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RobinHanson comments on Deliberate and spontaneous creativity - Less Wrong
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Why should we combat this at all? Why must everyone at all times be involved in developing paradigm-busting innovations? Why can't the task be delegated to those most capable of doing the task?
What if there's a paradigm-busting innovation that requires a lot of experience to see? Newton only had to invent first-year undergraduate stuff, as the saying goes.
Furthermore, our present society does very poorly at exploiting this resource of youth, so if we're going to explicitly rely on delegation to youth, we had better make more effort to stuff youth full of useful knowledge as fast as possible without wasting any time so they can start their useful research lifespans at age 18, not sentence it to slow university until age 30.
It seems to me that the limiting factor is usually the demand for such innovations, not their supply. There are usually lots of proposals for paradigm-busting innovations relative to the capacity to explore or test them. Until we can expand this capacity, it is hard to get very worked up over our not having an even larger supply of such proposals.
The result isn't that claimed / attempted paradigm-busting is limited to youth, but that successful paradigm-busting seems to start when young. I don't think we have an oversupply of paradigm-busters that are as good as they could get.
(If there's somewhere you go to get a reliable supply of these things, I have a large order to place with respect to certain areas of mathematical logic...)
Sure, there's no shortage of people claiming innovation if funded.
blinks, stops I had never thought of it that way.
However, if we aren't only talking about doing science but also trying to become more rational, then it seems that the same process that made us less likely to come up with paradigm-busting innovations would also strenghten the effect of any biases we had. That includes biases not directly related to science, but also things distorting our evaluation of e.g. moral/ethical questions. While in science we can just let people specialize, in moral questions we'd like as many people as possible to be capable of thinking straight. Every single person who has a distorted view of ethical questions can do harm in their daily lives, while the amount of harm done by a single misguided scientist is smaller.
Also, the population structure in most countries is currently growing older, which implies that we may need to counteract the effect by making even older scientists paradigm-innovate more if we want to progress as fast as we've been doing so far.
Can't we think of the youthful lack of organizing mental structures as a bias that distorts their thoughts? Until we know the optimal point along this spectrum, we can't tell which side is biased on net.
Thinking new thoughts (as opposed to cached thoughts) is risky behavior, if e.g. it makes you a crank, but I don't think it can properly be called a bias.
Most thoughts are cached thoughts, or put together from other cached thoughts like Tinkertoys; most new ideas are heard from others rather than invented. Genuinely new thoughts are rare, even if they're less rare in the young than the old. To my mind their rarity increases their value: the ability to invent new thoughts is precious.
In writing fiction I've practiced techniques that reliably induce creativity: brainstorming, freewriting, random association, and so on. These are non-methodical in character; they're not processes you can use to produce a result, but processes that put you in a state that allows you to produce the result. They are basically irrational. Does that mean creativity is a failure mode of rationality, or are there techniques a rationalist can use to produce new thoughts?
Why should society want to combat this at all? Or why should each of us want to combat the decline in ourselves (to whatever extent we have such creative ability)?
Eliezer gave one possible answer for the first question above, but you might be right that delegation is better for society as a whole.
As for the second question though, individuals capable of paradigm-busting innovation will probably do almost anything to keep those creative powers, because instances of successful or partially successful application of those powers in the past have probably been high points of their life.
(No kidding.)
Well if you want to make immortality a reality and hence have fewer young people (unless we find ways to exist more cheaply or more resources), then if we want to carry on busting paradigms at a decent lick we need to solve this problem.