Are Computers Still a Bicycle for the Mind?

Steve Jobs had an enormous appreciation for the computer, believing it was the greatest human invention, and he commonly likened it to a bicycle for our minds. Here he is in one such explanation of this analogy:

He refined his delivery over the years, but the underlying analogy was always the same. The bicycle dramatically increases the efficiency of human locomotion, and likewise the computer dramatically increases the efficiency of human thought. While that is still the case when computers, the Internet, and increasingly Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are used as tools to leverage our innate abilities to solve huge, complex problems, they can also become other things for the mind that are not so useful. We are seeing it happen more and more that as computers proliferate, shrink in size, and become more convenient and ubiquitous, they stop being treated as a tool and start being treated as a toy or simply as a distraction. Maybe computers are becoming less like a bicycle for the mind and more like something else.

How to Determine if Something is Good

I recently came across an old article entitled How Art Can Be Good by Paul Graham that I had tagged as something of interest, and I decided to read through it again. In it he argues that art can be good in an objective sense, and that good art is not simply a matter of good taste. I found this article fascinating because while I agreed with his premise that art can be objectively judged, I disagreed with most of Graham's arguments. With most of his articles, he exhibits clear, sound reasoning, and I learn a great deal from his writing. This article is peculiar in that the reasoning seemed much weaker and more vague, but it still made me think deeply about what makes a thing good so I want to explore that idea more carefully.

Keep in mind that Graham's article was written in December of 2006. He may no longer hold the same beliefs that he did when he wrote this article, and I'm not trying to tear down his ideas about good art or attack him in any way. I respect him both as a writer and as a thought leader in the tech startup community. I'm merely attempting to analyze the reasoning in the article and describe my own thoughts on the subject.

Being able to determine if something is good has much practical value, especially if you're the one creating the thing that you hope is good. When creating a work of art, or any other product for that matter, you want to have a keen sense of what makes it good because the better a product is, the more value it will have for more people. I'm going to widen the net well beyond art at this point because the qualities that make art good can apply to almost anything, so we'll be comparing art to music, movies, video games, literature, food, consumer products, Mathematics, and, of course, software.

You Keep Using That Word…

Right from the outset, Graham entangles the idea of good art with good taste in order to disprove that they are equivalent:

One problem with saying there's no such thing as good taste is that it also means there's no such thing as good art. If there were good art, then people who liked it would have better taste than people who didn't. So if you discard taste, you also have to discard the idea of art being good, and artists being good at making it.

He later concludes this argument by saying that if there is no way to make art better, then the Sistine Chapel is as good as a blank canvas, and since that's absurd, we have a contradiction. Therefore good art exists. I agree with the conclusion, but the argument is either circular, a straw man, or a slippery slope. I can't decide which one it is.

First, taste is a characteristic of the person who is judging the art, not a characteristic of the art itself, so they are already two different things. It's easy to think of something that I consider to be good, but I personally don't like it. Take music for example. There is plenty of music, whole genres in fact, that I don't like to listen to, but I can still appreciate that songs from those genres take great skill to perform and that plenty of other people like those songs. I also have guilty pleasures that I know aren't that good in a musicality sense, but I enjoy them all the same. Does that mean I have good taste for some music but not other music? No, it means I have varied tastes in music, and my tastes are different than other people's.

Second, good and better are also different things, yet he uses them as if the person with better taste automatically determines what is good taste. The world is not so narrow and simple. Faulkner and Hemingway are both considered good writers (an understatement, I know), but if one person liked both of their works and another person only liked Faulkner, would the person who liked them both have better taste? There are literary experts that like Faulkner's stream of consciousness style and hate Hemingway's terse, matter-of-fact style and plenty of other experts that love Hemingway's writing and hate Faulkner's. They can still agree that both are great authors and are important to read. Neither literary expert is better than the other because of which author they prefer, and the authors are difficult to rank because they are so different from each other.

