How Isaac Asimov’s Theories on Creativity Can Inspire Modern Innovation

During their recent episode, Taylor, Carlisle, and Robert G Hagstrom discussed How Isaac Asimov’s Theories on Creativity Can Inspire Modern Innovation, here’s an excerpt from the episode:

Tobias: Should we do veggies at the top of the art, JT?

Jake: Absolutely. So, knowing that Robert was coming on, one of my favorite investment books was one that he wrote here, and it’s Investing the Last Liberal Art. And of course, the veggie segments are always– They try to be an attempt at multidisciplinary thinking. So, I’ve been saving this one for a little bit for Robert, just because I thought he might have some interesting comments with it.

Robert: [laughs]

Jake: So, this is really, it’s a little biography of Isaac Asimov and creativity. It comes from this essay, how do people get new ideas? It’s this thought-provoking piece that explores the creative process and the factors that contribute to the generation of innovative ideas. A little shoutout to Joe Koster for sharing this in one of his links on his regular Value Investing World, which is a terrific resource that you should probably all sign up for. If I was smarter, I would just delete Twitter and only read what Joe sends out. But for some reason, I can’t help but touch that third rail.

Tobias: [chuckles]

Jake: So, a little bit of background about Asimov. He lived from 1920 to 1992. He was a renowned author, professor of biochemistry at Boston University, absolutely prolific writer. He wrote or edited more than 500 books and sent out an estimated 90,000 letters, which– I try to wrap my mind around what that means per day.

But he’s best known for his science fiction works, of course, including the foundation series and the Robot series, which is something like 37 different books. However, he also wrote extensively on other topics like science and history and literary criticism. This essay that I’m referencing was written in 1959, and it’s his contribution to a project on creativity that was commissioned by the US government.

So, here are his insights. The first thing is that, oddly enough, the generation of creative ideas is never clear, even to the generators themselves. A lot of this happens just completely by accident, which makes me wonder– We spend all this money as a society on corporate R&D. Really, I’m wondering if it might a better way to explore that hidden frontier of innovation, might be, like, what if we just liberally splayed money around and sent everyone $10,000 who promised to tinker in their garage with it? What might emerge from that? But I’m digressing a little bit.

The crucial point of this innovation is that the ability to see these cross connections that aren’t obvious. Creativity thrives on uncovering these unexpected connections between disparate ideas. Matt Ridley, who’s also one of my favorite authors, said that, “Innovation is basically what happens when ideas have sex.”

Robert: [laughs]

Jake: [chuckles] Creative people tend to have this strong background in their field of interest, but they also exhibit very unconventional habits, and they’re often seen as eccentric. It takes a certain level of daring and self-assurance to defy the norms and pursue an unconventional path, like Robert has done with business-driven investing.

There’s another big part of this isolation is important for the creative process. It allows the mind to freely shuffle information around without the inhibition from others. Because oftentimes, creativity can be embarrassing. Asimov says in this essay that, “For every new good idea you have, there are 100, 10,000 foolish ones which you naturally do not care to display.” It’s hard to tell what’s what when it’s just you sitting there thinking. This shuffling happens even when one is not conscious of it.

There’s this famous example of a scientist named Kekulé, I believe his name is, who worked out the structure of benzene in his sleep. Toby, I don’t know what you dream about. Is it chemical formulations?

Tobias: Benzenes

Jake: Yeah. [laughs] So, Asimov says that it’s necessary for all the people at a session, like a creativity session, to be willing to sound foolish and listen to others sounding foolish and not judge them. A collaboration could go wrong if a single person has a greater reputation or is more articulate or has a more commanding personality, and the rest of the participants can then be reduced into these passive obedience. Innovation will be squished, even if the high repute person is really talented.

So, Asimov ventured that the optimum number of the group would not be very high, maybe no more than five people. He says that joviality, joking and kidding around are an essence of this because they encourage a willingness to be involved in the folly that is required for creativity. And then lastly, you should have like a facilitator to play a role of guiding the discussions and prompting deeper exploration and ideas. It’s important that that person then asks shrewd questions and then can steer the session back on point when it gets too far off.

So, I thought it would be interesting to put together what would– Maybe be if you’re an investment team and you wanted to take some of these insights from Asimov on creativity, what might that look like? So, this is for an incubator idea. Pick an unconventional venue like a museum or a botanical garden or maybe a remote cabin or an art studio, something, and utilize the elements of isolation and subconscious thinking to generate novel ideas.

So, here’s a possible format. Maybe you start out with meditation, and visualization and then gets everyone relaxed and a free-flowing ideas, and then go off and do individual quiet time for each person. So, maybe it’s a walk, or just– Walking around the museum or art gallery, letting your mind wander, jot down on any ideas that come to mind, encourage free association and stream of consciousness writing. And then get together and share the wildest and most unconventional ideas in a safe, non-judgmental environment. And then collaboratively build on those shared ideas and connect disparate thoughts into maybe novel strategies and ideas.

Just for fun, I have my own silly idea to share. [chuckles] It’s something I’ve had on my little list of things that if I had more time and less– Probably if I didn’t have kids, I might have already started working on this. It’s called multidisciplinary, named to be determined. Not that great. So, imagine a multi-sided dice, a set of multi-sided dice. Each side of the dice represents a mental model of some kind, and something like invert or theory of evolution or inertia or alloying, which is combining a substance to form something even better, or the prisoner’s dilemma. There’s all these mental models that you can find in Robert’s book that help–

So, what you do basically is like is roll the dice. Now you filter your problem that you’re thinking about through two different mental models. So, you’re working on two or three even, two might be the max that I could come up with, and see if anything interesting emerges from filtering a problem through these two mental models at the same time. You’ll instantly have this lattice construction of mental models. Maybe this might better done as an app or something, I don’t know. But I like the physicality of the dice in the real world to foster more creativity.

So, it may be like you feed your problem and in your two mental models into ChatGPT and see what it says. But I would say like, don’t shortchange your own creativity there. I think these robot overlords, at some point. They’re going to have probably the million-dollar ideas, but I think the human, yours is still going to be the billion-dollar idea. So, anyway, I like this idea of taking advantage of mechanical randomness of the dice to ask the universe to whisper its serendipity in your ear. So, anyway, Robert, what do you think about? You ready to go build multidisciplinary?

Tobias: Jump to conclusions.

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