Sascha Fast juxtaposes his new notes with his own favorite problems to see if they have any connections with respect to improving on or solving them.

This practice is somewhat similar to Marshall Kirkpatrick's conceptualization of triangle thinking, but rather than being randomly generated with respect to each other, the new things are always generated toward important questions he's actively working on or toward.

This helps to increase the changes of forward progress in specific areas rather than undirected random progress.

There is a direct analogy to statistical mechanics and thermodynamics to be drawn here.

Leopold von Ranke's argument that God gazes over history and finds all periods equal is very similar to a framing of history from the viewpoint of statistical thermodynamics: it's all the same material floating around, it just takes different states at different times.

link to: https://hyp.is/jqug2tNlEeyg2JfEczmepw/3stages.org/c/gq_title.cgi?list=1045&ti=Foucault%27s%20Pendulum%20(Eco)

Can poverty be modeled after a statistical thermodynamic framework? How might we move the set point for poverty up significantly to prevent the ill effects of regular, repeated poverty?

What does the complexity of poverty indicate? Within the web of potential indicators, what might be done to vastly mitigate the movement of people in and out of poverty? What sorts of additional resiliency can be built into the system?

Feynman’s approach encouraged him to follow his interests wherever they might lead. He posed questions and constantly

Creating strong and clever connections between disparate areas of knowledge can appear to others to be a flash of genius, in part because they didn't have the prior knowledges nor did they put in the work of collecting, remembering, or juxtaposition.

This method may be one of the primary (only) underpinnings supporting the lone genius myth. This is particularly the case when the underlying ideas were not ones fully developed by the originator. As an example if Einstein had fully developed the ideas of space and time by himself and then put the two together as spacetime, then he's independently built two separate layers, but in reality, he's cleverly juxtaposed two broadly pre-existing ideas and combined them in an intriguing new framing to come up with something new. Because he did this a few times over his life, he's viewed as an even bigger genius, but when we think about what he's done and how, is it really genius or simply an underlying method that may have shaken out anyway by means of statistical thermodynamics of people thinking, reading, communicating, and writing?

Are there other techniques that also masquerade as genius like this, or is this one of the few/only?

Link this to Feynman's mention that his writing is the actual thinking that appears on the pages of his notes. "It's the actual thinking."

Books on statistical thermodynamics that use information theory.

Which textbook of Jaynes is he referring to?

Book on statistical thermodynamics that use information theory, mentioned in Chapter 1.

Books on statistical thermodynamics that use information theory.

Far too many people luck out this way and we all perceive them as magically talented when in reality, they're no better than we, they just had better circumstances or were in the right place at the right time.