Finally, each step of this argument doesn't immediately follow the previous step, and I think it is because the definition of good is vague and indeterminable. In the context of art, the word good can have at least two distinct meanings that I've only alluded to so far. Art can be good in the sense that it takes great skill to create, and it can be good in the sense that it evokes strong emotions in the viewers. Art created with great skill can include new techniques that have never been used before. There are numerous examples of famous paintings that were some of the first to use perspective effectively. At the time the technique was discovered, perspective was a difficult skill to master, and the paintings that showed good use of perspective were ground-breaking. Today a painting can't be considered good purely on its use of perspective.

We can see the distinction between these two concepts of good in different kinds of movies. Certain movies break ground with special effects. The Matrix is a great movie partly because so many incredible special effects were invented for it, and they were put to good use telling the story of the movie. On the other hand, I think Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium is a great movie partly because of the strong reactions of joy and sadness I get while watching it. I can jump into that movie at any time during the last third of it, and I'll be choked up within minutes.

Good has multiple distinct meanings, and throughout Graham's article the word seems to shift between these two meanings of requiring great skill and evoking strong emotions. It is generally easier to objectively analyze whether or not something requires great skill than it is to analyze that it evokes strong emotions, but they both play a part in making something good. Good can have other meanings as well, in the sense of morality for example, but Graham didn't get into those and I won't, either.

Know Your Audience

After the introduction, Graham goes on an extended discussion of what type of audience we're talking about when someone says that a piece of art is good. Who is the art good for? Who would appreciate the work of art? After touching on a number of characteristics that would appeal to people generally, noting that art can appeal to different groups of people in different ways, and even bringing aliens into the discussion, he settles on all human beings as the intended audience when art is described as good.

I generally agree with his reasoning here, although it is a bit drawn out and the bit about aliens seemed unnecessary. He did overlook an important group of people, though—experts in the field. He was arguably talking about how to judge whether a work of art is good for a general audience, but expert opinion is still important because experts in a field will have a much different perspective on something in their field than the general populace would. Once you have a certain level of knowledge about a given subject, your ideas about what is important, what is difficult, and what is elegant will change dramatically.

In mathematics, proofs that are particularly elegant can be considered beautiful. This is something that the average person will likely not appreciate, but an expert mathematician will see beauty where anyone else would see incomprehensible jargon. Sometimes the beauty comes from structuring a proof in a way that neatly solves the theorem in a more concise way than was thought possible. Other times the beauty comes from building up intricate mathematical machinery, and just when you think things are going to get even more complex, everything falls into place and the solution practically drops out of the proof's structure quite unexpectedly. These are forms of beauty that take intense study and specific knowledge to appreciate.

Experts will also see depth in something that the average person will fail to notice. A good example of this phenomenon happens in video games. Some games have layers of depth in game play that is not at all obvious on a single play-through. Devil May Cry is an old action game from 2001 where you are a half-demon named Dante who fights demons with a sword and guns. At first glance it's a run-of-the-mill action game, but if you spend enough time with it, you'll discover all kinds of expert-level secrets in the game. The enemies and levels are designed so that it's possible to complete every level without ever taking a hit, and the game keeps track of that, giving you bonuses and special rankings for good performance. The holy grail is a perfect SS game where you never take a hit for the entire game and complete each level within its time limit. To achieve this feat, you need to learn special tricks for using your weapons and defeating enemies. The game has a ton of depth that only experts will see and appreciate. Most of the games that are considered the best by expert gamers are like this, and the opinions of the expert audience are important when determining whether a game is good or not.

Comparing Apples and Oranges

Graham moves on to a discussion of how the general public leans in its preferences for art, and how those preferences stem from errors of personal bias and artist's tricks. He claims that good art can't be determined by a vote the way a good apple or a good beach could because the public is easily swayed by branding and advertising. I disagree both with the claim that voting is ineffective in determining if something is good and that apples and beaches are all that different than art.

Regarding voting, it's true that you may not think something is good while the majority of people think it is good, but it's likely that the set of things that come to the top in a vote includes some pretty good stuff. (Let's ignore politicians here because no one's going to agree that that statement holds for them.) Take smart phones as an easy example. People vote for smart phones with their wallet, and the top 10 list of best selling smart phones is dominated by Apple, Samsung and Xiaomi. You may not like iPhones. You may not like Galaxy phones. But it's pretty likely that you'll find a good phone on that list. They all have good performance, good build quality, and good design.

