Ask HN: How do you work through large ideas?
I seem to constantly have 1-2 large ideas in my mind that I chew on in the background, which seem to arise (or give way to something bigger) from reading or a lengthy discussion with a coworker or friend. For example: "what is the best way to organize a liberal democracy of >100M citizens?"
I'm wondering if there is an approach people have that best helps to organize, prune, and work through large, fundamental ideas such as these that they'd be willing to share.
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[ 9.6 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadWhether you use metaphors or first principles, to even capture the scope of the problem and the important pieces that influence it is the first task.
I also use the concepts app [2] on my tablet to draw out mindmaps / charts /etc.
I use taskpaper vim plugin so I can quickly collapse and expand items to not make the file too overwhelming. In the file I group topics / questions based on what makes sense for that project, and at the top of the file I often have a 'topic' where I can quickly dump thoughts, that then later have to be refactored into one of the real topics.
I hope to one day find a way (and the time) to connect my ideas app with the repo txt file approach, so I can sync both.
Conceptually I think the hard part of most problems is figuring out the real important questions you want to ask yourself. Once you think you know them, then the answer is either obvious, or requires you to do something (research, build prototype, etc).
[1] Idea Growr app - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.juliushuij...
[2] Concepts app - https://concepts.app/en/
In 90% of cases: you need to ignore these thoughts as they can be time-consuming. You are not going to solve anything worthwhile related to organizing a 100M democracy if you are not in that field. You will not just "pick it up" unless you are a freak of nature and you are not.
Market Research, Wireframing, and Design by Balaji S. Srinivasan
Link: https://spark-public.s3.amazonaws.com/startup/lecture_slides...
However, I've been using it for just a month or so, and it's too early for me to form any conclusions.
From there, it was a matter of adding/changing rules to match what desired and seeing the outcome.
I ask because it changes my answer depending on whether the sample question is representative and how you are thinking about it, either as an author imagining an ideal situation or as a political theorist trying to understand human behavior of as a political reformer writing out a five year plan.
The issue being that politics is a team sport, and it doesn't really matter what you think is the most ideal system so much as what 100m people will agree to.
(Which isn't to say I have a problem with thinking about the ideal situations which have no chance of being implemented; I spent far too much time yesterday coming up with a proposal to redefine the foot-pound-second units as 1 second = 9.5x10^9 caesium-133 oscillations, c = 1 billion feet per second, and 1 pound = mass of 10^25 atoms of Si-28.)
Generally a well-understood stable system of any kind (including a democracy) evolves from a smaller stable system.
This principle is more or less built into the scientific process, where smaller results are peer reviewed and kicked around to a while before being combined to solve large problems.
So maybe try to start big, and zoom in to focus in on one piece of the puzzle. There's a good chance that whatever you choose can be used in other ways if the primary idea doesn't work out.
Ok. More specifically- some other poster suggested recording assumptions around these questions, and I will go further. Behind every complex large scale optimization question- what is the best way to X...- when X is fundamentally about humans- are a set of assumptions- here, around the definition of "best."
Rather than chew on the question as framed, perhaps work to understand the assumptions your own brain is baking into the question in whatever value is being optimized. Understand further those assumptions as choices in a landscape and identify other choices that did not originally arise in the framing.
With an understanding of the larger variety of choices that were originally hidden, visit in conversation with your fellow humans and ask of them how they see that landscape and set of choices.
This discovery process through engagement may yield more insight than the self-centered utilization of your brain's optimization machinery. This process makes yourself available for teaching moments that are usually more impactful both for teacher and learner than any specific optimization insight and may help in further writing/sharing those moments.
Best wishes.
Obviously there are many exceptions, I wonder if on average interest in such questions peaks. If so, does the average peak coincide with an age or a period of life. Do we lose interest in our late 20s/early 30s, on average, because that’s when we have kids or is that just how long it takes for people to get bored with contemplative pondering?
I sort of hope it’s that having kids, a partner, a more challenging career soaks up the extra cycles. But even without those things, I find my passion ebbing. I worry this is an inevitable part of aging.
2) execute the plan
The plan is likely hasty and will prove to be a failure when you execute on it. That's fine. The plan is little more than worthless, but the process of planning is invaluable. Once failure or any collision become clear repeat the process with a modified plan. Don't wait for clarity to strike.
Start by defining "best".
this would get me to a point where i could inquire into the meaning of organize .. in this case probably realizing that there's sufficient self-organization that i'd have to think about needs/support and self-emerging structures.
at that point we could look at how the situation differs from the understanding implied in the question.
its only after i get my and the questioner's terms and models straight that i could begin to define some kind of scale to deal with someone's idea of best in order to work on generating 'deliverables'.
at least for me its best to become an expert in the things i want to change before suggesting changes in or to them; if i don't do that, or start from or with any kind of enthusiasm engendered by the power vested in me by big questions, good outcomes tend to move toward the vanishing point instead of forming solid new baselines.
but thats what you're suggesting the questioner do by having them question the use of the subjective term 'best'. right? :)
> What is the best way to organize a liberal democracy of >100M citizens?
Ask yourself this: Can you reformulate the question into questions that make more sense?
Who can/should organize a liberal democracy of >100M citizens? What are relevant criteria to assert that a liberal democracy has been organized in "the best way"? Is it possible to agree on a fixed set of criteria? Is it possible to draw a model that matches reality? What game rules are you going to feed your model? Can you discern first principles that you're going to agree on and keep to build on top of?
The more questions and follow up questions you ask, the more concrete/tangible your answers will become.
Also, ask questions about yourself too. For instance, which biases can you identify with yourself? Are you able to avoid them?
In this case: how do you want to answer "best way"? If you are seeking an answer in absolute terms, then you may risk ending up in a logical tarpit discussing the existence of objective truth. Here you have a red flag: Is this question even a complete or answerable question?
So, it helps to question the question itself too. Maybe you need to bend the question before it can yield a worthwhile answer?
For more free thinking the best thing is to keep it in the back of your mind and stay close to a notebook at all times. With several similar ideas they will cross-pollinate and put you in a mindset to explore them further.