[throwawayarnty]

This made me think of science and academia. One of the things that seems to distinguish productive people in science is the balance between “doer” mentality and “thinker” mentality.

Too much “thinker” mentality and the project never goes anywhere. Too much “doer” mentally and the project moves but may go down an unproductive path.

Perhaps an analogy is that “thinker” and “doer” mentalities work together like a stochastic gradient descent algorithm.

The “thinker” mode tries to calculate accurate gradients, but never moves towards the goal.

The “doer” mode takes a step towards the next iteration, regardless of whether you have an accurate gradient already.

Balancing the two correctly can give beautiful momentum dynamics that steers towards your goal.

[glial]

> Balancing the two correctly

There are some famous examples complementary and different personalities working together very well, like e.g. Kahneman and Tversky:

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-two-friends-...

[testingwaters4]

I appreciate the sentiment, as you're right about one of too many of these are easy traps to fall into. I would also say that life isn't so binary, it's not one or the other, it's a huge mix of everything. Also I am not sure doing without thinking exists, the "doer" in your case has to think about what he is doing otherwise he wouldn't be able to do anything no?

[burrows]

Damn dude, having seen anything this insightful since that last Malcolm Gladwell book. Thanks!

[karpierz]

I can't tell if this is cutting sarcasm or not; brilliant.

[Aperocky]

> 学而不思则罔，思而不学则殆 - Confucius