Laziness is the source of Innovation and Creativity

https://backintyme.substack.com/p/laziness-is-the-source-of-innovation

by banzin • 2 years ago

50 10 2 years ago

backintyme.substack.com

apantel• 2 years ago

Strong disagree. The only way to get to the simplest, truest, most elegant, and most performant solution to a problem is to try a lot of things iteratively, write a ton of code in the process, (and throwing almost all of it away in the process). Then once you’ve understood the domain fully and realized what the simple, true, elegant solution is, THEN you can settle on a couple hundred lines of the right code. But in the process you wrote ten thousand lines.

biomcgary• 2 years ago

Probably a reference to Larry Wall's (inventor of Perl language) three virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, hubris (https://thethreevirtues.com/)

Log_out_• 2 years ago

Combinig concepts that are not affiliated and then filter out the bad ones. Recombination is the source of creativity. Laziness is the Motivation driving that process. Iterrative processes can only iterrate over ideas and concepts already existing, unless you manage zo create some shizoid TRIZ NN that can halucinate new permutations.

omnimike• 2 years ago

Necessity is the mother of invention (not laziness). The internet was invented for surviving nuclear war with Russia.

We say laziness motivates us to become more efficient, but I can’t agree. It’s people who want or need to get things done faster that find innovative and creative ways of doing so.

randomdata• 2 years ago

The threat of nuclear war with Russia was unnecessary. But avoiding it was much, much harder to achieve. So we took the lazy way out, and thus invented the internet along the way in order to maintain the laziest path.

hiAndrewQuinn• 2 years ago

Mmm, I used to believe this, but now I think it's wrong. Or worse - inaccurate.

Being good at what you do both makes what you can do when you're at the peak of your grind better, and makes what you can put out even when you're lazy better. However, only the former pushes your skill ceiling consistently higher over time, and that leads to exponentially increasing rewards in a modern marketplace.

thinkingemote• 2 years ago

It's not efficiency or improving performance or more marketability that it gives but creativity.

It's also not about laziness, it's about ending the lazy feeling.

Feeling lazy should prompt us to find solutions. That is where the creation is.

The solutions we come up with use our creative spark but they are not intrinsically efficient or economically good.

Don't run away from feeling lazy.

Today we tend to hate lazy feeling and distract or procrastinate ourselves away from it. Many feel guilty from not being productive and useful to their employer. We should instead wallow in it and let our imaginations play.

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From a tech point of view I would think many interesting but 80% finished projects from solo devs are the results of such play.

musicale• 2 years ago

I'm not lazy, I'm conserving energy.

renegade-otter• 2 years ago

In my view - it's scarcity. You are the most inventive when you have little to work with. Laziness doesn't do that - it just makes you watch Netflix.

buckyfull• 2 years ago

Why do people write headlines like this? It would be so much better to say laziness is a source, a possible source, of innovation and creativity. We live in an information world for people are clawing and grabbing for attention by writing inaccurate and dramatic headlines. As someone who came of age when the web went online, it is so sad to see how we have muck it up.

I wish there were a magic button. I could press to silence all this kind of garbage thought that entirely litters are information landscape. I’m not sure whether to hate people like this or hate the system that causes them to behave this way. The old saying, “don’t hate the player, hate the game”, Seems a little quaint these days. Lately, I’ve been thinking that we maybe should hate the player a little bit since they are willingly contributing to an overall worse existence for everybody. People trying to “explain” complex topics with platitudes and absolutes are real barriers to the understanding of the topic. I wish they would find another hobby.

Laziness is the source of Innovation and Creativity

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