some activity because they accidentally had a defining moment of fun with that activity”. Yup, if an activity is fun, then you are going to enjoy thinking about it, and will also generate ideas related to it.
Personally I’ve noticed that if I’ve been getting rewarded for having ideas related to something, then my mind will automatically be scanning things for anything that could contribute to it. For example, right now I’m working on several essays by gradually sketching out what I want to say in them; I enjoy this phase, and have liked it whenever I come up with a new idea that I could use in one of the essays. As a consequence, I feel like my mind is very inclined to notice new instances of the things that I’m writing about, and suggest using that in my essay. (“Hey, the way the person in front of you at the grocery store did X, that’s an example of the psychological phenomenon you’re writing about.”) When I write that down, that process gets a bit of a reward and reinforces the act of scanning everything for its usefulness in these particular essays. So it’s not just that rewards can reinforce your creativity in general; they can also reinforce your creativity as related to a specific project.
Here’s a quote from the author Lawrence Block, writing in his book “Writing the Novel from Plot to Print to Pixel”:
… the reception one’s ideas receive has a good deal to do with the development of future ideas.
An example: my longtime friend and colleague, the late Donald E. Westlake, had a period in the mid-1960s when he kept getting ideas for short stories about relationships. (That his own relationships were in an uncertain state at the time may have had something to do with this, but never mind.) He wrote three or four stories, one right after the other, and he sent him to his agent, who admired them greatly and submitted them to markets like Redbook and Cosmopolitan and Playboy and the Saturday Evening Post. All of the editors who saw the stories professed admiration for them, but nobody liked any of them well enough to buy it, and the stories went unpublished.
And Don stopped having ideas. He didn’t regret having written the stories, and he would have been perfectly happy to write more even with no guarantee of success, but the idea factory in his unconscious mind added things up and decided the hell with it. It was clear to Don that, if one or two of those stories had sold, he’d have had ideas for more. But they hadn’t, and he didn’t.
On the other hand, consider Walter Mosley. Shortly after the very successful 1990 publication of his first crime novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, Walter appeared on a panel at a mystery convention in Philadelphia. He announced that he probably didn’t belong there, that this book was an anomaly, that it was actually highly unlikely that he’d write any more books within the confines of the genre.
This was certainly not a pose. He very clearly believed what he was saying. Since then, however, he’s written and published a dozen more Easy Rawlins mysteries, three Fearless Jones mysteries, and five Leonid McGill mysteries-along with close to two dozen other books, most of them novels. While a cynic might simply contend that Walter has gone where the money is, I know the man too well to believe commercial considerations outweigh artistic ones for him.
The ongoing success of the Easy Rawlins books have made it almost inevitable that his unconscious would come up with a succession of ideas for additional books. They’ve been good ideas, engaging their author even as they’ve engaged an increasing audience of readers, and it would have been a great betrayal of self not to have gone on writing them.
If someone had commented with a one-line answer like “people are intellectually active if it is rewarding”, I would have been very meh about it—it’s obvious, but trivial. All the added detail you gave makes it seem like a pretty useful observation, though.
Two possible caveats --
What determines what’s rewarding? Any set of behaviors can be explained by positing that they’re rewarding, so for this kind of model to be meaningful, there’s got to be a set of rewards involved which are relatively simple and have relatively broad explanatory power.
In order for a behavior to be rewarded in the first place, it has to be generated the first time. How does that happen? Animal trainers build up complicated tricks by rewarding steps incrementally approaching the desired behavior. Are there similar incremental steps here? What are they, and what rewards are associated with them?
(Your spelled-out details give some ideas in those directions.)
I was thinking in a very different direction upon reading “a lot of people also find that writing down your ideas, causes you to have even more ideas.” I know what you mean in the context of a reinforcement system, but I think it misses the more pressing phenomena, at least in my experience of uncertainty whether i’m inventing or indulging, of working on ideas.
The “even more ideas” part sounds to me like a sort of (combinatorial) explosion, when my stroke of inspiration is much more problematic, much less elegant than I thought. Sometimes this also means much less original than I thought, but this isn’t a bad thing—convincing oneself that something is being discovered is often the most effective way at grokking it! You don’t really lose anything when you find out that it’s, in fact, old news.
Sometimes all this means is it will take more work than I thought, to follow the idea through. Other times it means this is the wrong rabbit hole.
But I think many of us AD(H)Ders develop a suspicion or even hostility to this “indulgent” signal, the internal phenomena of believing oneself to be creative, because they’ve too easily looted the reward (been superficially creative) at the expense of rigor (“why finish all those exercises in that boring book when this system i just wrote down is totally AGI already?”)
