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This link was posted by ColinWright 2 hours ago on HN. It received 69 points and 22 comments.
Dialing down the brain at times serves exactly as a noise filter, so there's a sweet point in which you are dumbed down just enough to not to get confused by noise and smart enough to interpret the now clearer signal.
An example I like is from a company I worked in, in which a wireframe protective cage had to be designed for a device. Two engineers, the most senior of the company, and a brilliant new one doctored in structural engineering, set themselves forward on the task of calculating the cage so that it was to optimally meet resistance requirements. After weeks and dozens and dozens of pages of complex calculations and elaborated diagrams and schemes and etc, they were unable to get even a conceptual sketch on paper. A pretty average new employee came in, whose speciality was to concentrate more on the overall shape and aesthetics of things. He new nothing about structural calculus nor the like. He however had a feeling on how the end result should look like. So the task was handed to him and in just a week he was able to get a fully compliant prototype. He couldn't be distracted by all of the considerations the other engineers fell into because he flat-out ignored that, so he just thought "it should look like this", got to the shop to cut the shape, iterated quickly by trial and error and got the all important cage done.
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