The Endeavour » Creativity

Limiting your options leads to better options

John — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:10:58 +0000

Limiting your options leads to better options.

… when you study the evidence, it’s clear that you’re not likely to encounter real interesting opportunities in your life until after you’re really good at something.

If you avoid focus because you want to keep your options open, you’re likely accomplishing the opposite. Getting good is a prerequisite to encountering options worth pursuing.

From Closing your interests opens more interesting opportunities.

Related post:

Demonstrating persistence

Rule of the last inch

John — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:55:00 +0000

From The First Circle by Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

Now listen to the rule of the last inch. The realm of the last inch. The job is almost finished, the goal almost attained, everything possible seems to have been achieved, every difficulty overcome — and yet the quality is just not there. The work needs more finish, perhaps further research. In that moment of weariness and self-satisfaction, the temptation is greatest to give up, not to strive for the peak of quality. That’s the realm of the last inch — here, the work is very, very complex, but it’s also particularly valuable because it’s done with the most perfect means. The rule of the last inch is simply this — not to leave it undone. And not to put it off — because otherwise your mind loses touch with that realm. And not to mind how much time you spend on it, because the aim is not to finish the job quickly, but to reach perfection.

Via Still I Am One

It can be hard to know when something deserves the kind of polish Solzhenitsyn talks about. Sometimes you’re in the realm of rapidly diminishing return and it’s time to move on. Other times, the finishing touches are everything.

Related post:

Scripting and the last mile problem

Customizing conventional wisdom

John — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:34:45 +0000

From Solitude and Leadership by William Deresiewicz:

I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.

Conventional wisdom summarizes the experience of many people. As a result, it’s often a good starting point. But like a blurred photo, it has gone through a sort of averaging process, loosing resolution along the way. It takes hard work to decide how, or even whether, conventional wisdom applies to your particular circumstances.

Bureaucracies are infuriating because they cannot deliberate on particulars the way Deresiewicz recommends. In order to scale up, they develop procedures that work well under common scenarios.

The context of Deresiewicz’s advice is a speech he gave at West Point. His audience will spend their careers in one of the largest and most bureaucratic organizations in the world. Deresiewicz is aware of this irony and gives advice for how to be a deep thinker while working within a bureaucracy.

How to know it all

John — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 15:08:43 +0000

The way to know it all is to change the definition of “all.” Schools do this, for example, by defining “all” to mean everything on a test. Then it’s possible for someone to know it all. Schools create the illusion that the world is finite. You may not know everything, but someone does.

The desire to know it all is pernicious. The only way to accomplish it is to shrink your world. That may be OK for a while to focus your attention. The danger is that you can succeed and forget that you started by drawing arbitrary boundaries.

When I was very young, I thought that if I read every volume of the World Book Encyclopedia, I’d know everything. Of course I wouldn’t know everything, only what the editors of the encyclopedia chose to include.

If you want to learn English by first learning all the vocabulary, you’ll never speak English. Even if you learn every word in a particular dictionary, you still haven’t learned every word in the language.

Computer languages are orders of magnitude simpler than human languages, but they’re still too complex to learn exhaustively. If you want to learn every nuance of C++ before writing programs, you’ll never write a program. And if you think this is because C++ is a large language, it’s hardly possible to understand C exhaustively either if you take into account all the subtleties of how features are actually implemented on various platforms.

A common problem in math is how to select a finite sample from an infinite space. Maybe you have a function defined at an infinite number of points and you want to approximate it by sampling it at a carefully chosen finite set of points. This is a good metaphor for life.

Even when things are finite, it’s often very practical to think of them as being infinite. (See Infinite is easier than big.) Many aspects of life are effectively infinite.

Avoidance of distraction

John — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 04:12:17 +0000

My previous post gave examples of how David Souter and Donald Knuth chose not to use some common technologies. John Venier left an insightful comment.

I think the avoidance of technology in these cases is really an avoidance of distraction. These same fellows would probably not keep a parrot in their office if it screeched every couple of minutes, regardless of their affinity for birds.

I believe he’s right. My intention was to write more broadly about how tools influence our thinking, but the examples I gave were only about one kind of influence: distraction.

Selective use of technology

John — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 13:49:40 +0000

In his book The Nine, Jeffrey Toobin gives a few details of former Supreme Court Justice David Souter’s decidedly low-tech life. Souter has no cell phone or voice mail. He does not use email. He was given a television once but never turned it on. He moves his chair around his office throughout the day so he can read by natural light. Toobin says Souter lives something like an eighteenth century gentleman.