I find voting to be a pretty good guide for finding all kinds of good stuff. It's how I choose books to read on Amazon. I will nearly always pass on a book that gets less than a four-star rating because in my experience, they've been almost universally bad. I have a much better chance getting a good book with a four- or five-star rating, even though the occasional stinker still makes it through. It takes a strong recommendation from someone I trust to convince me to read a three-star rated book, and a rating less than that is out of the question. Life's too short, ya know?

Regarding apples, it seems entirely possible that I would not like an apple that the majority of people vote as being exceptionally good. What if I like sour apples and most people like sweet apples? What if I like my apples tart, covered in cinnamon, and baked in a pie? What if I hate apples? The point is that there are enough kinds of apples in the world that deciding which ones are good isn't all that different than deciding which works of art are good. Reasonable people are going to disagree on what is good art and what is a good apple. It kind of comes down to what tastes good to you, and now we've come full circle.

I Said I'd Talk About Software

All of these ideas about what makes good art or movies or smart phones also applies to software. The definition of good changes slightly because the user of a piece of software likely doesn't care if it took a lot of skill to make nor will it evoke strong emotions of joy or sadness. Maybe it will cause intense frustration, but that shouldn't be a goal. What good software does do is make the user feel highly skilled. It gives the user a great sense of accomplishment because she can do things easily that were difficult or impossible before. It should also be enjoyable to use and help the user feel productive. These things will make the user happy.

Expert users will find elegance and depth in good software. I am continually impressed by the cleanness of features in Firefox and the limitless capabilities of Vim, although I wouldn't say I'm an expert in either, yet. The point is that good software has layers of depth that keep enticing advanced users to explore further and discover new powers to make themselves more awesome. In the end good software, like good art, is still a matter of taste. Some people will like Chrome instead of Firefox. Some people will like Emacs or Sublime instead of Vim. For something to be good, it has to meet the requirements of being high quality and being appealing to an audience, and beyond that people's preferences are going to come down to taste.

So coming back to Graham's article, I think there are ways to determine objectively if art is good, but once those objective criteria are met, we are still left with a wide variety of art. Then it comes down to personal preferences, and different people are going to like different things. Ideally, good art is determined by both objective criteria and taste, and on that we seem to agree.

Creativity and Hard Work Are Both Necessary for Problem Solving

As programmers, as engineers, we solve problems all the time. It's a significantly large part of what we do. How do we solve problems efficiently and effectively? It requires a balanced mix of creativity and hard work. Both are hard to achieve, and a good combination of the two is even harder. Creativity requires getting yourself in a mood where you can let your thoughts run free and play with ideas, and hard work requires a mood where you can knuckle down and produce results. These moods are in constant conflict, and you can be at your most productive when you manage the two moods well.

I was going to make this post about how creativity is not what most people think. Instead of being driven by flashes of insight, I was going to argue that it was driven mainly by hard work. While I still think that's true in a sense, and I'll get into that more later, after looking at my notes and links to references on the subject, I believe creativity is a combination of insight and hard work in the form of intense thinking. Both things require time and space to accomplish, and both are required to creatively solve problems.

How to be Creative

I recently found this excellent talk by John Cleese on how to be creative. Much of his talk is based on the work of Dr. Donald W MacKinnon, and although I haven't read the book, I thoroughly enjoyed the talk by John Cleese. The gist of the talk is that there's no defined way to be creative, as that's somewhat of an oxymoron, but there are ways to enable creativity, and that is what Cleese focuses his talk on.

He starts off with an explanation of what creativity is, and it's not a personality trait, but a way of operating:

...the most creative had simply acquired a facility for getting themselves into a particular mood - a way of operating - which allowed their natural creativity to function. 

That mood is playfulness. They would play with ideas without any immediate practical purpose, but purely for the enjoyment of doing so. Cleese goes on to explain the two modes of operation that he labels the open and closed modes. Creativity requires an open mode of operation, but completion of the idea requires a closed mode of operation. To be most efficient, we must be able to readily switch between the open and closed modes.

