Creativity

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.

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Scripting and the last mile problem

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.

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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.

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Evaluate people at their best or at their worst?

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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.

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I was struck by this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, even though I’m not sure I understand what he meant.

In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

Maybe Emerson was referring to that why-didn’t-I-think-of-that feeling when you see that someone else connected one or two more dots than you did. You thought about a challenge, and maybe you were close to resolving it, but you lacked a key insight to pull it all together. You decided your approach wouldn’t work, but someone did make it work.

If that’s what Emerson had in mind, it’s puzzling that he speaks of “every work of genius.” It would be incredibly arrogant to think that you almost came up with every great idea you see. Maybe he means that we recognize genius best when it relates to something we’ve struggled with.

What do you think Emerson meant? When have your rejected ideas come back to you?

The most recent episode of the Plus Maths podcast describes how the London Velodrome was designed. Being a math podcast, it focuses on the optimization problems involved in the design and the finite element modeling of the structure.

The beautiful shape of the building was not an initial goal but rather a consequence of design decisions that began with the track and worked outward.

It’s perhaps surprising, given the pragmatic design concerns of optimizing the experience of people using the velodrome, maximizing the efficiency of the building, all within the constraints of the construction methods, the design process has led to a stunningly beautiful roof that almost echos the shape of the track.

… it’s a happy by-product of the design. There was nothing intentional in the design [of the roof] that we wanted it to look like the track. … it’s the opposite if the track …

Image by Richard Davies via the Plus Math article How the velodrome found its form.

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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.

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

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

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?

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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.

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