Creativity, Cognition and why I write
Re: When is it better to think without words?
Thoughts about When is better to think without words? - by Henrik Karlsson
The cover picture fits perfectly. A well written essay that touches all the important points. You can see that the author writes regularly.
The hypothesis here is that if you work hard on a problem, you soak your subconscious with it. Wrestling with a problem helps you build a mental model of what you know and what you don’t—providing the subconscious with building blocks to work with. (You can’t have genuine intuition and inspiration in areas where you lack knowledge.) Then, once you drop the problem from conscious thought and go take care of the dishes or something, the subconscious begins a silent and parallelized search, trying many, many alternatives (in a somewhat random fashion), until something snaps in place. When this happens, the solution bubbles back up to the conscious mind, as if out of nowhere, making you freeze mid-motion with a stack of dirty plates in your hands
How to build the mental model?
Reasoning from my experience, I suspect it is because words are laborious. When we put words to a thought, we have to compress something that is like a web in our mind, filled with connections and associations going in all directions, turning that web into a sequential string of words; we have to compress what is high-dimensional into something low-dimensional. This has all sorts of advantages, which I will return to, but the point I want to emphasize here is that compression is effortful. It takes intense concentration to find the right words (rather than the sloppy ones that first come to mind), and then to put them in the proper order. As James Joyce said to his friend when he was asked why he looked so gloomy, “I’ve only written seven words today…” “But why then are you in despair—seven words is a lot for you!” “I don’t know in which order to put them…”
So writing—and reading, seriously, the writings of others—is a way to collect stepping stones: ideas that have been stabilized enough that they can carry us as we walk deeper into the thought space.
Maybe the author provides the best summary; "the relationship between verbal thinking and deep wordless concentration is complex".
Re: The Creative Programmer
TODO
Re: Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Creativity and cognition.
Learning by writing
An great idea for beginner-learning is to write a book about a topic while still being a beginner. Ask questions!
This is how Steve Klabnik creates his tutorials -- "You only get to look at a problem as a beginner once, and so I think writing this stuff down is interesting. It also helps meclarify what I'm learning to myself."
Structing ideas
Structuring thoughts, structuring words, structuring folders and structuring ideas. All the same.
Re: Designing better file organization around tags, not hierarchies
Original at Designing better file organization around tags, not hierarchies
How is this article relevant? Because the author tries to provide structure to the formless.
Re: Luhmann's Zettelkasten
Re: Johnny Decimal
Dumping ground
TODO describe why I write
TODO for work, write summaries of ongoing topics (rollouts, problems, ...) to capture the core ideas and problems
TODO ask more questions -- why does something not work? why do we do things in a specific way?