[latexr]

> thinking quickly saturates: when you’ve thought about a problem for five minutes, you’ve had all the thoughts you’re gonna have, and it’s time to talk to someone else.

Perhaps consider you suffer from incredibly short attention span. Thinking for five minutes does not exhaust all the thoughts you are going to have on a topic, and if you spend five minutes considering the implications of such a though you quickly realise how absurd it is.

History is filled with stories of “shower thoughts” and bolts of inspiration which came from thinking on a topic long and hard and immersing yourself in it. If your idea were true, humanity would still believe the Earth is the center of the Universe and we wouldn’t have computers. Yours is precisely the type of mentality which leads to the proliferation of scams and conspiracy theories. It’s also a worrying trend with LLMs, that people are so willing to turn off their brains sooner and sooner.

[raldi]

You never called any question impossible, said Harry, until you had taken an actual clock and thought about it for five minutes, by the motion of the minute hand. Not five minutes metaphorically, five minutes by a physical clock.

And furthermore, Harry said, his voice emphatic and his right hand thumping hard on the floor, you did not start out immediately looking for solutions.

[...]

So Harry was going to leave this problem to Fred and George, and they would discuss all the aspects of it and brainstorm anything they thought might be remotely relevant. And they shouldn't try to come up with an actual solution until they'd finished doing that, unless of course they did happen to randomly think of something awesome, in which case they could write it down for afterward and then go back to thinking. And he didn't want to hear back from them about any so-called failures to think of anything for at least a week. Some people spent decades trying to think of things.