Some people are better athletes than others, but anyone who trains will be better than someone who does not, regardless of any innate potential.
I see creativity along the same lines. Many folks are conditioned to memorize, follow processes, follow norms and paths laid by others, it may not occur to them to seek out originality. It is another form of learned helplessness.
Creating is hard, especially when judged in a commercial context. Sure, if I make my own bread it will not win a prize but I made it, it is mine and therefore special to me in ways that are not reflected by the market.
Too often emotional value is dictated by market value, with the logical conclusion being "what's the point of making when I can buy something better" -- and you may respond, that is the correct view but it misunderstands that creativity is a process, a worthy act in its own right but also a journey that may end up in interesting places that are not explored by commercial venture.
I think creativity comes from exposing oneself to different disciplines/topics and finding ways to connect what you learn in one domain to another. It's like the cafeteria concept employed my companies. You want cross pollination of ideas to find creative solutions.
Reading is a great way to learn new things from different domains.
Genetics help, sure. But it is just potential. Can you provide an example where one person was so genetically talented that they didn’t train and still were competitive at some semi-professional level?
"Another event dubbed a "Battle of the Sexes" took place during the 1998 Australian Open[51] between Karsten Braasch and the Williams sisters. Venus and Serena Williams had claimed that they could beat any male player ranked outside the world's top 200, so Braasch, then ranked 203rd, challenged them both. Braasch was described by one journalist as "a man whose training regime centered around a pack of cigarettes and more than a couple bottles of ice cold lager".[52][51] The matches took place on court number 12 in Melbourne Park,[53] after Braasch had finished a round of golf and two shandies. He first took on Serena and after leading 5–0, beat her 6–1. Venus then walked on court and again Braasch was victorious, this time winning 6–2.[54] Braasch said afterwards, "500 and above, no chance". He added that he had played like someone ranked 600th in order to keep the game "fun".[55] Braasch said the big difference was that men can chase down shots much easier, and that men put spin on the ball that the women can't handle. The Williams sisters adjusted their claim to beating men outside the top 350.[51]"
Given the punishing training regimen the Williams sisters follow, it is good evidence of biological limits on the boost training can give in tennis. I doubt it has much relevance for creativity.
I think it's pretty well accepted that Men better at physical activities almost across the board. I don't think that's what the original point was about though.
The original question was asking for an example of a "genetically talented that they didn’t train" losing to someone who was a "pro" and this is clearly not an example of it.
That said, I'm not trying to make the argument that there aren't 'genetic' limits.
The original question, however, was a loaded one in the context it was asked, in that the person asking the question was using it to dispute the claim that individuals have biological limits that training cannot surmount. Even if this answer does not fully satisfy the excessively stringent terms of the question, it still works as a counterexample to the questioner's position.
For a majority of aspiring athletes, it is probably better for them to accept sooner rather than later that they cannot get to the first rank - and most of them do. Unrealistic expectations in either direction do not help (though a bias to optimism is probably a good thing.)
But, as I suggested earlier, I don't think the issue of athletic performance has much to say about creativity, which is the topic of this article. Indubitable's answer of Ramanujan is a much more relevant reply to your question, but where does that leave us? His example does not give us a reason to give up on creativity, which goes to show that the question doesn't address the issue.
I also wonder though how much of a difference it makes that the Williams sisters presumably only train with or to play against other women.
Let me say that I don't disagree in the advantages of genes and sex, but from my own experience competing at a moderately high level and knowing players who competed at the highest levels, you more or less train with an expectation of what your opponents will do in mind.
At least in badminton, the way men and women play the game is completely different, but I would be very surprised if it's merely due to physical differences. I don't think it's due to physical differences because the difference in style shows up across the skill level, and I imagine a professional female player who consistently did weight training should be able to achieve the same level of strength as a male who isn't nearly as serious.
Why compare with semi-professionals? Being a semi-professional already suggests a certain degree of talent. You should be comparing someone really talented but having no interest at X with someone who is very interested in X and does it regularly, but has no relevant talent and as such it's at best a hobby they are bad at.
"Murakami began to write fiction when he was 29.[19] "Before that", he said, "I didn't write anything. I was just one of those ordinary people. I was running a jazz club, and I didn't create anything at all."[20] He was inspired to write his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing (1979), while watching a baseball game."
