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by RossBencina 385 days ago
This reminds me of Richard Hamming's practice of spending time every Friday to consider the big questions of his field. Here's the first summary I found: https://nobaproject.com/blog/2018-11-01-tough-questions-and-...

The main Hamming materials I'm aware of are:

"You and your research" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw

and the course, "Learning to Learn" https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30

The original course notes are online somewhere, can't find right now.

And I just found that there is a book: https://gwern.net/doc/science/1997-hamming-theartofdoingscie...

A serious talk by British comedian John Cleese "Creativity In Management" is also relevant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g it touches on switching between "open" and "closed" modes of thought. Perhaps this is what we'd call switching between the DMN and TPN. Neurotypical exclusive switching between these networks is a function that is theorised to be impaired in ADHD.

1 comments

https://gwern.net/doc/science/1986-hamming#great-thoughts-fr...

You can think of it as a RL problem, and there are some interesting algorithms which achieve good performance by periodically 'breaking out' of exploitation, but less and less: https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.07979 (I expect that you can come up with an infinite hierarchy of 'wake ups' which converge to a fixed overhead and which aren't terribly far off an optimal schedule of replanning wake-ups, and that something like 'great thoughts Friday' is the first step; then you'd have 'great thoughts first-of-the-month' and 'great thoughts new year's day' etc: https://gwern.net/socks#fn10 )