What I talk about when I talk about doing

I’m still thinking through a piece I read at Strange Loop Canon, in which Rohit Krishnan writes that thinkers do and doers think, but there’s still a macroscopic difference between the results that thinkers and doers actually produce: 

One place we see this is where there is a ton of conversation around the difference between science and technology. We try to draw arbitrary distinctions and relationships amongst them to justify what creates what. Did the creation of tooling enable the development of science through better measurements? Did the development of the theory of electromagnetism enable the development of communication cables?

We’ve had technology development inside science labs, like Bell or even DARPA, and we’ve had science development inside technology companies, like most of AI.

Qualifying the differences are easy at the extremes – theory of relativity from a patent office vs developing Pagerank at Stanford – even though the locales are opposite to what you’d expect. Towards the middle it starts getting muddled – Shannon’s information entropy, von Neumann’s work on implosion type nukes, creation of the internet.

Thomas Kuhn tried to crack the issue by looking primarily at science, and trying to delineate between the “big leaps” that led to entire new paradigms being created, vs the “little leaps” that cumulatively helped colour in after a big leap was completed.

By contrast, it reminds me of an introduction that I’d written for Creative Doing, which didn’t make it through the cutting room:

A young Steve Jobs sits in a chair. This moment takes place six years after his company, known then as Apple Computer, launched the Macintosh. It’s also practically a decade before he has taken on his signature black Issey Miyake turtleneck. Instead, he’s wearing a white dress shirt buttoned to the top, held together by a grey tie and a black suit jacket. He sits in front of a camera for an interview, a spot he has likely grown familiar with over the years. The conversation drifts to art and science, and then to creativity. The interviewer asks (24:53), “The balance between thinking and doing… How important was that in the early days?”

Jobs reflects for a few seconds, and acknowledges that even though he’s mainly worked in the computer industry, he has worked in it for 15 years and seen a lot of people make things, and a lot of people fail.

He says, “My observation is that the doers are the major thinkers. The people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker and doer in one person.”

Jobs referenced a historical figure, artist Leonardo da Vinci. “Did Leonardo have a guy off to the side that was thinking five years out in the future [about] what he would paint, or the technology he would use to paint it? Of course not,” Jobs said. “Leonardo was the artist but he also mixed all his own paints. He also was a fairly good chemist. He knew about pigments. He knew about human anatomy. And combining all of those skills together, the art and the science, the thinking and the doing, was what resulted in the exceptional result. There is no difference in our industry. The people that have really made the contributions have been the thinkers and the doers.”

To Krishnan’s point, Jobs and Apple made products, and a fair amount of little leaps. They could be considered as capitalizing on the big leaps of previous thinkers. But it’s worth acknowledging Jobs’s point on da Vinci, who probably would’ve been categorized as a very passionate doer. Yet one of his techniques, componimento inculto, involved thinking by sketching. Many of us who spend a lot of time inside our heads would benefit from doing more; thinking from our neck down, so to speak. 

It was through this doing that da Vinci was able to think, constantly tinkering and inventing. So while da Vinci was a doer, the results he produced were very much the big leaps that a thinker would produce. 

I dislike the term big C creativity (institutionally accepted creative work) and little c creativity (hobbyist creative work), which Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi introduces in Creativity. I’d actually agree with Krishnan in a macro sense, as he calls for a similar shift from Big science to little science:

Little science is science as practiced by pretty much every major scientist a child studies in school – Einstein, Newton, Maxwell, even Tesla and Edison. Little science is the science of artisanal tinkering, of interdisciplinary exploration with no agenda, of following your curiosity without needing to get permission, of small experiments done in a garage.

We have systematically discouraged ambition just as we have institutionalised it. We try to have grand goals and attempt to reach them through institutional heaviness. We try and force work onto problems that seem important rather than working on problems where we have a chance of making a difference.

As we have increasingly favoured the doer part of the spectrum over the past half century or more, we’ve pushed ourselves to do things ever bigger and grander. And our estimation of those who manage to do this is also greater, our modern geniuses. But in doing so we forget that the other end of the spectrum doesn’t function under the same pressures. It needs space and leisure to let ideas bloom, and for people to spend time in exploration. We need to find a way to give this space, with enough cachet and prestige that it encourages people to dream. To think!

In the meantime, without the sabbaticals, there must be something that we can do at an individual level as well. Can citizen scientists work as hobbyists, taking in microgrants while working a day job? I also appreciate Krishnan’s call and would consider if it expanded further into art—more accessible fellowships and sabbaticals for creators and artists to make breakthroughs.

At an individual level, creative thinking, breakthroughs, and insights emerge from doing. They’re a yin and yang, a constant loop that feeds each other.

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