However, I’m not sure that post follows its own advice, as it appears to be essentially a collection of anecdotes. And it’s possible to marshal anecdotes on both sides, e.g. here is Claude Shannon’s take:
...very frequently someone who is quite green to a problem will sometimes come in and look at it and find the solution like that, while you have been laboring for months over it. You’ve got set into some ruts here of mental thinking and someone else comes in and sees it from a fresh viewpoint.
[Edit: I just read that Shannon and Hamming, another person I cited in this thread, apparently shared an office at Bell Labs, so their opinions may not be 100% independent pieces of evidence. They also researched similar topics.]
Ah, but should you familiarize yourself with the literature on familiarizing yourself with the literature before writing an EA Forum post?
Clever :)
However, I’m not sure that post follows its own advice, as it appears to be essentially a collection of anecdotes. And it’s possible to marshal anecdotes on both sides, e.g. here is Claude Shannon’s take:
[Edit: I just read that Shannon and Hamming, another person I cited in this thread, apparently shared an office at Bell Labs, so their opinions may not be 100% independent pieces of evidence. They also researched similar topics.]