I've witnessed this phenomenon at work when asking other people for help with problems. My coworkers come up with more creative solutions than I did, much faster. The only problem is that when I'm asking for help with stuff, it tends to be tricky stuff with lots of edge cases. My coworkers' solutions tend to not actually work...
Which is not to say that there isn't value in asking them. Sometimes their solutions that don't work can be modified into something that does; or their crazy non-solutions can spark some inspiration on my end.
My theory as to what's going on here is that when you are responsible for the solution, you spend a lot of time thinking about what could go wrong, so your thinking gets constrained. When you are solving a problem for someone else, you're thinking is much freer, because frankly you don't give a damn. You are much more likely to come up with a unique, novel solution. You are also much more likely to deliver a solution that is actually disastrous.
My point being: I think there's room for both associated and disassociated thinking. This article seems to think because there was one series of studies showing some benefits of disassociated thinking that disassociated thinking is just straight up better.
This is a really good point and it shows how good collaborations need a "lead with strength" attitude and why rubberducking works - when you think the problem is not actually that hard and you can clearly describe it, then you can safely delegate its solution. But the thorniest stuff has to stay under your supervision or it won't get done right - usually. But there are just as many "easy problems with simple solutions that you overthink", and then you need a rubberduck conversation to work out why it's easy.
I've seen this as well. Other peoples problems offer an escape from my own. There isn't any pressure to solve them so there is definitely a different feel to them. There is also choice, if I hear about 5 other peoples problems, I may have insight into one or two but not the others and I can devote my spare cycles to the promising ones.
One approach for getting your own work done may be to think of your future self. That's who you're doing it for. This also gives less immediacy to the problem in addition to distance. "Older me is going to really appreciate this 3 months from now."
It also gives you the advantage of putting yourself in a different mindset. For that, I usually use "3 AM me" as the comparison. Any API that is usable by fully-conscious daytime me, but is prone to errors by "3 AM me" is one that needs to be improved. If an API can be used by "3 AM me", along with all the stress and pressure that led to late-night coding, then it is sufficient.
Not only is there less pressure, but there is also the immediate pressure of gratitude from your peers, it's great to be able to help someone out and get a heartfelt thankyou. They are also often quite interesting and let you learn something about a new domain.
And suddenly I understand why I keep volunteering to help on gnarly little projects that are peripheral to my main job - even though I'm extraordinarily busy.
Another problem of coming up with solutions for others is that it's easier to say "throw it out start from scratch" when you're not the one doing the implementation leg work.
> I've witnessed this phenomenon at work when asking other people for help with problems. My coworkers come up with more creative solutions than I did, much faster. The only problem is that when I'm asking for help with stuff, it tends to be tricky stuff with lots of edge cases. My coworkers' solutions tend to not actually work...
You can see this phenomenon in the HN comments on pretty much any article about Self Driving Cars. Everybody seems to have an extremely creative solution to some problem, as long as you're willing to ignore all of the inconvenient reality that researchers and corporations actually have to handle.
Something only becomes a Problem for me if I have failed to solve it. So, by definition, my problems are things I'm probably worse at solving than other people.
That's a clever definition for "problem", but it's not how I would use the word in context. I would consider "problem" to include things which I have not yet attempted to solve, and I think most people would define it similarly.
I regularly use this to my advantage. Though other people's solutions often don't consider all the edge cases or complexity, they are not without merit. I often find I can adapt a suggestion to make it work, or solve one part of the problem. In the best cases, someone else can identify something you were worried about as a not as big a deal as you thought, think of a totally different solution/workaround to it, or even identify it as a non-problem.
This is aside from the rubber duck effects[0] of just explaining your problem to someone else.
For me its other way around: I know that I am a very sloppy person and can handle a lot of inconveniences, so I don't bother with fine details. If I write for other people, I assume that they are much neater and pickier, so I spend a lot of time polishing those corner cases.
A rationale approach to problem solving is usually the best. Others have less baggage and fewer emotions invested so they certainly can help.
Before organizing a whole enterprise around this however it is worth considering how much of our work actually fits into the solvable problem category.
Most ropes are twisted or braided. Cutting lengthwise would cut all of the threads completely destroying the rope.
You could maybe unbraid the rope and deconstruct carefully into component threads and reconstruct into two ropes, Banak-Tarski(spell?) style. But that would be quite involved.
Why not? Big ropes are made with smaller fibres entwined.
