John Cook draws on the movie Redbelt to highlight the difference between staged contests and real-world fights. The main character of the movie is a Jiu Jitsu instructor who is willing to fight if necessary, but will not compete under arbitrary rules. Cook analogies this to the distinction between academic and real-world problem solving. Academics and students are often bound by restrictions that are useful in their own contexts, but are detrimental to someone who is more concerned with having a solution than where the solution came from.
Robin pointed arbitrary restrictions in academia out to us before, but his question then was regarding topics neglected for being silly. Following Cook's line of reasoning, are there any arbitrary restrictions we have picked up in school or other contexts that are holding us back? Are there rationalist "cheats" that are being underused?
I think a common situation is the manager/idea-generator relationship. An idea generator is a person who spends a lot of their working time simply "thinking", and there is no apparent output to their task until the very end, when they output an idea. A programmer trying to design the right algorithm to solve a given problem is one example of an idea generator.
Often, the manager will want to have some sort of feedback on the progress, and have an estimate of the time remaining to completion. The idea-generator, however, has no idea how long their task will take. They might find the solution this afternoon, or they may spend months brainstorming on it.
And so the manager may "assign" responsibilities like writing daily reports on what was found so far, filling in time sheets, etc. to alleviate their nervousness from seeing nothing produced. Bureaucracy like this is just taking the idea-generator's mind off of the real problem at hand, and can slow things down.
We might say there are two kinds of "responsibility." School teaches people to be responsible to authority; the other kind is being responsible for eventual outcomes (such as truthfulness) by asking questions and challenging authority.
An example would be something I read recently about the institutional mindset held by journalists at newspapers: older editors and managers are practically begging young reporters for new ideas... the problem is the type of people who go to work for a newspapers now tend to want responsibilities (and security) give... (read more)