(At the same time, you and Lawrence Block are 100% right about nurturing/environment as well)
All in all, I can’t wrap my head around “what is the difference between a producer and a consumer of thought?” because the question as posed seems to hold rigor, even quality, constant/irrelevant.
(Many years ago a composer told me that when Schoenberg was at UCLA, young composers had to spend hours with him for 3+ years just analyzing mozart before he would consider looking at your music, compared to conservatories now you’re expressing yourself from day one. There is doubtless an analogy to AI risk—which culture is more productive?)
All in all, I can’t wrap my head around “what is the difference between a producer and a consumer of thought?” because the question as posed seems to hold rigor, even quality, constant/irrelevant.
I’m not trying to hold it constant, I’m just trying to understand a relatively low standard, because that’s the part I feel confused about. It seems relatively much easier to look at bad intellectual output and say how it could have been better, think about the thought processes involved, etc. Much harder to say what goes into producing output at all vs not doing so.
I’m not trying to hold it constant, I’m just trying to understand a relatively low standard, because that’s the part I feel confused about. It seems relatively much easier to look at bad intellectual output and say how it could have been better, think about the thought processes involved, etc. Much harder to say what goes into producing output at all vs not doing so.
I think I understand the distinction, and I think if it was as simple as “people undershoot their actual capacities in favor of humility / don’t want to risk wasting anybody’s time” everyone would have adjusted social norms to remedy it by now.
This reminds me of how little control you have over your own mind. However, that is not the worst part. The worst part is when you don’t realize how little control you actually have.
I think I have almost my entire life fallen prey to the fallacy of believing that emotions don’t affect me. I thought I was impenetrable to feedback on the emotional level. That I could, with a cold mind, extract all of the object-level information from feedback. But then somebody gave me very negative feedback on an article I had worked very hard on for over a week. Afterwards, I basically stopped writing for 6 months about that topic. Actually, I think it still affects me now, 1 year later.
I think all of this would have been a lot less terrible had I realized what was going on. I did not even consider the possibility that I was not writing because I got some very strong negative feedback until maybe 4 months ago.
I think there is probably a time and place for intellectually isolating yourself if you are prone to this failure mode. I only notice now that I have often intellectually isolated myself in the past, and that at those times I never ran into the issue of not being able to come up with ideas. However, I think feedback can be extremely valuable, so there is certainly a balance to strike here.
That was potentially valuable early on for me when I started to write down my ideas. I wrote down probably over a million words worth of ideas before I ever wrote up anything publically. I am pretty sure >3% of all the writing I have done is public right now.
Now that I frequently talk to people about the things I am thinking about I am constantly running into the issue that I get critique about something other than the thing I am trying to explain because I am so bad at explaining. Often this only becomes apparent in hindsight. I think this could have been very damaging early on if I always got this kind of negative feedback. However, it’s worth noting that not isolating myself for so long would probably also have helped me get better at explaining.
I also wrote a huge amount in private idea-journals before I started writing publicly. There was also an intermediate stage where I wrote a lot on mailing lists, which felt less public than blogging although technically public.
I have been doing something similar lately. I wrote with somebody online extensively, at one point writing a 4000 word Discord messages. That was mostly not about AI alignment, but was helpful in learning how to better communicate in writing.
An important transition in my private writing has been to aim for the same kind of quality I would in public content. That is a nice trick to get better at public <writing/communication>. There is very large difference between writing an idea down such that you will be able to retrieve the information content, and to write something down such that it truly stands on it’s own, such that another person can retrive the information.
This is not only useful for training communicating in writing, it also is very useful when you want to come back to your own notes much later, when you forgot about all of the context wich allowed you to fill in all the missing details. Previously I would only rarely read old nodes because they where so hard to understand and not fun to read. I think this got better.
Maybe one can get some milage out of framing the audience to include your future self.
The very first and probably most important step in the direction of “writing to effectively communicate” which I took many years ago, was to always write in “full text”, i.e. writing full sentences instead of a bunch of disparate bullet points. I think doing this is also very important to get the intelligence augmenting effects of writing.
For me the public in public writing is not the issue. The core issue for me is that I start multiple new drafts every day, and get distracted by them, such that I never finish the old drafts.
In my personal practice, there seems to be a real difference—“something magic happens”—when you’ve got an actual audience you actually want to explain something to. I would recommend this over trying to simulate the experience within personal notes, if you can get it. The audience doesn’t need to be ‘the public internet’—although each individual audience will have a different sort of impact on your writing, so EG writing to a friend who already understands you fairly well may not cause you to clarify your ideas in the same way as writing to strangers.