I find it interesting that Justice Souter would have such independence of mind that he chooses not to use much of the technology that our world takes for granted. He made it to the top of his profession and had a job for life, so he could afford to be eccentric. But he wasn’t born on the Supreme Court. I would like to know whether his low-tech work habits developed before or after his legal success.

I imagine most readers of this blog could more easily relate to Donald Knuth than David Souter. Knuth obviously doesn’t reject technology, but he is selective in how he uses it.

I had the opportunity to see Knuth speak while I was in college. Much to my surprise, his slides were handwritten. The author of TeX didn’t see the need to use TeX for his slides. While he cares about the fine details of how math looks in print, he apparently didn’t feel it was worth the effort to typeset his notes for an informal presentation.

In 1990 Knuth decided to stop using email.

I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.

I believe I’ve read that Knuth does most of his work on a Linux box with no network connection. He also has a Mac for creating graphics and using the Internet. He has a secretary to handle his correspondence, including email.

If you’re reading legal briefs by sunlight, your thoughts will not be exactly the same as they would be if you were reading by fluorescent light. If you’re writing a presentation by hand, you’re not going to think the same way you would if you were pecking on a computer keyboard. And if you do use a computer, your thinking is subtlety different depending on what program you use. Technology affects the way you think. The effect is not uniformly better or worse, but it is certainly real.

An array of hammers

John — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 10:02:02 +0000

In a comment on the previous post, vonjd brought up the famous quote from Abraham Maslow:

It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

Sometimes you don’t just have a hammer, you have an array of hammers. You have rock hammers, claw hammers, and sledge hammers, all in numerous sizes. You have a variety of wooden and rubber mallets too. You’ve even got a gavel. Because you have such an impressive collection of specialized hammers, you think you’re broad in your problem solving, but your basic instinct is still only to beat on things.

Doing good work with bad tools
Just an approximation
Redbelt problem solving

Better mousetraps

John — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 16:00:25 +0000

From Ike Pigott:

Build a better mousetrap, and cats will beat a path to your door to picket.

Related post:

It takes more than a better mousetrap

John Coltrane versus Kenny G

John — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 23:13:16 +0000

My previous post began with a story about a performance by John Coltrane. Douglas Groothuis left a comment saying that he used the same story in his book Truth Decay. Before telling the Coltrane story, Groothuis compares the philosophies of Kenny G and John Coltrane.

Kenny G’s philosophy is as shallow as his music.

I just play for myself, the way I want to play, and it comes out sounding like me.

Coltrane’s philosophy, like his music, is more ambitious.

Overall, I think the main thing a musician would like to do is give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things he knows and senses in the universe. That’s what music is to me — it’s just another way of saying this is a big, wonderful universe we live in, that’s been given to us, and here’s an example of just how magnificent and encompassing it is. That’s what I would like to do. I think that’s one of the greatest things you can do in life, and we all try to do it in some way. The musician’s is through his music.

As Groothuis comments, Kenny G only spoke of expressing himself, while Coltrane “expressed a yearning to represent objective realities musically.”

Productivity and negative space

John — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 18:58:43 +0000

My post Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity has been getting a lot of buzz today. One of the arguments in that post is that the most productive programmers know where they can find software to do parts of their job. When they reuse existing code rather than writing their own from scratch, nobody notices. They probably don’t even notice themselves, at least not often.

The work you don’t do is a sort of negative space, like the shape formed by the empty space in a painting or the silence in a piece of music. It’s hard to appreciate what’s not there. It’s hard for a business to reward the unnecessary work that someone avoids doing.

Venkatesh Rao has a different take on what makes some people far more effective than others. In his post Thrust, Drag, and the 10x Effect, he says that the people who are 10x more productive are the those who allocate large, uninterrupted blocks of time to work on difficult creative tasks.

Rao’s observation would also help explain why super programmers do not earn super wages, and it ties into the idea of negative space. People who fracture their time putting out fires seem more productive, or at least more responsive, than the people who block out time to think. It’s harder to notice someone not being frantic. Thinkers don’t fare well in environments that reward activity more than accomplishment.

How to neutralize intelligence

John — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 12:00:58 +0000

Kurt Vonnegut’s short story Harrison Bergeron begins “The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal.” Beautiful people are required to wear ugly masks, strong people are required to carry weights, etc. Every excellence is handicapped.

But how do you handicap intelligence? With interruptions. In Vonnegut’s story, those deemed too intelligent are required to wear a device in their ear that regularly interrupts their thoughts with a loud noise.

Odd little bookshops

John — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 09:38:38 +0000

From Tristan Gylberd:

The smaller, the odder, the more out of the way, and the more specialized, the better. That is my philosophy on bookshops. Come to think of it, that is my philosophy on everything else too — it makes for a very interesting life unconstrained by the smothering expectations of the tyranny of fashion or popularity.

