"Unknown unknown solutions haunt the mediocre without their knowledge."
Discovering new solutions and ideas often involves a lot of naivety - Making progress often requires a willingness to approach a problem with a truly fresh perspective, free of the prejudices and blindness that come from having too much depth in a field.
While I can't always find the discipline for this - I like to try and attempt a problem on my own, even when I strongly suspect that there is an existing solution better than anything I could invent. I am surely less competent than someone who knows the existing solution and applies it without hesitation, but the more competent expert is less likely to improve his methods unless he is willing to move beyond established methods where he risks screwing up.
Intelligence can emerge from stupidity.
This is actually a heuristic for solving the reinforcement learning problem: there is a known tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. If the vast bulk of the solution space is crap and you know this then you are less likely to explore and find a better solution.
Discovering new solutions and ideas often involves a lot of naivety - Making progress often requires a willingness to approach a problem with a truly fresh perspective, free of the prejudices and blindness that come from having too much depth in a field.
While I can't always find the discipline for this - I like to try and attempt a problem on my own, even when I strongly suspect that there is an existing solution better than anything I could invent. I am surely less competent than someone who knows the existing solution and applies it without hesitation, but the more competent expert is less likely to improve his methods unless he is willing to move beyond established methods where he risks screwing up.
Intelligence can emerge from stupidity.
This is actually a heuristic for solving the reinforcement learning problem: there is a known tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. If the vast bulk of the solution space is crap and you know this then you are less likely to explore and find a better solution.
see: http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/%7Esutton/book/the-book.html