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Esar comments on Rationality Quotes October 2012 - Less Wrong
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Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.
-- Thomas Edison
Lacking sufficient inspiration, I shall reduce my perspiration until recommended ratio is met.
Unfortunately, this will produce only a very small quantity of genius.
Yes, but it's the best you can do sometimes. And the excess sweat would otherwise be wasted.
Not necessarily. You can always apply your excess perspiration to someone else's excess inspiration (and then claim 99% of any resultant profits - assuming that you provide all the perspiration, of course).
Anecdotally, I seem to observe more excess inspiration than excess perspiration, so I don't think that excess inspiration will be hard to find.
Hmm. Corollary:
Lacking sufficient perspiration, I shall reduce my inspiration until recommended ratio is met.
Eh. Doesn't sound quite as awesome.
No, it doesn't, but might be almost equally wise. Just as it doesn't make sense to keep working hard without something worth working hard on, it probably doesn't make sense to keep trying to come up with brilliant ideas if you're already so awash in brilliant ideas that you can't implement them all.
Caveat 1: If you can find better inspiration into which to direct your limited supply of perspiration, and don't further deplete your capacity for perspiration in the process, it may still be a good idea to go for more inspiration.
Caveat 2: If you have a good way to sell your excess inspiration or buy more perspiration, and you have a strong comparative advantage in inspiration, you may want to do that, but selling inspiration is hard, as is buying good quality perspiration.
I think that Caveat #1 is extremely important here. Considering the amount of perspiration needed to turn inspiration into genius, it's probably best to spend a bit of extra time searching for the best possible inspiration to which to direct your available supply of perspiration.
Have you considered LSD, for the inspiration? I mean, if the sources don't matter, just the ratio...
I haven't, but the suggestion seems overwhelmingly problematic to me. I don't have any personal experience with LSD, but I don't think it would be of great help in my present problem.
However, we could test this. If you have LSD and would like to try your hand at solving it, please let me know. I must say, though, I doubt you would find it to be an interesting problem in the first place.
Sorry, the only research I've heard of was about technical matters and implied it only worked for the person who had been thinking deeply about it.