The problem with this is that people like this then tend to train and go on to do phenomenally well with extreme ease. In the physical domain, Mike Tyson is a good example. He was 'discovered' by a detention counselor when he was 13. 2 years later he would be the junior olympic world champion for two years in a row. Then he went professional and won his first 19 fights by knockout, 12 in the first round. He then went around and won every world championship belt there was - getting his first world championship title 8 months before he was old enough to legally buy a beer.
For the mental realm you have people like Srinivasa Ramanujan [1]. He had next to no formal training in mathematics yet would contribute immensely to a wide array of mathematical fields before the end of his brief life, dying at 32.
Indeed Mike Tyson is probably a very poor example of this because even though he is no doubt immensely talented, he also was not only trained by but adopted by Cus D'amato, a very famous boxing coach who dedicated those final years of his life to making sure Tyson became a world champion.
I can't think of an instance where this is true for normal people. I can see an untrained 250lb person beating a 100lb one-armed boxer, but outside such extreme disparities, training >> innate ability, at least in my experience.
Most mental jobs are like this? Programming is notoriously difficult for people without the right mindset, and the right mindset is difficult to teach. During my degree I've met many people who've worked really hard, much harder than I did, and some of them quite smart - but just couldn't learn to write good code. They've eventually switched degrees or dropped out, because there's only so long you can try something for when you obviously aren't achieving much.
Sure is a good No True Scotsman you've got there. And I'm not even sure you'd be right ignoring that; recall that sports like boxing and MMA separate people into weight classes that are ten pounds wide. In other words, those sports think that, within the bounds of "professional", there is no amount of innate ability or training that can balance out a 25-pound difference in weight.
But even if you were right about reachable levels of ability, you fail to realize that the problem is less about the maximum reachable level and more about the ease of reaching a competitive level. Sure, most people can train up to run a marathon. But some people will take a year to do that and some people will take three month. And that kind of difference is crippling. Trying to get a degree in a one-year skill will cost you more in time and stress than trying to get a degree in a one-month skill, so much more that you may be out-competed and fail or simply collapse under the increased strain.
Furthermore, when looking at Real Life, it's not just about whether you can Get Good at a single skill that you can't choose. It's about how good you can be overall. It's impressive when a 100lb one-armed boxer beats an untrained 250lb person through pure skill because it indicates just how much time that boxer must have spent training to do that. But do we think that the "untrained person" sat on their ass that whole time? No. They spent that time playing chess. And as a result, while the boxer trains their ass off and has a fantastic day and somehow, against all odds, manages to beat the untrained person in a boxing ring... if they squared off across a chessboard the "untrained person" would casually style all over the boxer in between rounds of candy crush.
So yes. Training >>> innate skill, more so for some skills than others. But don't let that make you think that genetics are fair.
>Sure is a good No True Scotsman you've got there. And I'm not even sure you'd be right ignoring that; recall that sports like boxing and MMA separate people into weight classes that are ten pounds wide. In other words, those sports think that, within the bounds of "professional", there is no amount of innate ability or training that can balance out a 25-pound difference in weight.
That's actually a bad example. UFC got its start with the spectacle of watching comparatively small Royce Gracie beat fighters with significant weight advantages who didn't know how to grapple.
In MMA, pretty much everyone who gets into the octagon is already training as hard as they can, so in this case you're correct that innate advantages dominate outcomes.
I was more thinking outside the top 1% of any particular skill, for example when you're hiring a designer or sales staff in a normal company (as in, a not-1% company, such as a refrigerator manufacturer or something).
I'm willing to concede that if you're looking exclusively at top 1% or top 0.01% candidates, you may profit best by taking their innate abilities into account, but if you're trying to find a top 80% or top 70% candidate (if you're trying to play moneyball with your organization or something) I personally would weight the depth and breadth of experience most.
And at the elite level, that disparity is still huge.
The NFL has 32 football teams. Any quarterback outside the top 10 or so is considered 'bad' by most people. Assuming each team has a backup quarterback, out of the 64 'best' people in the world to do that job, only the top ten are so are safe from being called 'bad at their job' on any given Sunday.
There's also a story about a UFC fighter who went 0-3, and people called him a terrible fighter. Someone from his hometown mentioned how he was the toughest guy in town and one day beat up 4 guys and 5 cops at a bar all by himself, and he was only a 155lb fighter.
