Conversation

Serialized thinking is a superpower. Any idiot can think the obvious sequence of thoughts in a situation. Takes a superidiot to add nonsequential complexity and analyze-paralyze themselves within. But if you can spot and follow an unexpected new sequence easily: superpower.
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I generally have to go slowly painfully through superidiot phase and get to the other side of novel sequence the hard way.
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Replying to and
I think this is a commonly held but deeply mistaken piece of conventional wisdom. I’m a big believer in the opposite. The rare quality is breaking big connections that everybody believes in. Tons of people are good at seeing even obscure connections. Breaking “obvious” ones? Rare
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Most of the ones I have in mind are technical unfortunately. Think of analogies and metaphors as creating soft constraints on thought. If your idea of human flight is connected to bird flight, you’d never invent the fixed wing plane, let alone the helicopter.
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Musk’s first-principles heuristic is only one of many ways to break the connectionitis inherent to analogically reasoning, but there are many others. Boyd’s snowmobile approach is slightly more general.
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Look at the destruction and creation paper. The idea for a snowmobile is born by first disconnecting the parts of a motorcycle and skis, them reconnecting a subset of the parts. But even this is too structured. In general, the process is anarchic.
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