It's not that difficult to obtain two smaller ropes from a bigger one provided that it is big enough.
> Which leads to one final question: how exactly did the prisoner with the insufficiently long rope manage to escape? The answer: he split the rope lengthwise, tied the two halves together and shimmied to freedom.
Note that it is not being "cut" lengthwise, but instead is being "split" lengthwise... it's an important distinction. An alternative for split could be "un-braid".
Some of the comments below yours seem to be confusing the 2 times the author mentions the dividing of the rope.
The 1st is when he outlines the problem (at the beginning)
>Yet he divides the rope in half, ties the two parts together, and escapes to his freedom.
The 2nd is when the author provides the answer (at the end)
> The answer: he split the rope lengthwise, tied the two halves together and shimmied to freedom.
I absolutely agree with the premise that solving somebody else's problem or getting an outside opinion is highly beneficial because it allows you to approach a problem with a beginner's mind.
That rope example though clearly shows a caveat with that approach. In an ideal, abstract world that solution would work. However, in the real world this solution obviously doesn't work because you can't cut a rope lengthwise without the rope coming undone.
I noticed a similar phenomenon in my days at school.
When solving problems on my own I was reasonably successful, but in class when I found out - or someone mentioned - that a particular problem was extremely difficult and/or no one had managed to do, I do exceptionally well in it.
As for an explanation to this, I have no idea. It maybe has something to do with the fact that if I fail at the difficult problem then a lot of people have seen me fail at it, but that's just guesswork.
They say that solving someone else's problem helps you think abstractly . But why do you have to use tricks to think abstractly ? why not just do so on purpose ? intentionally ?
Its just the way our mind works, it gets kind of tired doing the task you _have_ to do. That's why people like doing "side projects". It gives them a kick out of thinking in new ways.
The mind isn't as rational or straightforward as we would perhaps prefer. You can look at phenomena like split-brain studies to see just how bizarre it can be.[0] I'm not saying the split-brain stuff is comparable or useful in this particular situation. It's just the first concrete example of surprising, non-intuitive mind behavior I thought of.
Figuring out what tricks work can help us leverage these behaviors in ways that are useful. And maybe we'll learn how to get the benefits in a more direct manner, intentionally.
This seems like one of those marginal results that the experimenter planned to find before starting the experiment that won't replicate. Also, cutting a rope in half probably won't work, and one man's creative drawings and innovative gifts are another man's silly drawings and stupid gifts.
Did we discover that people are more likely to try to sell solutions that probably won't work if they know that they won't be responsible for actually carrying them out?
I had the same conclusion reading about the alien story part. If I have to write a story about an alien, I'm going to be thinking about what it's motivations and experiences are -- distinctly human things -- but if I have to describe an alien for someone else to write about, I'll have no trouble spewing out a stream of self-contradictory, unrelatable junk. So I'm left wondering why anyone would think the second is more "creative" than the first, given that the first was designed to solve problems and the second to create them. I wouldn't think that's the kind of creativity you'd want to measure and optimize for.
This is exactly how I felt when reading this! A reasonable hypothesis followed by some weak and vague experiments (how do you measure the creativity of drawings?). I'm sure many would accept the hypothesis alone (given some reasonable-sounding justification) without ever looking to see if the experiments truly validate the hypothesis.
What bias is this called again? It's not Texas Sharpshooter is it? Maybe just poor science?
Again, this is not to say the effect does not exist (I personally believe it does) - just that the conclusion does not follow from the evidence.
Nobody should be buying an argument on this sort of basis anymore. The business of selling us some truthy conclusion and thin social psych evidence in favour should be dead.
I discovered this as a trick when I was a teenager. I realized that when the guy ahead of me in Math class asked me to explain something, even if I wasn't sure my ego kicked in and my brain automatically went in overdrive to try and help him solve the problem, or perform an explanation.
I actually now use this trick: when I am blocked on a hard problem, or I find myself losing motivation, I imagine someone I would want to impress asking me the exact question, and spend 10s visualizing the scenario. It works!
My job is to help my clients get better at making software. I've done this with great success, but I couldn't ship something on my own if my life depended on it.
Observed it myself. While at work, I designed sophisticated ops / workflow automation systems, with continuous integration, Docker, test reporting and whatsnot.
For my own development? Nah, too much work, I'll do it manually (and I happily wasted huge amounts of accumulated time).