Related post:

Small, local, old, and particular

On being wrong

John — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 02:54:46 +0000

TED Talk by “Wrongologist” Kathryn Schulz:

It could be depressing to be reminded that you’re probably wrong about many things you believe. But I thought about a number of things I’d like to find out I’m wrong about, and maybe I am wrong about at least one of them.

Write the other way

John — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 14:46:38 +0000

This notebook made me think of the quote from William Carlos Williams:

“If they give you lined paper, write the other way.”

Have you saved a milliwatt today?

John — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 14:41:30 +0000

Research In Motion (RIM) is best known for making the BlackBerry. In the early days of the company, RIM focused on reducing the BlackBerry’s power consumption. The engineers put up a sign:

Have you saved a milliwatt today?

This was a specific, reasonable challenge. Instead of some nebulous exhortation to corporate greatness, something worthy of a Dilbert cartoon, they asked engineers to reduce power consumption by a milliwatt.

What’s your equivalent of saving a milliwatt?

Theory and practice

John — Fri, 13 May 2011 12:18:28 +0000

Donald Knuth explains how he combines theory and practice:

This has always been the main credo of my professional life. I have always tried to develop theories that shed light on the practical things I do, and I’ve always tried to do a variety of practical things so that I have a better chance of discovering rich and interesting theories. It seems to me that my chosen field, computer science — information processing — is a field where theory and practice come together more than in any other discipline, because of the nature of computing machines. …

History teaches us that the greatest mathematicians of past centuries combined theory and practice in their own careers. …

The best theory is inspired by practice. The best practice is inspired by theory.

Taken from Selected Papers on Computer Science.

Third-system effect

John — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 13:04:33 +0000

The third-system effect describes a simple system rising like a phoenix out of the ashes of a system that collapsed under its own complexity.

A notorious ’second-system effect’ often afflicts the successors of small experimental prototypes. The urge to add everything that was left out the first time around all too frequently leads to huge and overcomplicated design. Less well known, because less common, is the ‘third-system effect’: sometimes, after the second system has collapsed of its own weight, there is a chance to go back to simplicity and get it right.

From The Art of Unix Programming by Eric S. Raymond. Available online here.

Raymond says that Unix was such a third system. What are other examples of the third-system effect?

Forced to be simple

John — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 14:40:28 +0000

From Paul Graham:

When you’re forced to be simple, you’re forced to face the real problem. When you can’t deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance.

Priorities

John — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 11:02:24 +0000

From Merlin Mann:

If you’ve got more than two priorities, you might as well think you have more than two arms.

Appropriate scale

John — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 13:32:50 +0000

“Scale” became a popular buzz word a couple decades ago. Suddenly everyone was talking about how things scale. At first the term was used to describe how software behaved as problems became larger or smaller. Then the term became more widely used to describe how businesses and other things handle growth.

Now when people say something “won’t scale” they mean that it won’t perform well as things get larger. “Scale” most often means “scale up.” But years ago the usage was more symmetric. For example, someone might have said that a software package didn’t scale well because it took too long to solve small problems, too long relative to the problem size. We seldom use “scale” to discuss scaling down, except possibly in the context of moving something to smaller electronic devices.

This asymmetric view of scaling can be harmful. For example, little companies model themselves after big companies because they hope to scale (up). But running a small software business, for example, as a Microsoft in miniature is absurd. A small company’s procedures might not scale up well, but neither do a large company’s procedures scale down well.

I’ve been interested in the idea of appropriate scale lately, both professionally and personally.

I’ve realized that some of the software I’ve been using scales in a way that I don’t need it to scale. These applications scale up to handle problems I don’t have, but they’re overly complex for addressing the problems I do have. They scale up, but they don’t scale down. Or maybe they don’t scale up in the way I need them to.

I’m learning to make better use of fewer tools. This quote from Hugh MacLeod suggests that other people may come to the same point as they gain experience.

Actually, as the artist gets more into her thing, and gets more successful, the number of tools tends to go down.

On a more personal level, I think that much frustration in life comes from living at an inappropriate scale. Minimalism is gaining attention because minimalists are saying “Scale down!” while the rest of our culture is saying “Scale up!” Minimalists provide a valuable counterweight, but they can be a bit extreme. As Milton Glaser pointed out, less isn’t more, just enough is more. Instead of simply scaling up or down, we should find an appropriate scale.

How do you determine an appropriate scale? The following suggestion from Andrew Kern is a good starting point:

There is an appropriate scale to every human activity and it is the scale of personal responsibility.