You are proving the point though. Sure, there is variance among 64 out of the (say) 1000000000 people who could possibly be a quarterback. But most people could probably be in the top .1% of quarterback talent in the population if they trained hard for it.
EDIT: I think I may have uncharitably read your comment as being argumentative instead of informative.
It's not just among the elite. I did some wresting in school and trained for 148lbs (68kg), but I guarantee I would lose to literally anybody in the 198lbs (90kg) bracket, even if they had never wrestled before.
I also knew an incredibly good 97lbs (44kg) wrestler. He was technically much, much better than me, but I could throw him around like a rag doll so I always won.
With weight comes strength. Any competition that rewards strength but does not penalize weight will end up dominated by heavyweights. Westling is particularly brutal as weight itself is beneficial for inertia.
"I did some wresting in school and trained for 148lbs (68kg), but I guarantee I would lose to literally anybody in the 198lbs (90kg) bracket, even if they had never wrestled before."
Really? This runs counter to what I've heard from BJJ and other martial arts practitioners -- that a trained fighter could beat an untrained fighter in a fair fight (ie. no weapons, eye gouging, etc) using technique any day. You're saying that doesn't hold for wrestling?
I mean a heavy beginner wrestler vs a smaller intermediate or advanced wrestler. You would need to at least know the basics of the sport to compete without breaking the rules.
> there is no amount of innate ability or training that can balance out a 25-pound difference in weight
What? Of course there is. Just at that level, the competitors are all training at their absolute maximums. There is no additional training on top of the world-class training they do that will balance out a 25-pound difference in weight.
I guarantee you a 120 pound (I'm ~145) MMA fighter can kill me with a well placed punch faster than I could even tickle them.
Since all you need is one instance, let me share. I am a runner. I run a lot to stay in shape. I am not particularly slow, and ran track in school. I ran once with a friend of mine who had a natural runners build, but wasn't a runner and hadn't run in years. He smoked me, trotting along effortlessly while leaving me behind absolutely breathless.
It depends on what you are doing but sometimes people are just wired for something better than others. But everyone can almost always get much better with training.
> I can see an untrained 250lb person beating a 100lb one-armed boxer
I can't. My money would be on the trained boxer every time. The untrained one will be slow and will leave an opening right off the bat, boom, one punch and he's done.
I don't know, doesn't the outcome matter? Trying is admirable, but if a person tries and fails and I never try; at the end of the day we're both in the same place, no?
> at the end of the day we're both in the same place, no?
I think it depends on how you fail though. If you learn something from the experience, your odds of succeeding on the next try increase. Many goals are achieved through a succession of failures.
I agree with your statement - my point is that there seems to be this prevailing idea that you can't learn unless you try to build something by yourself which ignores reality. Sure, if you try to start a business/project/idea you're going to learn a lot along the way, but if you don't strike out on your own you're still going to have experiences and learn.
Not exactly, most of these arguments also assume "free will" is a real thing. Some people might be more genetically inclined to "trying". Overall most things are based purely on luck and genes.
If you're genetically gifted with a talent and genetically driven to "train" you'll be much better off than someone with only one trait.
> if a person tries and fails and I never try; at the end of the day we're both in the same place, no?
What a bizarre statement. This is a generalisation that can easily be shown to be false. If I try and win Gold at the olympics, but fail (only winning silver), I am in a completely different place from you who never tried. There's a million other counter examples.
I think you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who considers winning a silver medal to be failing - but yes, failure is subjective. The original premise was about a person who tries being "better than" someone who doesn't try - my argument is simply that the act of trying doesn't automatically make you better.
This ties in with the "Reality has a surprising amount of detail" article that's currently on the frontpage (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255). In my experience, I discovered that when I first learn about something and then try to do it, I usually find that a lot of the things I've learned were irrelevant, and a lot of the important things weren't even on my radar when learning. That's why, I believe, a mixed approach is more efficient than just blindly trying, or just blindly learning.
This is what people should take away from this, not that there might always be someone out there better than you no matter what. In the end, you can only control your own circumstances so do your best, prepare/train for whatever it is you're doing and whatever happens happens.
We should take away from this exactly what is true, not what is motivational. Our whole problem lately is that we've been doing the opposite.
These things are bigger than you and me and the person next door and there are far more important things than motivating some random person to train more. That is, frankly, peanuts compared to what is at stake.
