17-12-10 Operationalizing Systematizing Creativity

Category: Idea Lists (Upon Request)

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The classic example here is idea lists, with a 10 minute timer.

1. Diffuse mode side, I can certainly
   1. Take a daily walk over ideas
   2. Shower after writing about abstraction or memetics or causality or machine learning
   3. Meditate over ideas
2. Abstraction and Transfer
   1. One option is to take problems with shared structure and list the types of structure that they share. When there’s an update to the working of that structure, update understanding of every task.
   2. There’s a graph here, connecting representations of problems. Or at least you’d like to capture the structure that justified the representation that was shared across problems.
3. Multinomial Trees
   1. I have never actually done this. I’d like to try it, at least once.
4. Graphs of relationship between ideas
   1. I should do this for concepts in machine intelligence
5. Combining, connecting ideas / idea sex
   1. Create lists of potent ideas, and play with their recombination (even, perhaps, in diffuse mode)
   2. CS / Economics is a great fertile beginning.
   3. CS / Social Science / Emotions / Memetics
   4. Mechanism Design, components of incentive structures
6. Leading Questions
   1. Resource Constraints / Excess
      1. This led to the billionaire pitches. Create this for time, attention, etc.
   2. Eliminating Options
   3. Generate other valuable leading questions
7. Generalization
   1. Find nice solutions, and extend them to their farthest reaches
   2. Can create list of breakthroughs / elegant solutions as a source.
8. List and Reject Assumptions
   1. Damn, I really would love assumption generators. Or leading questions for dangerous latent assumptions.
9. Multiple level of abstraction
   1. Oh, I totally need to start a deconstruction habit. That would be excellent - concept by concept. What is everything? How do they break down? How can they be measured? What is similarity? Information? Relationship? Structure? How do we abstract? Where do these concepts break?
10. Apply different modes of processing
11. What are these? Emotional? Think about it with anger, with adoration, with frustration? Different categories of thought?
12. Emotional
    1. Anger
    2. Gratefulness
    3. Adoration
    4. Frustration
    5. Excitement
13. Types of Thinker
    1. Mathematician
    2. Technologist
    3. Computer Scientist
    4. Philosopher
    5. Psychologist
    6. Economist
14. Think ground up, from first principles
15. A ‘first principles analysis’ habit would be so strong.
16. Decomposition + Optimization

Source: Original Google Doc