Hamming, "Creativity" (May 23, 1995)
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- Опубликовано: 11 сен 2024
- Intro: Creativity, originality, novelty, and such words are regarded as "good things," and we often fail to distinguish between them - indeed we find them hard to define. Surely we do not need three words with exactly the same meaning; hence we should try to differentiate somewhat between them as we try to define them. The importance of definitions has been stressed before, and we will use this occasion to illustrate an approach to defining things, not that we will succeed perfectly or even well.
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn" was the capstone course by Dr. Richard W. Hamming (1915-1998) for graduate students at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey California.
This course is intended to instill a "style of thinking" that will enhance one's ability to function as a problem solver of complex technical issues. With respect, students sometimes called the course "Hamming on Hamming" because he relates many research collaborations, discoveries, inventions and achievements of his own. This collection of stories and carefully distilled insights relates how those discoveries came about. Most importantly, these presentations provide objective analysis about the thought processes and reasoning that took place as Dr. Hamming, his associates and other major thinkers, in computer science and electronics, progressed through the grand challenges of science and engineering in the twentieth century.
Thanks for uploading this ! amazing lecture, here are my notes of the lecture:
- Multiplying 2 specific 10-digit numbers using a computer probably never done before but it isn't creative.
- Scientists like artists, don't get recognition at first for their creative work (Mendel and Wegener as examples)
- Creativity involves "Psychological distance": How difficult is to associate 2 things that are distant from each other?
- It is hard to explain how creative thinking came to you when it came to you, but you can try and understand it after you formulate your idea.
- Saturate your subconscious with the problem, by thinking about it all the time. (luck favor the prepared mind).
- Emotional content: being emotionally involved is very important to your success. You should care about what you do. (a different way of saying the previous idea of saturating your mind)
- When you stuck, ask yourself "what an answer looks like if I had it? Have I got all the information I need ?"
- Analogies can help you even if they are loose analogies. They work as suggestions.
- Learning things in the framework you learned them could make you overlook things. In the act of learning, Try and reconstruct your thinking in different ways so you remember it better. Put different hooks on the idea. Don't be trapped in that framework that gave you that knowledge in the first place.
- Surround yourself by people who intellectually motivate you.
- To run a 4-minute mile, you have to do your work. Change your mental habits and break them down to understand them. Change yourself to understand new things and be prepared to learn and find new things. Change your ways.
- To change yourself, you need to understand yourself. Changing your mental habit is possible like changing your physical habits. Try small incremental changes, new ways of living your mental life.
- You are responsible for yourself. Don't be what you don't like to be.
- Know when to drop the problem. There is a fine line between strong-well and stubbornness.
Manage yourself. To manage yourself you need to know yourself. Understand what you can and can't do. Try to make your attributes work for you.
Thanks for your notes! Here's mine (with different emphasis):
- Let a problem (and nothing else) occupy my mind; force the subconscious to work on it.
- After a period of monomaniacal focus, switch to something else while the subconscious continues working on it.
- Ideas may arise suddenly, or only when I return to the problem.
- (Terence Tao made this suggestion too:) When learning something new, mull over it, vary its conditions / parameters / conclusions, reframe the idea, try it on existing problems I'm studying, think about how it connects to my other knowledge, etc. These connections create "hooks" for recalling this piece of information when considering related / analogous problems.
- Discuss with friends; select friends based on how well they respond with related / analogous information and stimulate my thinking.
- Tough / unreasonable working conditions (eg. wartime) is more stimulating than easy life. "Necessity is the mother of innovation."
- Motivating myself to be creative: know my own personality:
- eg. Hamming tells colleagues he'll have the answer by next Monday, and the self-imposed deadline makes him (having ego but also self-confidence) a "cornered rat" and go to greater effort on the problem.
- Moving into new situations enables changing personality because I don't have an existing reputation and people don't have expectations.
- Build a reputation for solving certain kinds of problems, and corresponding problems will come to me.
- Dropping a problem:
- If the problem stays the same amount of work in the future ("I'll solve it in 18 months", and 1 year later it's still 18 months), then I'm not making real progress and should do something else for at least 6 months to 1 year.
These lectures should have millions of views. Where has this been all my life?
Right!
Monterey California and Bell Labs, apparently.
whenever I visit this lecture I discover something completely new every single time
Can't believe I will be able to listen to man behind those books!
this lecture is great. it's very similar to an essay that Cormac McCarthy later wrote (one of the most famous American literary authors) called "Kekule's Dream". In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if this where McCarthy got the idea from
42:10 In some fields, maturity is the best thing. But it is astrophysics, mathematics, and theoretical physics where raw creativity counts. Youth is a great advantage and experience is not.
~32:00 Our boy Al Einstein 😂
The one the I like most is "Our boy Euler" ...
19:38 - 20:48 - 23:44 - 25:44 john
I have done the sub consciousness thing , it works for real people. I did an incredible thing in android development thanks to that. No it was not an app it was a platform.