You are pushing a highly individualistic philosophy that not everyone even agrees on. We live in societies and we have governments beholden to us and it's very important how these things function, much more important than what you individually do. If these systems and structures do not properly serve us because we overestimate personal agency and underestimate circumstance, that's a major problem.
The investigation to find what is true (why are people creative?) with figuring out how to improve the station of some person (why am I not creative?) is a conflict of interest, do not mix these unless you like believing in things that are just plain wrong.
"We should take away from this exactly what is true, not what is motivational. Our whole problem lately is that we've been doing the opposite.
These things are bigger than you and me and the person next door and there are far more important things than motivating some random person to train more. That is, frankly, peanuts compared to what is at stake."
Ooh, interesting. Can you elaborate more on what you thing the "whole problem" is? What things are you talking about? What is at stake?
Let me say what my actual opinion on all this is, since you seem to be assuming a lot of intent("You are pushing...") from my 2 sentence original post. Many people ask: "why is X more creative than me?", "why is X better than me at Y?" and often the goal is not really to better understand anything about the nature of creativity but to give some justification for their perceived deficiencies. In these cases, this kind of thinking is unproductive because the explanation(something something brain connections blah blah blah) is out of their control! Exactly what you're saying with this being a "conflict of interest." And to these people I say, IF you care about being more creative, IF you care about being the best in your field: control what you control, and whatever happens happens.
> What things are you talking about? What is at stake?
"Poor people deserve to be poor" and "we shouldn't help drug addicts, its their fault" are the classic ones. The problem can be summarized as total responsibility assignment (i.e., the idea that a person is fully responsible for their state)
I'm assuming it because it's a very common problem. Discussions about nature vs nurture very often get redirected into moralism. Like this example here:
> the goal is not really to better understand anything about the nature of creativity but to give some justification for their perceived deficiencies
You're saying this as if these things are not related. If people repeatedly get the message that the only thing stopping them from being a great mathematician is hard work, that message better be correct, or there will be social consequences.
It's actually completely reasonable to question the message, and it's very problematic that in the current climate any attempt at questioning it results in a moralistic response akin to "you're just looking for excuses". This is the very kind of thinking I'm arguing against here.
I'm not really sure why you seem to be so antagonized by my statements. I am not making any moral judgement on people. I am not saying anything about this nurture/nature debate. All I'm saying is that in the end you can only control what you can control, so you do your best there and the results are what they are. I have not insinuated anything about the certainty of success, only that there is uncertainty.
> The truth is never unproductive.
Yes understanding creativity is important. I am not against the truth. But you perfectly well that I am talking about productivity with respect to these concrete goals of becoming more creative/getting better at X/etc. The "truth" that you discover from studies like this are probabilistic. X% of the study participants showed Y or we observed some correlation of Z with creativity, etc. There is no certainty that these findings apply to a specific individual. Maybe, maybe not.
You can make these statements about social structures, (possible) differences in the connections of brains of creative people(as suggested in the linked paper), etc, etc. But what is actionable out of this "truth" if you are trying to become a great mathematician? There are two responses to this. What can we do as a society? And what can I do as an individual who is toiling on this path towards a higher goal? You're concerned about the former. That is fair. I am talking about the latter.
>It's actually completely reasonable to question the message, and it's very problematic that in the current climate any attempt at questioning it results in a moralistic response akin to "you're just looking for excuses". This is the very kind of thinking I'm arguing against here.
I have no way of proving this, but I would bet any amount of money that pieces like this and its like have this exact effect that you are against. I hypothesize that a majority of people reading this will walk away with the conclusion that more creative people have these innate differences in brain connectivity and then go on to surmise that the odds are stacked against them so why bother trying. And THAT is more damaging than any motivational message.
After typing all this up, I now agree with your original thesis: "We should take away from this exactly what is true, not what is motivational." In light of that, I stick to my message that you should still control the things you control in your pursuits of w/e goal it is you're pursuing b/c it is unrealistic to imagine that people will walk away from these pieces with just this "truth" - they will naturally form opinions about it and later on inform their actions with this "truth."
I agree that genetics is an important foundation, but we shouldn’t let it overshadow the hours of training professional athletes go through and the discipline they have. Good genes or not, it still takes a lot of effort to get to where they are.
Some people will just start a standard deviation above others, but when it comes to talents or traits you build careers on, those people are rare.
