AstraSequi comments on Exploring the Idea Space Efficiently - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (27)
I'm sure it is! In fact, when writing the "jobs, personal life, the natural world, engineering, other" list, I noted that "jobs" and "personal life" have a sort of opposite category connection for me, as does "the natural world" and "engineering" (i.e. human inventions), so I definitely primed myself to come up with areas that are somewhat related.
Fortunately, it's less of a problem for really broad categories, since there are just so much fewer of them, so you should end up accidentally too focused or missing stuff less often. Not so fortunately, I'm not sure how to fix the problem, short of maybe having a giant list pre-written and picking up all that apply, or something laborious like that.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking of when I suggested that it might be done systematically. I hope that a pre-written list wouldn't be necessary though, since I think such a list would also cause priming unless it were completely exhaustive.
Also, a separate idea I just thought of - although making a list as you suggest is a big step forward in generating ideas, I would speculate that every idea is still primed in some way, even if only by your previous thoughts. (For example, if I forget a thought that I wanted to consider more, often thinking about what I was thinking about right before will let me produce that thought again, even though the previous thoughts were ostensibly unrelated. Similarly, a category like "jobs" will tend to elicit different initial thoughts in different people, which would then prime their next thoughts, etc.) So I'm suggesting that making a list could perhaps be interpreted as "preparing many unrelated ways of priming yourself beforehand so that when you exhaust one search you can re-prime yourself from another starting point." And then you would cover a much larger region of idea-space as a result - although I'm not sure how this different interpretation might help in the search for more ideas.