CGP Grey describes a phenomenon I think of as 'dreams of ideas' that I find useful as a tool to know when to stop working on a project.
You can be working on something and you are thinking about what it could be, but what is hard to know is if that thought in your head is more like when your brain dreams.
There is a phenomenon that I always think of as like, you wake up and you think you had a great idea in your dream, but what you really had was the idea of a great idea. You didn't have a great idea, but you had all the emotional resonance to it being a good idea in your dream. You're like, "Oh, why can't I think of the details?". It's like, because there weren't any details there at all...
Sometimes there just isn't the [...]
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Outline:
(01:45) When to cull ideas
(02:19) Examples
(04:26) Not every unfulfilled idea is a dream
(05:06) The solution
(05:49) TL;DR
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First published:
May 19th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dzdEtFwkjGQ6XvTko/dreams-of-ideas
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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