I think the important point is that most people can move themselves up a standard deviation or more with dedicated practice, even in areas like creativity. While they might not become geniuses, they can certainly develop quite a respectable level of talent.
"The genetic lottery is unfair; and some people are just better than you no matter what you do, and no matter what they don't do."
This is clearer in some fields than others -- particularly in fields where there are child prodigies, like in chess, music, or mathematics.
In other fields, child prodigies are rare or perhaps even non-existent.
There are, to my knowledge, no child prodigies who've written brilliant novels, or earned the Nobel Prize for Literature (as flawed a measure of talent as it is). There are no children who've composed poems which are considered to be among the greatest in the world.
These fields tend to draw upon a whole life's worth of experience -- something that children obviously lack and can't make up for through "winning the genetic lottery".
Few books are written by kids which confuses the issue. If only one in 100,000 books is great and prodigies have written less than 100,000 books then you should not expect any great books.
On the other hand plenty of great books have been written by people in their 20's which is a long way from a full life.
There are plenty of books written by people under 18. Some are even above average relative to adult writing. But, unlike chess, math, or music it takes a long time to write a book so they get less practice. On top of that books take a long time to write so they need to be good at a young age simply to finish by 18.
On the other had there is some IMO great poetry written by kids.
Child prodigies are rare by definition though. Whether or not you've heard of them, I think, is more a function of what media chooses to shine a spotlight on. On the top of my head I'd probably say Chistopher Paolini(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Paolini) qualifies as a child prodigy author - his first book, Eragon, was published when he was 19. Granted, it was his parent publishing company, but it still became a best seller.
But your broader point: "These fields tend to draw upon a whole life's worth of experience -- something that children obviously lack and can't make up for through "winning the genetic lottery"."
Yea, I'd agree with that.
Bestseller lists are an even less reliable way of measuring talent than the Nobel Prize. There have been numerous articles about how flawed and subject to manipulation the NYT Bestseller List is, for instance.[1][2][3][4]
Calling a 19-year-old a "child" is really stretching the definition of a "child", in my view. Compare that to chess and music prodigies, for instance, who are already performing at levels above those of most adults even before their teens.[5][6]
You bring up a good point about talent. With chess, math, music, there are objective measures in how "talented" the person is. You can say person X is performing above their grade level, or person X is in the top Zth percentile of all competitors in their arena. But what is talent in something more subjective like writing or art? What does it mean to "perform at levels above most adults"? Perhaps the reason you do not see "child prodigies" in these areas is because it is hard to come to any consensus on how to gauge talent here.
On your point that he was 19 at the time of publication. Sure you can say he was not a kid when he wrote it, but the act of writing it was not something that just happened over night(and certainly not with a piece of work as long as Eragon). I would still argue that he is a prodigy in the sense that he found success as a writer much earlier than most writers usually do. And perhaps this had little to do with his writing talent. Maybe, maybe not.
This is incorrect in many cases. The relative importance of innate potential vs focused practice differs wildly based on the activity. Certain activities (powerlifting, sprinting, competitive programming, singing) depend very heavily on genetic abilities such as IQ, muscular strength, etc. Other activities (assembling wooden ships and putting them in bottles, sailing, choreographed dances, becoming an expert on world history) depend more on improving muscle memory or on learning specific skills/strategies/techniques that don't simply appear without practice.
Most skills are somewhere between the two extremes. If success relative to your peers is the goal, the former type of skill should only be pursued by those with some degree of pre-existing talent, whereas the latter type of skill provides opportunities for talentless but hard-working individuals to outshine their lazier peers.
On the topic of talent-heavy activities though: I think it's important to point out that you should only consider talent when you are trying to make a living doing it, because competition is high and thus you're likely going to get out-competed by people who have innate advantages.
But if you're just doing it for fun and not to earn a living, you can actually get quite good at any of them with focused training. You might not get professional level good, but you can become objectively quite skilled.
There isn't that much genetic variation. Talent amounts to a few percent, the rest is hard work. You could be last place at the Olympics, and will trivially beat anybody with talent but no training.
You could be 7 foot with excellent hand-eye coordination, but with no training in basketball, a 5 foot schlub with good training will easily destroy you.
On the other hand, most everyone is good at something. It pays to find out what you're good at, and make a career in that direction.
Me, I have no physical talents whatsoever. But I happen to have the inclination and ability to program, so that makes sense for me to do that rather than, say, boxing.
