Allison Arieff:

This is a relentless age we’re living in, a time when innovative solutions — or any solutions, for that matter — to our seemingly infinite problems seem in short supply.

So how do we come up with new ideas? How do we learn to think outside of normal parameters? Are the processes in place for doing so flawed? Do we rely too much on computer models? On consultants? On big-idea gurus lauding the merits of tribes and crowds or of starfish and spiders? On Twitter?

At the risk of sounding like a big-idea guru myself, I can’t help thinking that we’re all so mired in it that we’ve forgotten how to get out of it — how to daydream, invent, engage with the absurd.

Searching for Value in Ludicrous Ideas

David Brooks finally got around to watching Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk.

We, of course, live in a scientific age, and modern research pierces hocus-pocus. In the view that is now dominant, even Mozart’s early abilities were not the product of some innate spiritual gift. His early compositions were nothing special. They were pastiches of other people’s work. Mozart was a good musician at an early age, but he would not stand out among today’s top child-performers.

What Mozart had, we now believe, was the same thing Tiger Woods had — the ability to focus for long periods of time and a father intent on improving his skills. Mozart played a lot of piano at a very young age, so he got his 10,000 hours of practice in early and then he built from there.

Richard Sennett:

It takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a skilled carpenter or musician -- but what makes a true master?

Back to Brooks:

The mind wants to turn deliberate, newly learned skills into unconscious, automatically performed skills. But the mind is sloppy and will settle for good enough. By practicing slowly, by breaking skills down into tiny parts and repeating, the strenuous student forces the brain to internalize a better pattern of performance.

Dan Soltzberg:

It is ironic: people don’t notice that noticing is important!

Genius - The Modern View

Malcolm Gladwell:

The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and convince the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense.

It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played ...

David can beat Goliath by substituting effort for ability—and substituting effort for ability turns out to be a winning formula for underdogs in all walks of life, including little blond-haired girls on the basketball court.

Michael Lopp:

You should pick a fight, because bright people often yell at each other.

Paul Graham:

Adults lie constantly to kids. I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why.

Gladwell, from last October:

Genius, in the popular conception, is inextricably tied up with precocity—doing something truly creative, we’re inclined to think, requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth.

Nir Rosen, in Rolling Stone:

"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we Taliban have time."

Annals of Innovation: How David Beats Goliath

Jacob Weisberg riffs on Dyson:

A lot of our premises have turned out to be wrong lately.

Those who challenged the groupthink tended to be dismissed as provocateurs, wackos, or worse.

So at a moment when everything we once assumed seems suddenly up for discussion, it may be worth asking the question: What other big stuff could we be wrong about?

Freeman Dyson:

I beseech you, in the words of Oliver Cromwell, to think it possible you may be mistaken.

Paul Graham:

This idea is so pervasive that even the kids believe it.

From a discussion here last month:

I don't mean to agitate, but it's interesting how the public demand for honesty and realism appears to be inversely proportional to the performance of the major indexes. In 2007, when the Dow first broke 12600, I doubt many people were saying: "after a fifty percent increase in the 'value' of the economy it's about damn time these people stopped blowing smoke and come clean about what the situation is so that the rest of us can make informed decisions." And the few people who asked such questions found themselves the laughingstock of Wall Street and Main Street alike.

What Else Are We Wrong About?

New from National Academies Press:

The scientific research enterprise is built on a foundation of trust. Scientists trust that the results reported by others are valid. Society trusts that the results of research reflect an honest attempt by scientists to describe the world accurately and without bias. But this trust will endure only if the scientific community devotes itself to exemplifying and transmitting the values associated with ethical scientific conduct.

On Being a Scientist was designed to supplement the informal lessons in ethics provided by research supervisors and mentors. The book describes the ethical foundations of scientific practices and some of the personal and professional issues that researchers encounter in their work. It applies to all forms of research--whether in academic, industrial, or governmental settings-and to all scientific disciplines.

This third edition of On Being a Scientist reflects developments since the publication of the original edition in 1989 and a second edition in 1995. A continuing feature of this edition is the inclusion of a number of hypothetical scenarios offering guidance in thinking about and discussing these scenarios.