I would also mildly caution against a policy which makes your own personal notes too effortful to write. I wholeheartedly agree that you should keep your future self in mind as an audience, and write such that the notes will be useful if you look back at them. But if I imagine writing my own personal notes to the same standard as public-facing essays, I think I lose something—it takes too long to capture ideas that way.
I think that a lot of the answers here are touching upon aspects of the same thing: feedback and reward. The idea-generating mechanisms in our subconscious respond to rewards. If you want to have lots of ideas about something, try to ensure that it either feels as rewarding as possible intrinsically, or that you also get social rewards for them, or both.
Eli notes that writing up your thoughts is useful. As he notes, this is useful for iterating them: but a lot of people also find that writing down your ideas, causes you to have even more ideas. I think that a part of this is that when you write the ideas down, it can feel rewarding by itself, and if you also iterate them further and enjoy it, then that’s also a form of reward that can be propagated to the initial act of having thought them up.
Abram’s response is that an intellectual community or receptive audience is a big factor. This also matches: if you get to have enjoyable conversations about your ideas, that’s rewarding, and it also gives you leads for new ideas. E.g. if someone didn’t understand your explanation, it feel rewarding to have an idea of how you could explain it better; even moreso if you do actually succeed in explaining it.
John suggests reinforcing yourself for ideas regardless of their quality, and getting excited about having produced them. The connection here is presumably obvious. Also, “Most people are too judgemental of their ideas” is an important bit: avoiding negative reinforcement for generating ideas, can be as important as having positive reinforcement. If for each idea you generate you automatically think “but this idea sucks”, then that’s a bit of a negative valence associated with idea-generation, which can quickly stop you from coming up with anything at all.
Cousin It, in the comments: “sometimes people end up in some activity because they accidentally had a defining moment of fun with that activity”. Yup, if an activity is fun, then you are going to enjoy thinking about it, and will also generate ideas related to it.
Personally I’ve noticed that if I’ve been getting rewarded for having ideas related to something, then my mind will automatically be scanning things for anything that could contribute to it. For example, right now I’m working on several essays by gradually sketching out what I want to say in them; I enjoy this phase, and have liked it whenever I come up with a new idea that I could use in one of the essays. As a consequence, I feel like my mind is very inclined to notice new instances of the things that I’m writing about, and suggest using that in my essay. (“Hey, the way the person in front of you at the grocery store did X, that’s an example of the psychological phenomenon you’re writing about.”) When I write that down, that process gets a bit of a reward and reinforces the act of scanning everything for its usefulness in these particular essays. So it’s not just that rewards can reinforce your creativity in general; they can also reinforce your creativity as related to a specific project.
Here’s a quote from the author Lawrence Block, writing in his book “Writing the Novel from Plot to Print to Pixel”:
If someone had commented with a one-line answer like “people are intellectually active if it is rewarding”, I would have been very meh about it—it’s obvious, but trivial. All the added detail you gave makes it seem like a pretty useful observation, though.
Two possible caveats --
What determines what’s rewarding? Any set of behaviors can be explained by positing that they’re rewarding, so for this kind of model to be meaningful, there’s got to be a set of rewards involved which are relatively simple and have relatively broad explanatory power.
In order for a behavior to be rewarded in the first place, it has to be generated the first time. How does that happen? Animal trainers build up complicated tricks by rewarding steps incrementally approaching the desired behavior. Are there similar incremental steps here? What are they, and what rewards are associated with them?
(Your spelled-out details give some ideas in those directions.)
Even the by product (ideas) are most trivial too.
I was thinking in a very different direction upon reading “a lot of people also find that writing down your ideas, causes you to have even more ideas.” I know what you mean in the context of a reinforcement system, but I think it misses the more pressing phenomena, at least in my experience of uncertainty whether i’m inventing or indulging, of working on ideas.
The “even more ideas” part sounds to me like a sort of (combinatorial) explosion, when my stroke of inspiration is much more problematic, much less elegant than I thought. Sometimes this also means much less original than I thought, but this isn’t a bad thing—convincing oneself that something is being discovered is often the most effective way at grokking it! You don’t really lose anything when you find out that it’s, in fact, old news.
Sometimes all this means is it will take more work than I thought, to follow the idea through. Other times it means this is the wrong rabbit hole.
But I think many of us AD(H)Ders develop a suspicion or even hostility to this “indulgent” signal, the internal phenomena of believing oneself to be creative, because they’ve too easily looted the reward (been superficially creative) at the expense of rigor (“why finish all those exercises in that boring book when this system i just wrote down is totally AGI already?”)
