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.
Related post: Doing good work with bad tools
Creativity
Style and understanding
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.
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Mathematical landscape
W. W. Sawyer makes a beautiful analogy regarding the mathematical landscape in his book Prelude to Mathematics.
Imagine farmers living in a country where no other tool was available except the wooden plough. Of necessity, the farms would have to be in those places where the earth was soft enough to be cultivated with a wooden implement. If the population grew sufficiently to occupy every suitable spot, the farms would become a map of the soft earth regions. …
It is much the same with mathematical research. At any stage of history, mathematicians possess certain resources of knowledge, experience, and imagination. These resources are sufficient to resolve some problems but not others. … Unconsciously, therefore, the map of mathematical knowledge comes to resemble the map of problems soluble by given tools.
But of course the discoveries themselves open the way for the invention of fresh tools. As the coming of the steel plough would change the map of the farmlands, so these new tools open up new regions of profitable research. But the new tools may take centuries to come, and while we wait for them, the frontier remains an impassable barrier.
Related post: Easy to guess, hard to prove
Two contrasting articles on minimalism
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, no longer online)
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.
Related posts
Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy
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
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 knew someone 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 an organization 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
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 poor 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.
Sometimes you can be a hero by taking what is common as dirt in one context and applying it to a new context.
Related posts
Two kinds of generalization
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
The trouble with wizards
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.
Related posts
Don’t be a goblin
From The Hobbit:
Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted. They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones.
Don’t be satisfied with being merely clever. Make something beautiful.