>I see creativity along the same lines. Many folks are conditioned to memorize, follow processes, follow norms and paths laid by others, it may not occur to them to seek out originality. It is another form of learned helplessness.
The same applies in the academic setting as well. When I was doing my PhD, I found myself trapped in exactly this kind of paralysis. I was very good at learning things, so everyone expected me to do well, but I had never created anything, and the idea that I ever could was so overwhelming and foreign that I couldn't even get started. It wasn't until a little over a year before graduating that I managed to get it together, and was lucky enough to pull it off in time.
Part of the problem is the romanticization of creativity, at least in my mind, as if it were an act of heroism or exceptional ability. On the contrary, it's mostly a matter of working and thinking and not giving up. Once you get enmeshed deeply enough in something, you stop wondering about if you're any good at it.
Is there a name for the fact that articles that start with "Why are ...?", that promise to explain some curiosity, tend to almost never give a satisfying answer? (Usually because it just reports on some small incremental research paper that's still far away from shining a clear lucid light on the bigger picture.)
Betteridge's law doesn't apply and clickbait is too broad.
Another part of the phenomenon seems to be that the comments here on HN is rarely about the actual content of article itself, but about peoples personal thoughts on the subject.
For instance, I wouldn't be surprised if an article about incremental research about dreams would be titled "Why do we dream?", would not contain a satisfying answer in the body of the report, and would on HN mostly consist of peoples own experiences and thoughts about dreams (instead of about the specifics of the research).
Creativity is a weird resource. You don't consume it, you refill it by using it.
The more creative things you do, the more creative you become. I see this a lot in writing. When I'm on the wagon and writing every day, the ideas keep coming and flowing and I start thinking "Maybe I should publish twice a day? There's no way I can limit myself to just once"
But then I fall off the wagon and I publish/write once a week. It becomes a struggle. Ideas don't flow. It feels like I have nothing to say. The less writing I do, the fewer things feel interesting enough to write about. Ideas get discarded.
Try it. Do something creative every day. Even just something small. Write down an idea or a joke or a thought. Or write a 10 line piece of code that does something silly.
Soon enough you won't be able to contain yourself and creativity will come bursting out of you.
You might not write the next Harry Potter or come up with the next Homebrew, but you're going to create something cool I bet.
I take issue with the basic premise. I don't think people are more creative than others at all; rather I believe that people exercise/express their creativity more than others. It's the difference between being dealt a card and choosing it for yourself.
I'm not arguing that one way or the other, actually.\* I'm saying that differences in innate creativity, if any, are dwarfed by their expression or lack thereof. i.e. the biggest factor is not what you have but how you use it.
This is from experience teaching people to "think outside the box" to write better code, to create/describe better models of the real world, etc. starting with people that you would swear didn't have a creative bone in their body and watching them improve dramatically.
\* (I know I kind of did argue that, but since you're asking outright, this is what I actually believe.)
> Some ideas were more creative than others. For the sock, one participant suggested using it to warm your feet—the common use for a sock—while another participant suggested using it as a water filtration system.
> We also ranked their ideas for originality: Common uses received lower scores (using a sock to warm your feet), while uncommon uses received higher scores (using a sock as a water filtration system).
> Overall, people with stronger connections came up with better ideas.
The only objective measure used here is the originality rank. Just because an idea is "original" doesn't mean it is "creative". At least not in a useful way. What if I suggested using a sock to wash your car? Probably an "original" idea. So maybe they ranked it as less creative, even though it is original?
Of course this is just a contrived example, but it seems to me like this is an area that could introduce bias pretty easily.
The article did suggest that a creative act had to be both novel and useful. There are an infinite number of useless uses for a sock. Enumerating them is not creative; it's random, like rolling a die.
Creativity requires both imagination and judgement -- for each idea you conceive, you must also judge its practical utility to serve some known purpose. Or imagine some unknown purpose that it also might serve...
"In shoe world, all hats look just like shoes, but no one wears shoes on their feet. As such, nobody ever invented a sock, nor can they imagine any use for it. After all, why would you put a sock on your head?"
There's clearly only a large finite number of possible uses for a sock - I'd say if you can enumerate ones that others wouldn't even conceive then you're being more creative. What would you call someone who can think of ways to use something that no-one/few others can?
Unfurl the sock and make a "blind man trail" as a party game. Burn the [cotton] sock and use as char-cloth. Cut up the sock and use as fuel in a tiny model steam-engine.
