Sequential Organization of Thinking: "Six Thinking Hats"
Many people move chaotically from thought to thought without explicit structure. Inappropriate structuring may leave blind spots or cause the gears of thought to grind to a halt, but the advantages of appropriate structuring are immense:
Correct thought structuring ensures that you examine all relevant facets of an issue, idea, or fact.
- It ensures you know what to do next at every stage and are not frustrated or crippled by akrasia between moments of choice; the next action is always obvious.
- It minimizes the overhead of task switching: you are in control and do not dither between possibilities.
- It may be used in a social context so that potentially challenging issues and thoughts may be brought up in a non-threatening manner (let's look at the positive aspects, now let's focus purely on the negative...).
To illustrate thought structuring, I use the example of Edward de Bono's "six thinking hats" mnemonic. With Edward de Bono's "six thinking hats" method you metaphorically put on various colored "hats" (perspectives) and switch "hats" depending on the task. I will use the somewhat controversial issue of cryonics as my running example.1
Heuristic is not a bad word
An insect tries to escape through the windowpane, tries the same again and again, and does not try the next window which is open and through which it came into the room. A man is able, or at least should be able, to act more intelligently. —George Polya, How To Solve It
Intelligence makes humans capable of many impressive feats. Unlike flies and birds, we don't bang up against windows multiple times trying to get out of our houses. We can travel to the moon. We have taken over the planet. Why? Because intelligence enables us to solve problems.
All problems start the same way. They start unsolved. Each fact humans have figured out was initially unfigured out by us. Then we did something, which converted the unknown fact into a known fact, changed the state of a problem from unsolved to solved.
I emphasize the unknown starting state of problems to make a point: problem solving, the basis of human achievement, depends on a process of discovery, discovery of new facts, new possibilities, new methods, and new ways of thought.
Heuristic—the art and science of discovery—has been integral for human progress. The word "heuristic" is related to "Eureka!"
Deliberate and spontaneous creativity
Related to: Spock's Dirty Little Secret, Does Blind Review Slow Down Science?
After finding out that old scientists don't actually resist change, I decided to do a literature search to find out if the related assumption was true. Is it mainly just the young scientists who are productive? (This should be very relevant for rationalists, since we and scientists in general have the same goal - to find the truth.)
The answer was a pretty resounding no. Study after study after study found that the most productive scientists were those in middle age, not youth. Productivity is better predicted by career age than chronological age. One study suggested that middle-aged scientists aren't more productive as such, but have access to better resources, and that the age-productivity connection disappears once supervisory position is controlled for. Another argued that it was the need for social networking that led the middle-aged to be the most productive. So age, by itself, doesn't seem to affect scientific productivity much, right?
Well, there is one exception. Dietrich and Srinivasan found that paradigm-busting discoveries come primarily from relatively young scientists. They looked at different Nobel Prize winners and finding out the age when the winners had first had the idea that led them to the discovery. In total, 60% of the discoveries were made by people aged below 35 and around 30% were made by people aged between 35 and 45. The data is strongest for theoretical physics, which shows that 90% of all theoretical contributions occurred before the age of 40 and that no theoretician over the age of 50 had ever had an idea that was deemed worthy of the Nobel prize. Old scientists are certainly capable of expanding and building on an existing paradigm, but they are very unlikely to revolutionize the whole paradigm. Why is this so?
Actually, this wasn't something that Dietrich just happened to randomly stumble on - he was testing a prediction stemming from an earlier hypothesis of his. In "the cognitive neuroscience of creativity", he presents a view of two kinds of systems for creativity: deliberate and spontaneous (actually four - deliberate/cognitive, deliberate/emotional, spontaneous/cognitive and spontaneous/emotional, but the cognitive-emotional difference doesn't seem relevant for our purposes). Summarizing the differences relevant to the aging/creativity question:
Lawful Creativity
Previously in Series: Recognizing Intelligence
Creativity, we've all been told, is about Jumping Out Of The System, as Hofstadter calls it (JOOTSing for short). Questioned assumptions, violated expectations.
Fire is dangerous: the rule of fire is to run away from it. What must have gone through the mind of the first hominid to domesticate fire? The rule of milk is that it spoils quickly and then you can't drink it - who first turned milk into cheese? The rule of computers is that they're made with vacuum tubes, fill a room and are so expensive that only corporations can own them. Wasn't the transistor a surprise...
Who, then, could put laws on creativity? Who could bound it, who could circumscribe it, even with a concept boundary that distinguishes "creativity" from "not creativity"? No matter what system you try to lay down, mightn't a more clever person JOOTS right out of it? If you say "This, this, and this is 'creative'" aren't you just making up the sort of rule that creative minds love to violate?
Why, look at all the rules that smart people have violated throughout history, to the enormous profit of humanity. Indeed, the most amazing acts of creativity are those that violate the rules that we would least expect to be violated.
Is there not even creativity on the level of how to think? Wasn't the invention of Science a creative act that violated old beliefs about rationality? Who, then, can lay down a law of creativity?
But there is one law of creativity which cannot be violated...
The "Outside the Box" Box
Whenever someone exhorts you to "think outside the box", they usually, for your convenience, point out exactly where "outside the box" is located. Isn't it funny how nonconformists all dress the same...
In Artificial Intelligence, everyone outside the field has a cached result for brilliant new revolutionary AI idea—neural networks, which work just like the human brain! New AI Idea: complete the pattern: "Logical AIs, despite all the big promises, have failed to provide real intelligence for decades—what we need are neural networks!"
This cached thought has been around for three decades. Still no general intelligence. But, somehow, everyone outside the field knows that neural networks are the Dominant-Paradigm-Overthrowing New Idea, ever since backpropagation was invented in the 1970s. Talk about your aging hippies.
Nonconformist images, by their nature, permit no departure from the norm. If you don't wear black, how will people know you're a tortured artist? How will people recognize uniqueness if you don't fit the standard pattern for what uniqueness is supposed to look like? How will anyone recognize you've got a revolutionary AI concept, if it's not about neural networks?
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