The ability to get into the open mode requires five elements:

1. Space free from distraction
2. Time also free from distraction
3. Time playing with uncertainty before deciding
4. Confidence that silly thoughts may still be fruitful
5. Humor to keep the mind playful and exploratory

Once you achieve this setup, Cleese recommends about an hour and a half to play (with ideas)—a half hour to let your mind calm down and an hour of creative work. I realized that this time frame mirrors my own flow for blog posts pretty closely. Every post is a problem that I need to solve, and when I sit down at night to work on a post, I'll spend about a half an hour collecting my thoughts, looking through my notes, and considering what I want to write and how to write about it. Sometimes I have to wrangle my thoughts into submission because my mind wanders around, not wanting to focus on the task at hand. Then I'll have an hour or so of good productive time where I can write down thoughts and play with ideas in a pretty good state of flow. I'll reach a point sometime after the two hour mark where I start to tire out and my productivity slows down. I thought it had more to do with getting tired before going to bed, but it might be as much a factor of having worked creatively for an hour or two and I'm simply tired of being creative.

You probably noticed there was not one, but two time elements in the list. The second time element is surprising, and Cleese had a great justification for it:

One of my Monty Python colleagues who seemed to be more talented than I was never produced scripts as original as mine. And I watched for some time and then I began to see why. If he was faced with a problem and saw a solution he was inclined to take it even if he knew it was not very original.  Whereas if I was in the same situation, while I was sorely tempted to take the easy way out, and finish by 5 o’clock, I just couldn’t. I’d sit there with the problem for another hour and a quarter and by sticking at it, would in the end, almost always come up with something more original. It was that simple.

My work was more creative than his simply because I was prepared to stick with the problem longer. So imagine my excitement when I found this was exactly what MacKinnon found in his research. He discovered the most creative professionals always played with the problem for much longer before they tried to resolve it. Because they were prepared to tolerate that slight discomfort, as anxiety, that we all experience when we haven’t solved it.

I find this type of thing happening frequently when I'm trying to solve program design problems. I'll come to a workable solution fairly quickly most of the time, but if I pocket that solution for later and think about the problem a while longer, I can usually come up with a more elegant solution.

Humor may seem out of place in solving problems, but Cleese strongly held that creativity is closely related to humor - it is a way of connecting two separate ideas that results in something new and interesting. In the case of humor, it's funny, and in the case of creativity, it's useful for solving a problem. He certainly opposed the idea that humor and serious business should be separated:

There is a confusion between serious and solemn. Solemnity…I don’t know what it’s for. What is the point of it? The two most beautiful memorial services I’ve ever attended both had a lot of humor. And it somehow freed us all and made the services inspiring and cathartic. But solemnity serves pomposity. And the self important always know at some level of their consciousness that their egotism is going to be punctured by humor, and that’s why they see it as a threat. And so dishonestly pretend that their deficiencies makes their views more substantial, when it only makes them feel bigger…ptttttth.

Humor is an essential part of spontaneity, an essential part of playfulness, an essential part of the creativity we need to solve problems no matter how serious they may be.

Solemnity should have no place in the creative process. It kills our confidence in being able to play with ideas freely and distracts us from thinking fully about the problem by limiting thought to the safest, most acceptable paths. Humor is definitely more productive. My coworkers and I joke around a lot at work, and we get a tremendous amount of creative work done. On the other hand, I've never heard someone claim that their workplace is serious and they do especially creative work. More likely seriousness is accompanied with words like deliberate, careful, and protocol. Oh, and if a company tells you that they work hard, but they know how to have fun once in a while, that's a big warning sign.

Hard Work is Still Necessary

Creativity alone is not enough, and while creativity does involve hard work, coming up with a great idea to solve a problem is not the end of the task. Now comes the extra hard work of implementing the idea, resolving all of the details that you hadn't thought of before, and actually finishing solving the problem. Scott Berkun has written extensively on this topic, and it's some of his better writing. In his post on The Secrets of Innovation Secrets, he reminds us of how much work is involved in innovation:

If there’s any secret to be derived from Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, or any of the dozens of people who often have the name innovator next to their names, is the diversity of talents they had to posses, or acquire, to overcome the wide range of challenges in converting their ideas into successful businesses.

