#428 How Claude Shannon Worked

The great insights don't spring from curiosity alone, but from dissatisfaction. Not the depressive kind of dissatisfaction, but rather a constructive dissatisfaction or a slight irritation when things don't look quite right. A genius is simply someone who is usefully irritated. A genius must delight in finding solutions. Genius must derive joy from applications of intellect. Claude Shannon once said, I get a big kick out of seeing a clever way of doing some engineering problem, a clever design for a circuit which uses a very small amount of equipment and gets a great deal of results out of it. For Shannon, there was no substitute for the pleasure of seeing net results. So how would such a person go about solving a problem? Shannon proposed six strategies. Strategy number one: You might, he said, start by simplifying. Almost every problem that you come across is befuddled with all kinds of extraneous data of one sort or another. And if you can bring this problem down into the main issues, you can see more clearly what you're trying to do. Simplification is an art form in and of itself. It requires a knack for exercising everything from a problem except what makes it interesting. Number two. Encircle your problem with existing answers to similar questions, and then deduce what it is that the answers have in common. You'll need a vocabulary of questions already answered. You can call this ingenious incrementalism. As Shannon put it, it seems to be much easier to make two small jumps than one big jump in any kind of mental thinking. Number three. Restate the question. Change the words. Change the viewpoint. Break loose from certain mental blocks which are holding you in certain ways of looking at a problem Do not become trapped by the sunk cost, the work that you have already put in There is a reason after all why someone who is quite green to a problem will sometimes solve it on their first attempt. They are unconstrained by the biases that build up over time. Number four. Break an overwhelming problem into small pieces. Many proofs in mathematics have been actually found by extremely roundabout processes. Shannon pointed out that a man often starts out and proves many great results which don't seem to be leading anywhere and then eventually ends up at the backdoor on the solution of his given problem. Number five. Invert. If you can't use your premises to prove your conclusion, just imagine that the conclusion is already true and see what happens. Try proving the premises instead. And number six. Take time and see how far it will stretch. Someone always comes along and starts generalizing it, so why not do it yourself? That is an excerpt from one of my favorite chapters in the book that I'm going to talk to you about today. That chapter is called Constructive Dissatisfaction. The book I'm going to talk to you about today is A Mind at …