[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.