Update: See the follow-up post Arrogant ignorance.

Art critics versus artists

John — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 12:55:03 +0000

From Pablo Picasso:

When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.

Style and understanding

John — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 23:07:35 +0000

From Let Over Lambda by Doug Hoyte:

Style is necessary only when understanding is missing. A corollary to this is that sometimes the only way to effectively use something you don’t understand is to copy styles observed elsewhere.

I liked those lines when I first read them. But as I thought about them more, they started to sound sophomoric.

In context, Hoyte is arguing that one should not avoid advanced programming techniques just because they are not in common use. Also, I believe he has in mind a single programmer working in isolation. Hoyte’s statement is easier to accept within those boundaries than when applied more generally, but even in context there is room to disagree.

Novices may not realize that a style is a style. They may confuse what they find necessary with what is necessary.

But style can be the mark of experts as well as novices. Novices may follow a convention because they know no alternative. Experts may be aware of alternatives and deliberately choose the limitations of the same convention.Experts may see the wisdom in convention, or may see convention as a small price to pay out of consideration for other people.

It’s not saying much to say style is only necessary “when understanding is missing.” Understanding is nearly always missing to some extent on any large project. We hardly ever understand what we’re doing so thoroughly that we can completely disregard style.

Two contrasting articles on minimalism

John — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 14:57:02 +0000

This morning I ran across a couple articles on minimalism:

Minimalism is NOT a viable intellectual strategy (30 Dec 2010)
Minimalism IS a viable long term intellectual strategy (31 Dec 2010)

The former has a sense of humor; the latter does not. The former contains thoughtful criticism; the latter is a knee-jerk reaction. The former makes an interesting argument; the latter quibbles about definitions.

The former article is by Vivek Haldar. I cannot tell who wrote the latter.

Here’s an excerpt from Haldar’s article:

The zenith … is a calm geek, sitting in a bare room with a desk upon which sits only a MacBook Air, his backpack of possessions on one side, the broadband internet cable available but unplugged, fingers ready to type into the empty white screen of a minimalist editor.

I think that’s pretty funny. And I would hope that minimalists would be able to get a chuckle out of it.

But Haldar does not just lampoon hipster minimalism. He argues that you need periods of stimulation and clutter to be creative. He also argues that minimalism has its place.

Now I agree with most of the premises of the minimalists … My gripe is with the way they sell it as a way of life. It’s much more valuable as a periodic phase of life.

Minimalism cannot be a long-term strategy, but it makes an excellent short-term tactic.

The second article essentially argues that Haldar has the definition of minimalism wrong.

Minimalism, at its core, is the process of prioritizing your life and working towards concrete goals without giving in to distraction. … Like any school of thought with a certain critical mass, there is dissent and corruption among the ranks.

Who can find fault with prioritizing your life, working toward concrete goals, and avoiding distraction? And who wants to defend corruption? But this is just quibbling about definitions. By contrast, Haldar makes an argument independent of such a definition. Haldar argues that a certain set of attitudes and behaviors — however you want to label them — are not conducive to sustained creativity.

Here are some ideas I threw out a while ago on defining minimalism.

“Minimal” literally means an extreme. I appreciate moderate minimalists, though strictly speaking “moderate minimalist” is a contradiction in terms. A more accurate but unwieldy name for minimalists might be “people who are keenly aware of the indirect costs of owning stuff.”

… you could define a minimalist as someone who wants to eliminate non-essential possessions … But by that definition, Donald Trump would be a minimalist if he believes everything he owns is essential.

Generic discussions of minimalism are fluff. Haldar’s argument is more substantial because he makes a specific suggestion.

Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy

John — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 13:41:57 +0000

From Magic School Bus:

Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy.

Magic School Bus is an educational television show for children. The quote above is often repeated by the main character of the show, Ms. Frizzle.

Too many programs that supposedly teach science only teach results from science. Magic School Bus does both. It teaches specific facts, such as the names of the planets, but it also teaches that science is about taking chances, making mistakes, and getting messy.

Related post:

Preparing for innovation

Maybe you only need it because you have it

John — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 15:13:11 +0000

Some cities need traffic lights because they have traffic lights. If one traffic light goes out, it causes a traffic jam. But sometimes when all traffic lights go out, say due to a storm, traffic flows better than before.

Some buildings need air conditioning because they have air conditioning. Because they were designed to be air conditioned, they have no natural ventilation and would be miserable to inhabit without air conditioning.

Some people need to work because they work. A family may find that their second income is going entirely to expenses that would go away if one person stayed home.