(At the same time, you and Lawrence Block are 100% right about nurturing/environment as well)
All in all, I can’t wrap my head around “what is the difference between a producer and a consumer of thought?” because the question as posed seems to hold rigor, even quality, constant/irrelevant.
(Many years ago a composer told me that when Schoenberg was at UCLA, young composers had to spend hours with him for 3+ years just analyzing mozart before he would consider looking at your music, compared to conservatories now you’re expressing yourself from day one. There is doubtless an analogy to AI risk—which culture is more productive?)
I’m not trying to hold it constant, I’m just trying to understand a relatively low standard, because that’s the part I feel confused about. It seems relatively much easier to look at bad intellectual output and say how it could have been better, think about the thought processes involved, etc. Much harder to say what goes into producing output at all vs not doing so.
I think I understand the distinction, and I think if it was as simple as “people undershoot their actual capacities in favor of humility / don’t want to risk wasting anybody’s time” everyone would have adjusted social norms to remedy it by now.
thanks
This reminds me of how little control you have over your own mind. However, that is not the worst part. The worst part is when you don’t realize how little control you actually have.
I think I have almost my entire life fallen prey to the fallacy of believing that emotions don’t affect me. I thought I was impenetrable to feedback on the emotional level. That I could, with a cold mind, extract all of the object-level information from feedback. But then somebody gave me very negative feedback on an article I had worked very hard on for over a week. Afterwards, I basically stopped writing for 6 months about that topic. Actually, I think it still affects me now, 1 year later.
I think all of this would have been a lot less terrible had I realized what was going on. I did not even consider the possibility that I was not writing because I got some very strong negative feedback until maybe 4 months ago.
I think there is probably a time and place for intellectually isolating yourself if you are prone to this failure mode. I only notice now that I have often intellectually isolated myself in the past, and that at those times I never ran into the issue of not being able to come up with ideas. However, I think feedback can be extremely valuable, so there is certainly a balance to strike here.
That was potentially valuable early on for me when I started to write down my ideas. I wrote down probably over a million words worth of ideas before I ever wrote up anything publically. I am pretty sure >3% of all the writing I have done is public right now.
Now that I frequently talk to people about the things I am thinking about I am constantly running into the issue that I get critique about something other than the thing I am trying to explain because I am so bad at explaining. Often this only becomes apparent in hindsight. I think this could have been very damaging early on if I always got this kind of negative feedback. However, it’s worth noting that not isolating myself for so long would probably also have helped me get better at explaining.
Becoming good at detaching yourself from your ideas is probably better than isolating yourself as much as I did.
I also wrote a huge amount in private idea-journals before I started writing publicly. There was also an intermediate stage where I wrote a lot on mailing lists, which felt less public than blogging although technically public.
I have been doing something similar lately. I wrote with somebody online extensively, at one point writing a 4000 word Discord messages. That was mostly not about AI alignment, but was helpful in learning how to better communicate in writing.
An important transition in my private writing has been to aim for the same kind of quality I would in public content. That is a nice trick to get better at public <writing/communication>. There is very large difference between writing an idea down such that you will be able to retrieve the information content, and to write something down such that it truly stands on it’s own, such that another person can retrive the information.
This is not only useful for training communicating in writing, it also is very useful when you want to come back to your own notes much later, when you forgot about all of the context wich allowed you to fill in all the missing details. Previously I would only rarely read old nodes because they where so hard to understand and not fun to read. I think this got better.
Maybe one can get some milage out of framing the audience to include your future self.
The very first and probably most important step in the direction of “writing to effectively communicate” which I took many years ago, was to always write in “full text”, i.e. writing full sentences instead of a bunch of disparate bullet points. I think doing this is also very important to get the intelligence augmenting effects of writing.
For me the public in public writing is not the issue. The core issue for me is that I start multiple new drafts every day, and get distracted by them, such that I never finish the old drafts.
In my personal practice, there seems to be a real difference—“something magic happens”—when you’ve got an actual audience you actually want to explain something to. I would recommend this over trying to simulate the experience within personal notes, if you can get it. The audience doesn’t need to be ‘the public internet’—although each individual audience will have a different sort of impact on your writing, so EG writing to a friend who already understands you fairly well may not cause you to clarify your ideas in the same way as writing to strangers.
I would also mildly caution against a policy which makes your own personal notes too effortful to write. I wholeheartedly agree that you should keep your future self in mind as an audience, and write such that the notes will be useful if you look back at them. But if I imagine writing my own personal notes to the same standard as public-facing essays, I think I lose something—it takes too long to capture ideas that way.
“the mid-19605”
Should be “1960s”, I think
Fixed, thanks.