These people didn't succeed because of flashes of insight that just happened to them, and they didn't succeed by coming up with a great idea and selling it. The ideas themselves would have been nothing if it wasn't for their superb execution. (The importance of execution is one reason why patent trolls are so destructive to innovation—they haven't done any of the hard work of implementing an idea, but they want to get paid royalties simply for patenting an idea with no intention of doing the hard work themselves.)

Even the flash of insight that leads to an idea is the result of a lot of hard work. If it wasn't for all of the studying, researching, and experimenting that came before the actual moment of clarity, the idea may not have materialized at all. Scott Berkun again has some clear reasoning on why epiphanies are more of a process than an event:

One way to think about the experience of epiphany is that it’s the moment when all of the pieces fall into place. But this does not require that the last piece has any particular significance (the last piece might be the hardest, but it doesn’t have to be). Whichever piece of the puzzle is sorted out last becomes the epiphany piece and brings the satisfying epiphany experience. However the last piece isn’t necessarily more magical than the others, and has no magic without its connection to the other pieces.

I have this experience all the time when I'm trying to solve problems (which is also pretty much all of the time). I'll be mulling over a problem for hours, days, or weeks, struggling to find a workable solution, and then the answer hits me all of a sudden, usually while I'm laying down to go to sleep. I call it Bedtime Debugging because that's when it normally happens to me, but other people have it happen when they're taking a shower or brushing their teeth. It feels like a sudden eureka moment, but it would never have happened if I hadn't spent all of that time thinking about the problem, researching options, and studying the code I'm working on. The final connection that made everything make sense may have happened in a moment, but bringing all of the other pieces of the puzzle together so that that moment could happen took much more time.

Preparing for Epiphanies

I spend huge amounts of time reading and learning. I never know when I'll need to use a particular piece of knowledge, and the more of it that I have at my disposal, the better. Constantly exercising my mind and learning new things also keeps my thinking process flexible so that I can connect ideas from different fields and think about problems in new and different ways.

Our culture tends to romanticize the eureka moment while ignoring all of the hard work that's involved in the process because the eureka moment is so much more exciting than the work that came before it and must follow it. For one of innumerable examples, Cal Newport, an assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University, contrasts the theatrical impression of Stephen Hawking's discovery of Hawking Radiation in The Theory of Everything with the reality:

In a pivotal scene in the Stephen Hawking biopic, The Theory of Everything, the physicist is staring into the embers of a dying fire when he has an epiphany: black holes emit heat!

The next scene shows Hawking triumphantly announcing his result to a stunned audience — and just like that, his insight vaults him into the ranks of scientific stardom.…

In reality, Hawking had encountered a theory by two Russian physicists that argued rotating black holes should emit energy until they slowed to a stationary configuration.

Hawking, who at the time was a promising young scientist who had not yet made his mark, was intrigued, but also skeptical.

So he decided to look deeper.

In the (many) months that followed, Hawking trained his preternatural analytical skill to investigate the validity of the Russians’ claims. This task required any number of minor breakthroughs, all orbiting the need to somehow reconcile (in a targeted way) both quantum theory and relativity.

The reality of Hawking's discovery is a clear example of the hard work involved in solving big problems. He needed to have a lot of knowledge about multiple complex fields of physics and develop new advances in those fields over a long stretch of time to make progress towards his goal of answering a question he had about a theory he had come across. Creativity was absolutely involved in this process, but the eureka moment is a vanishingly small part of the story. These instances of major breakthroughs and discoveries through hard work are the norm, rather than the exception. After all, if these moments were as simple and easy as they are portrayed, they would be much more common than they actually are. We can't all just sit staring into a campfire or reading under a tree and expect all of the answers to hit us in the head.

In a way, creativity is only a small part of succeeding in solving a big problem, such as producing a great product, creating a market around it, and building a business from it. The idea of what product to make is a drop in the bucket compared to the colossal amount of work involved in this process. Yet creativity is also an integral part of the entire process. Every step of the way there are little problems to be solved and details to be resolved, and doing this creatively is incredibly important. Creativity and hard work are intimately woven together in the process of solving big problems.