[kortilla]

> Lazyness is a big driver for invention

What? I can’t see it being a good invention driver for anything other than the category of “tools for lazy people”. How was the invention of the OLED driven by laziness? How about the high bypass turbofan?

[rpastuszak]

> What? I can’t see it being a good invention driver for anything other than the category of “tools for lazy people”. How was the invention of the OLED driven by laziness? How about the high bypass turbofan?

It's proven that "doing nothing" helps with creative thinking. The inventions you are talking about are a product of both hard work and laziness.

You can't solve a problem by staring at your screen and thinking really, really hard for 10 hours. The solution will come to you a few hours later during a shower or a walk.

> "tools for lazy people"

1) From the biological standpoint all tools are for lazy people. Lazy animals spend less resources, which in turn could be used for creating more lazy animals.

2) Our brain is wired to be lazy. This impacts both how we approach problems (form stronger neural pathways or move between system I and system II to use D. Kahneman's example) and how we avoid them (e.g. cognitive biases)

3) The distinguishing feature of humans as animals is that we create tools and become dependent on them.

On a less serious note, I'd say that 90% of my programming work is driven by laziness.

For instance, I test things in advance or design them in a certain way so I don't need to worry about them in the future.

This allows me for focus on more challenging problems. These at some point become boring chores. So "I test things in advance or design them in a certain way so I don't need to worry about them in the future." Rinse and repeat.

[adwn]

> It's proven that "doing nothing" helps with creative thinking. The inventions you are talking about are a product of both hard work and laziness.

The kind of "doing nothing" that helps with creative thinking is very different from the kind of "doing nothing" that results from laziness.

> On a less serious note, I'd say that 90% of my programming work is driven by laziness. For instance, I test things in advance or design them in a certain way so I don't need to worry about them in the future.

That's not being lazy, that's long-term thinking and defering gratification – which is the opposite of what people typically mean by the term "laziness". In your post, you're conflating two concepts:

1) Defering productive work until a later time to free time for near-term non-productive activities ("being lazy").

2) Spending more resources (time, energy) near-term to be more efficient overall ("being inventive").

[rpastuszak]

Yeah, that was supposed to sound tongue-in-cheek, but actually distorts the meaning of the rest of the post. I wish I didn't add that example and kept only the first part of the post. Thanks for pointing that out. (Now, I wish I kept only the bullet points)

> The kind of "doing nothing" that helps with creative thinking is very different from the kind of "doing nothing" that results from laziness.

I agree, but that's not how I read the parent post. I'm curious to see how you'd describe this distinction though.

[adwn]

> I'm curious to see how you'd describe this distinction though.

One kind of "doing nothing" frees your mind to discover solutions and interesting ideas in a background process. Examples include talking a walk, talking a shower, or just sitting around and letting your mind wander.

The other kind of "doing nothing" occupies your mind with low-effort thought processes. Examples include watching TV or reading a book. This isn't necessarily a negative thing, but your mind won't be solving problems (unless you're not really focusing on the movie or the book).

[kortilla]

You read the parent post (my post) wrong. I’m refuting that laziness is “the driver” for innovation.

You then went on a tangent about downtime being responsible for thinking. That has zero relationship with laziness.

You only need to look to students to see how spending intellectual effort exploring ideas requires energy. Huge chunks complain about anything that requires open ended problem solving. You become blind to this as a knowledge worker who has honed that skill in the same way a plumber becomes blind to the difficulty of sweating pipes together.

Again, the high bypass turbofan and OLED were not created out of laziness. Many critical ideas were likely matured during downtime, but that’s not laziness.

All math proofs pushing the boundaries of the field of math have approximately no practical application leading to inventions to help mathematicians be lazy. Nobody is taking a crack at the Riemann hypothesis because they’re too lazy to do the dishes.

[sgillen]

So many tools take a job that was possible without the tool and make it much easier, and in that sense many tools are “for lazy people”.

Examples include: autocomplete, spell check, version control, undo, in-house running water, washing machines, Zoom.

Just to name a few random examples, the list is obviously gigantic.

[kortilla]

Zoom is not for lazy people. The main use case is to allow people to have meeting who could not otherwise. The percentage of zoom users who could meet otherwise is vanishingly small.

Making a tool that helps people do work more efficiently is not targeting lazy people. A person is not lazy if they want to do a job more efficiently and eliminate wasted effort. A person is lazy if they don’t want to do work at all.

A smart writer uses spellcheck because people make mistakes and spellcheck is a lot cheaper than a proofreader. A lazy writer doesn’t bother writing in the first place.

[np_tedious]

Plows and tractors

[hamilyon2]

OLED: Performing in theater live is laborious. Also, getting there and waiting for actors.

Turbofan is way out of my area of expertise. Still, I guess planes are less hard than breeding, riding a thousand horses, sailing ships, and so. And waiting, waiting is not for lazy.

[kortilla]

OLED did not come after theater, it came after LED.

High bypass turbofans did not displace the horse either. Planes were flying before they came into use.

You’re not making the point you think you are.

[classified]

Big driver, not the only driver.