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VNKKET comments on Five-minute rationality techniques - Less Wrong
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Candidate: Don't pursue an idea unless it came to your attention by a method that actually finds good ideas. (Paraphrased from here.)
I actually keep getting good ideas in some areas while sleeping.
E.g. when facing a difficult problem in programming sleeping a night seems to give the solution quite often.
You changed my mind. I'm worried my candidate will hurt more than it helps because people will conflate "bad idea generators" with "disreputable idea generators" -- they might think, "that idea came to me in my sleep, so I guess that means I'm supposed to ignore it."
A partially-fixed candidate: If an idea was generated by a clearly bad method, the idea is probably bad.
Well, then that is, in fact, a method that finds good ideas!
I sometimes use the debonoesque 'lateral thinking' tricks like association with a random dictionary word to come with some creative solution for a problem. I does not work for all classes of problems, but it can be useful.
There are some methods that consistently do not work well for me when trying to find good ideas / solutions; for example, sitting at my desk and looking at the screen.