A lecture from Richard Hamming about creativity and how to cultivate it.
See also:
- The Incomplete Guide to the Art of Discovery (Hamming mentions continental drift and tectonics as an example of knowing something, but not receiving credit until new tools existed to re-discover what was already known)
Links to this note
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Extrapolating from past data points is not an explanation. Building your confidence that something that will happen—like Bayes Theorem—is useful for descrete, observable problems, but fails to reveal the truth. It’s the equivalent of saying “because it’s always been that way” which is a flawed way of reasoning about the world.
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Mathematician and computer scientist.