On Being a Scientist is aimed primarily at graduate students and beginning researchers, but its lessons apply to all scientists at all stages of their scientific careers.

Martin Schwartz:

Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it.

Louis Menand:

Getting a Ph.D. today means spending your 20’s in graduate school, plunging into debt, writing a dissertation no one will read – and becoming more narrow and more bitter each step of the way.

Richard Hamming:

If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work.

On Being a Scientist

Jennifer Fisher Wilson, on George Johnson's The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments:

When reading about scientists, I am often struck by how much confidence — as well as intelligence — is required to do the job. So much of the work that goes into great discoveries is based on an anomalous idea, conducted in lonesome obscurity, and carried out through the repetition of small tasks — titrating liquid, measuring output, tracking results. There seems to be so much room for mistakes and so much time to lose faith. Johnson seems similarly awed by how it all happens, wondering how the scientists who conducted these “beautiful experiments” kept from confusing their instincts with their suppositions, “unconsciously nudging the apparatus, like an Ouija board, to come up with the hoped-for reply.” As he asserts, “the most temperamental piece of laboratory equipment will always be the human brain.”

Martin Schwartz:

Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it.

From the archive:

Galileo was an astrologer.

Newton was an alchemist.

Have you seen Synecdoche, New York?

Knowing that you don’t know is the most essential step to knowing, you know?

Experimental Nonfiction

Isabella Rossellini:

I will develop a tunnel and it will be a labyrinth.

From last year:

They are not like standard nature shows.

Nathan Myhrvold:

I was in the middle of saying "it's very hard to enter the rectum, but once you do things move much faster", only to hear the waiter gasp. Whoops.

129 Minutes With Isabella Rossellini

Inspired by the vast potential of bioengineering, ordinary people are seeking their inner Frankenstein -- doctor, not monster. Two speakers who know their way around Petri dish and beaker discuss the possibilities and pitfalls of do-it-yourself biology with an MIT Museum crowd.

Showing ads from a 1980 Omni magazine, Natalie Kuldell reflects on the vast changes in computer engineering in the past few decades – from 20-lb PCs to laptops and handhelds. In contrast, she laments, genetic engineering today still resembles in large part its 1980 antecedents -- inserting bits of DNA into organisms like E. coli. She avers that computer engineering made such leaps because its technology was widely available to amateurs, who helped drive many advances. Biotech hasn’t moved as fast, and won’t, believes a nascent do-it-yourself (DIY) community, until basic components of biology become accessible to a larger population.

Freeman Dyson:

When children start to play with real genes, evolution as we know it will change forever.

About Drew Endy:

As an engineer, he can recognize a kludge when he sees one. And in his opinion, life is a kludge.

Decius:

Al Qaeda is not an organization. It is a scene.

Bill Joy:

An immediate consequence of the Faustian bargain in obtaining the great power of nanotechnology is that we run a grave risk - the risk that we might destroy the biosphere on which all life depends.

Do-It-Yourself Biology

Craig Partridge:

This essay is based on notes from a lecture I gave at Stanford in 1999. That lecture was easily the most popular one of the course and several people encouraged me to put the ideas on-line.

The idea behind the lecture was to provide very basic information that the average computer science student needs, and that my friends and I found that we were not given by the time we had graduated from college. Some of the advice here is from my own experience, but a lot is also from the experience of friends, several of whom kindly shared advice they wished they’d gotten earlier.

Here is the career advice, in summary:

Manage Your Boss
Experiment
Avoid Becoming a Manager
Learn to Write
Learn to Speak Well
Finish Projects
Do Your Homework for Reviews and Raises
Keep Your Skills Current

Things I Wish I'd Been Told

Dean Keith Simonton, via John Cloud:

Deliberate practice is a necessary but not sufficient condition for creating genius. For one thing, you need to be smart enough for practice to teach you something.

W.A. Pannapacker:

Academe is full of potential geniuses who have never done a single thing they wanted to do because there were too many things that needed to be done first: the research projects, conference papers, books and articles — not one of them freely chosen: merely means to some practical end, a career rather than a calling.

Alan Kay:

If the children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?

Douglas Coupland:

People would go into the pi room, and their brains would become quiet, and they would emerge relaxed.

Is Genius Born or Can It Be Learned?