Some of the most creative thinkers allow themselves moments of disorderly discovery, allowing new influences and sources to, in a sense, ‘find them.’
That’s from my early post about “disorderly discovery” (a poor attempt to invent a catchy term), or the importance of randomness in the creative process. It might be one of the most dominant themes of my writing.
I’m returning to it thanks to a post by Eliezer Yudkowsky at Overcoming Bias, titled “My Best and Worst Mistake“:
“Contrast amazing clever reasoning that leads you to study many sciences, to amazing clever reasoning that says you don’t need to read all those books. Afterward, when your amazing clever reasoning turns out to have been stupid, you’ll have ended up in a much better position, if your amazing clever reasoning was of the first type.”
In other words, studying many sciences and reading many books might be undertaken in a naive and futile attempt — like Hudson’s attempt to sail accross the North Pole — but might still generate profitable results…
“When I look back upon my past, I am struck by the number of semi-accidental successes, the number of times I did something right for the wrong reason.”
But how was Yudkowsky’s best mistake also his worst?:
“Because sometimes ‘informal’ is another way of saying ‘held to low standards’… This was a gate through which sloppy reasoning could enter. “
Well quite possibly, yes — or almost certainly, at least eventually — but here’s where Yudkowsky and I diverge. My early semi-accidents led me away from mathematics. My later semi-accidents led me towards a kind of process-oriented intuitive modeling — or an attempt to develop a method for it — the principle demand of which is to account for the often-neglected temporal aspect of things: something’s always happening everywhere.
Eventually I appreciated that mathematics and reason might just be at a very extreme end of a spectrum of “semi-accidental success,” where outcomes are expected with near certainty but aren’t absolutely certain. Within a regulated frame of experience, at a particular time, we may be quite certain that 2 + 2 = 4. But that certainty is itself dependent on countless creative accidents and the postponement of destructive accidents (i.e. of our existence) to regulate the context.
To get right to my point, rather than looking for a definition of intelligence or deciding it’s impossible or deciding to delay answering until after “accumulating lot’s of information,” I kept working harder in a manner analogous to the manner in which a sales or marketing professional works: doing what I love, which means (if the love is true) doing it with discipline.
No matter what a ‘born salesperson’ is doing – whether she’s at work, at a party, in the shower, or reading the newspaper – she’s always, in some way, keeping her contacts fresh, developing leads, closing some kind of agreement, or thinking of how she might do so, running through scenarios and mentally preparing for future interactions.
She doesn’t have to be closing actual sales all the time, but she’s constantly updating and reorganizing cognitive tabs of people she knows and what she knows about them. When she runs into someone, the relevant tabs are activated so information needed for a productive conversation is all right there, ready to be used: “How’s little Johnny’s soccer team?.. Are you still coaching?.. Did you take the boat anywhere this summer?.. Oh that’s right, you went to Chuck’s cottage. I just ran into his wife last week – she said they had a great time with you and Judy there… I’m meeting him at the conference next week. Are you going?.. I should introduce you to our Business Development VP while we’re all there… I’ll call you this week to discuss the details.”
Of course all that isn’t just for the sake of sales; our genuine salesperson actually enjoys it and does it largely for the sake of the activity itself, regardless of certain goals involved: the goals and objective requirements of the job only give her activity a direction – they suggest specific people must be met, particular questions must be asked, and certain answers must be sought – but the job doesn’t “cause” her to go out meeting all those people. Without the job, she would probably find some other reason to be out connecting and communicating.
The job may take much of the enjoyment out of it, and there may be times when she wishes she didn’t have to be ‘on her game’ at every party, but in all likelihood she would much rather have to be ‘on her game’ than to be out of the conversation altogether.
This is how I approach ideas and theories, and I suspect a lot of other genuinely creative or philosophical people feel the same way. We just need to be continually networking knowledge, making new connections between facts and theories, always trying to achieve some kind of closure in every interaction, constantly updating and reorganizing mental tabs for what we know and what we know about all of it. When we encounter new facts, relevant tabs are activated so material for creation is right there ready to be used.
Ironically, like generating sales leads, casualness is required for ideas to be more generative and open. As with social relationships, our relationships with ideas aren’t as fruitful and sustainable if probed too aggressively and with an immediate payoff in mind: you’ve got to keep re-visiting and playing with ideas to keep them vital and engaged, which is hard to do unless you enjoy the activity for its own sake.
If you explicitly tell people you want to have them over for dinner because it’ll help your career – and that’s what you say every time you invite them over – eventually the only people who’ll go along your game are other people who approach friendship the same way. Your social life and career won’t be open to as many promising new connections and it simply won’t be as enjoyable – and as it becomes less tolerable and less profitable, your whole social life and career will flatline and degenerate.
Likewise, approaching knowledge with exploitative intentions tends to be counterproductive. Knowledge doesn’t always fit together in ways we expect it to. We have to let it mingle and mate promiscuously in order to discover how much reactive and reproductive potential something really has.
On the other hand, in both sales and genuine creativity or intellect, there are times that call for persistence, ‘killer instinct,’ and the ability to close. On these occasions all the skills acquired through play are employed as if by ‘second nature.’ You can plan and prepare as much as you want – and you should – but as the deal progresses some factors will change. Just as a client’s demands can change (i.e. due to competition, unexpected variables, and changes in market prices or costs), facts and conceptual demands can change without notice. Simply learning one new fact can put all the other information in a different light, requiring a complete reinterpretation.
Ongoing creative or intellectual success requires genuine discipline and willpower (whatever that is) and a performance mindset — like a salesperson, or an athlete, or a musician — not building a static thing, but developing mastery to respond effectively to emerging realities, to incorporate accidents, using them either to test (i.e. strengthen or overcome) old rules and results or to generate new insights and leads.
Related: Borgward Through the Paradox of Perfection, Sad for Hillary and Sidney, Keep Thinking Alive, Failing Good, Origins of Creative Genius, Stories of Disorderly Discovery,
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