I don't know if I am more creative when helping my co-workers with their problems, but strangely I do feel more motivated to find a solution when it is for someone else's work. Weird.
This is reality interesting and reminds me of a real life anecdote. Imagine a customer who has a small trivial request where the correct response was "no, we won't do that and you will not need it" but without a manager's permission, the sales guy and an engineer stopped working on their mission critical projects to snipe in this tiny request in a non reusable way. It was already extremely low benefit to high cost (labor + opportunity cost). Management finds out half a lost day's work later and is really pissed off.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadYour link is a more in depth version of his position. Thx!
Which is not to say that there isn't value in asking them. Sometimes their solutions that don't work can be modified into something that does; or their crazy non-solutions can spark some inspiration on my end.
My theory as to what's going on here is that when you are responsible for the solution, you spend a lot of time thinking about what could go wrong, so your thinking gets constrained. When you are solving a problem for someone else, you're thinking is much freer, because frankly you don't give a damn. You are much more likely to come up with a unique, novel solution. You are also much more likely to deliver a solution that is actually disastrous.
My point being: I think there's room for both associated and disassociated thinking. This article seems to think because there was one series of studies showing some benefits of disassociated thinking that disassociated thinking is just straight up better.
One approach for getting your own work done may be to think of your future self. That's who you're doing it for. This also gives less immediacy to the problem in addition to distance. "Older me is going to really appreciate this 3 months from now."
And suddenly I understand why I keep volunteering to help on gnarly little projects that are peripheral to my main job - even though I'm extraordinarily busy.
You can see this phenomenon in the HN comments on pretty much any article about Self Driving Cars. Everybody seems to have an extremely creative solution to some problem, as long as you're willing to ignore all of the inconvenient reality that researchers and corporations actually have to handle.
This is aside from the rubber duck effects[0] of just explaining your problem to someone else.
[0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/rubber-duck-problem-solving/
Before organizing a whole enterprise around this however it is worth considering how much of our work actually fits into the solvable problem category.
You could maybe unbraid the rope and deconstruct carefully into component threads and reconstruct into two ropes, Banak-Tarski(spell?) style. But that would be quite involved.
"Yet he divides the rope in half, ties the two parts together..."
> Which leads to one final question: how exactly did the prisoner with the insufficiently long rope manage to escape? The answer: he split the rope lengthwise, tied the two halves together and shimmied to freedom.
Some of the comments below yours seem to be confusing the 2 times the author mentions the dividing of the rope.
The 1st is when he outlines the problem (at the beginning)
>Yet he divides the rope in half, ties the two parts together, and escapes to his freedom.
The 2nd is when the author provides the answer (at the end)
> The answer: he split the rope lengthwise, tied the two halves together and shimmied to freedom.
That rope example though clearly shows a caveat with that approach. In an ideal, abstract world that solution would work. However, in the real world this solution obviously doesn't work because you can't cut a rope lengthwise without the rope coming undone.
When solving problems on my own I was reasonably successful, but in class when I found out - or someone mentioned - that a particular problem was extremely difficult and/or no one had managed to do, I do exceptionally well in it.
As for an explanation to this, I have no idea. It maybe has something to do with the fact that if I fail at the difficult problem then a lot of people have seen me fail at it, but that's just guesswork.
Figuring out what tricks work can help us leverage these behaviors in ways that are useful. And maybe we'll learn how to get the benefits in a more direct manner, intentionally.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain
Did we discover that people are more likely to try to sell solutions that probably won't work if they know that they won't be responsible for actually carrying them out?
What bias is this called again? It's not Texas Sharpshooter is it? Maybe just poor science?
Again, this is not to say the effect does not exist (I personally believe it does) - just that the conclusion does not follow from the evidence.
Nobody should be buying an argument on this sort of basis anymore. The business of selling us some truthy conclusion and thin social psych evidence in favour should be dead.
I actually now use this trick: when I am blocked on a hard problem, or I find myself losing motivation, I imagine someone I would want to impress asking me the exact question, and spend 10s visualizing the scenario. It works!
- If you succeed, they will be thankful.
- If you fail, well, it's not your problem.
Also, you can let them do the obvious/boring stuff, like bureaucracy.
If it's not my problem, I'm not preoccupied with the emotional component.
For my own development? Nah, too much work, I'll do it manually (and I happily wasted huge amounts of accumulated time).
Irrational, but true.