It’s hard to tell when you’ve gotten into a situation where you need something because you have it. I had a friend that worked for a company that sold expensive software development tools. He said that one of the best perks of his job was that he could buy these tools at a deep discount. But he didn’t realize that without his job, he wouldn’t need these tools! He wasn’t using them to develop software. He was only using them so he could demonstrate and sell them.

It may be even harder for organizations to realize it has been caught in a cascade of needs. Suppose a useless project adds staff. These staff need to be managed, so they hire a manager. Then they hire people for IT, accounting, marketing, etc. Eventually they have their own building. This building needs security, maintenance, and housekeeping. No one questions the need for the security guard, but the guard would not have been necessary without the original useless project.

When something seems absolutely necessary, maybe it’s only necessary because of something else that isn’t necessary.

Related post:

Defining minimalism

You can be a hero with a simple idea

John — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 15:24:46 +0000

Yesterday I mentioned someone who published a scholarly paper in 1994 for a technique commonly taught in freshman calculus. There’s been a lot of discussion of this (the paper, not my blog post) on the web. The general take has been that this was an egregious failure in the peer review system. No one recognized a simple, centuries-old idea. No one called up a high school math teacher and asked “Hey, have you seen this before?” All that is true, but here’s a different take on the situation.

The paper reinventing the trapezoid rule has been cited 75 times. It must have filled a need. Yes, the author was ignorant of basic calculus. But apparently a lot of other doctors are just as ignorant of calculus. The author did the medical profession a service by pointing out a simple way to estimate the area under a glucose-response curve. The technique was not original, and should not have been published as original research, but it was valuable.

Surely some doctors already knew how to find the area under a glucose-response curve. But apparently many others did not, and they learned something useful from the article. The article did some good, more good than original but arcane articles that no one reads, even though it was bad scholarship.

The author made a connection that not everyone else had made. This reminds me of Picasso’s sculpture Head of a Bull.

All Picasso did was put handle bars on top of a bicycle seat and say “Hey, that looks like a bull.” His sculpture took zero technical skill, but it was clever. Was Picasso the first human to ever have this idea? Maybe, but I doubt it.

Sometimes you can be a hero by taking what is common as dirt in one context and applying it to a new context.

Fairy dust on the diploma

John — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 13:10:13 +0000

When I was in college, a friend of mine gave me a math book that I found hard to get through. When I complained about it, he told me “You’re going to finish a PhD someday. When you do, do you think there’s going to be fairy dust on the diploma that’s going to enable you to do anything you can’t do now?”

That conversation stuck with me. I realized that I just needed to work hard rather than wait for my intelligence to mysteriously rise at graduation.

Two kinds of generalization

John — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 14:00:58 +0000

From George Pólya:

There are two kinds of generalizations. One is cheap and the other is valuable. It is easy to generalize by diluting a little idea with a big terminology. It is much more difficult to prepare a refined and condensed extract from several good ingredients.

Related post:

Jenga mathematics

Two videos on craftsmanship

John — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 12:24:56 +0000

Here are a couple inspiring videos about craftsmen, sign artist David A. Smith and machinist Neil Youngberg.

David A Smith – Sign Artist from Danny Cooke on Vimeo.

PROFESSIONal from VITA BREVIS FILMS on Vimeo.

The trouble with wizards

John — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 14:56:51 +0000

It’s usually a compliment to call someone a “wizard.” For example, the stereotypical Unix wizard is a man with a long gray beard who can solve any problem in minutes by typing furiously at a command prompt.

Here’s a different take on wizards. Think about wizards, say, in the Harry Potter novels. Wizards learn to say certain spells in certain situations. There’s never any explanation of why these spells work. They just do. Unless, of course, they don’t. Wizards are powerful, but they can be incompetent.

You might use wizard to describe someone who lacks curiosity about what they’re doing. They don’t know why their actions work, or sometimes even whether they work. They’ve learned a Pavlovian response to problems: when you see this, do this.

Wizards can be valuable. Sometimes you just need a problem solved and you don’t care why the solution works. Someone who doesn’t understand what they’re doing but can fix your problem quickly may be better than someone who knows what they’re doing but works too slowly. But if your problem doesn’t quite fit the intended situation for a spell, the wizard is either powerless or harmful.

Wizards can’t learn a better way of doing anything because “better” makes no sense. When you see problem A, carry out procedure B. That’s just what you do. How can you address problem A better when “solving A” means “do B“? Professional development for a wizard consists of learning more spells for more situations, not learning a better spell or learning why spells work.

Wizards may be able to solve your problem for you, but they can’t teach you how to solve your own problems.