#428 How Claude Shannon Worked

**David Senra** (0:00)
The great insights don't spring from curiosity alone, but from dissatisfaction. Not the depressive kind of dissatisfaction, but rather a constructive dissatisfaction, or a slight irritation when things don't look quite right. A genius is simply someone who is usefully irritated. A genius must delight in finding solutions. Genius must derive joy from applications of intellect. Claude Shannon once said, I get a big kick out of seeing a clever way of doing some engineering problem. A clever design for a circuit which uses a very small amount of equipment and gets a great deal of results out of it. For Shannon, there was no substitute for the pleasure of seeing net results. So how would such a person go about solving a problem?
Shannon proposed six strategies. Strategy number one, you might, he said, start by simplifying. Almost every problem that you come across is befuddled with all kinds of extraneous data of one sort or another. And if you can bring this problem down into the main issues, you can see more clearly what you're trying to do.
Simplification is an art form in and of itself. It requires a knack for exercising everything from a problem except what makes it interesting. Number two, encircle your problem with existing answers to similar questions and then deduce what it is that the answers have in common. You'll need a vocabulary of questions already answered. You can call this ingenious incrementalism. As Shannon put it, it seems to be much easier to make two small jumps than one big jump in any kind of mental thinking. Number three, restate the question. Change the words, change the viewpoint. Break loose from certain mental blocks which are holding you in certain ways of looking at a problem. Do not become trapped by the sunk cost, the work that you've already put in. There's a reason after all why someone who is quite green to a problem will sometimes solve it on their first attempt. They are unconstrained by the biases that build up over time. Number four, break an overwhelming problem into small pieces. Many proofs in mathematics have been actually found by extremely roundabout processes. Shannon pointed out that a man often starts out and proves many great results which don't seem to be leading anywhere and then eventually ends up at the back door on the solution of his given problem. Number five, invert. If you can't use your premises to prove your conclusion, just imagine that the conclusion is already true and see what happens. Try proving the premises instead.
And number six, take time and see how far it will stretch. Someone always comes along and starts generalizing it. So, why not do it yourself?
That is an excerpt from one of my favorite chapters in the book that I'm going to talk to you about today. That chapter is called Constructive Dissatisfaction. The book that I'm going to talk to you about today is A Mind at Play, How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age, and it was written by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman. So even though Claude Shannon is one of the most important people to ever live in history, many people don't know his name. I've been telling friends this week, the book that I'm reading, and they're like, who's Claude Shannon? And the thing that resonated the most is like, well, Claude Shannon is the reason that Anthropic called Claude Claude. And so I actually broke down this book and my notes on the book in the way that Claude Shannon would break down a problem. So I essentially simplified what I think are the most important lessons and then extracted them out of the book and then organized them in a way I think is just gonna be really interesting for you and I to go over. So one I want to start is I'm not gonna go over like, even though it's a biography of Shannon which is wonderfully written, I'm not even gonna talk about really much about his personal life or his child or anything else. There's just a certain way and an indifference to the outside world that I find very intriguing by Shannon. You and I have talked about this maximum over and over again that you mute the world and then build your own. Well, Claude Shannon muted the world, built his own, and then in turn by doing that built the foundation of our world, the digital world that we live in now. So I want to start with just giving you an outline of his very unusual personality he had. He says, and there's a bunch of descriptions all throughout the book about how he was, how he approached life, how he approached work that I thought was interesting.