The judgement comes in with craft, or engineering IMO and isn't a facet of creativity per se. Like, burning the sock will create little heat and lots of fumes, etc.; the idea needed creativity. What we mustn't assume is that creation (of goods, craft items, products, whatever) requires _only_ creativity.
I get the feeling that the researchers might have thrown me out after the Nth time suggesting, for every item, the following uses: murder weapon, "adult" toy, jury-rig repair part, primitive math, steganography, and fashion accessory.
Anything is a _____, if you're brave enough.
If you think about it, the hard part is coming up with a useful purpose that can only be fulfilled by one kind of object. What useful purpose can only be accomplished by use of a sock? Not even "keeping a foot warm and dry while inside a shoe or boot" works there.
They did suggest that, but I didn't see anything measurable in terms of "usefulness". Not to mention that's a context dependent criteria. So I don't really know how you would measure it to begin with. That's why I am saying it is ripe for bias being introduced. Perhaps these findings are completely legitimate, but I'm skeptical.
UX Designer here. It took me a long time, almost 4 years of college, to train my creative muscle. Most people don't wake up one day and are instantly creative, it takes hard work and dedication just like any other skill.
This is something we as humans are going to have to deal with at one point or another. While some people would have it that "we are all the same" - the fact is that we are not.
It tends to become a touchy subject when you suggest that brain functionality differs between people but we seem to blindly accept that some people make better athletes than others.
It is particularly hard because you can't simply look at somebody and make any sort of judgement about ones mental abilities and there sometimes is no rhyme or reason why one person is more creative, or smarter than the other.
For me, I am a strong believer that brain functions are much like those of our physical counterparts. While the majority of people can all train the body up to run 1, 5, or 10 miles or more some people will simply have to exert less effort and be able to run further or faster than others. The same goes for brain functions. We can all be "good" in math, science, reading excreta... But only a subset of us will be experts in those subjects or even all of those subjects.
I think there is a lot to be studied how how early brain development can push the boundaries for the given set of hardware you are born with. But at some point I think you are mostly locked into what you have.
This is a hard topic to even begin to study. Because while two people may be able to preform the same mental functions we don't have a good way of judging amount of effort, and prep time required. For example, somebody who is just introduced to a new consept and can preformed the mental functions within minutes of introduction vs somebody who can preform the same mental functions but required 2 years of practice. The two people have very different cognitive capabilities, and you could argue one is smarter than the other.
As for the notion that we are not all the same. Please don't take that as we should be treating each other different based off skills. I think with regards of us all being human we all deserve the same level of respect and opportunity in life. My interest in this subject is based on the notion that we could have happier lives if this sort of subject was less taboo and we could explore making life decisions based off our actual aptitude.
I would much rather work with people, and do a job that I found "easier" every day than a job that I could do that I found "hard". While that is a very black and white statement that is not to mean that I don't want a challenge, but it does mean that I don't want to constantly be struggling.
I see this in the world already. Where people take jobs they hate, because their aptitude is simply low for that line of work. Where everything is constantly a uphill battle. I can't help to wonder how much better their life would be had they picked a different job where the work came more easy and maybe even considered fun to them. I was lucky to find a job where there is just enough hard stuff to keep me busy, but the bulk of the work I find easy. I think a lot of people who found their way into software experience this. Meanwhile I have friends who can't wait till the work day is over and generally hate their job and complain about how hard it is.
So simply put, some people are more creative, or smart or any other attribute because we are all different, and had different experiences during critical brain development times in life. I think the expectation that everybody would be the same -- or even have the same aptitude on any given mental exercise would be weird -- unless we were all clones.
How many people train up to even a tenth of their physical capability?
Consider applying the same to creative effort. Yes, your absolute best effort may beat my absolute best, but we live in a world where most people are not even trying.
Its tricky, but consider the function of "trying" just another brain function. Many brain functions are required to achieve a outcome. So pure aptitude in one area might require cooperation of another. So we might be able to group different functions and map their dependencies.
You might end up with something like (effort * raw_aptitude) = actual_aptitude for a given function, and there will be crossovers where where raw_aptitude is less in one person but their effort is more. And again one could arguably assign one being better than the other.
When we talk about these sorts of things there are not many "gotchas" because you can't use one brain function to discount the other brain function as they really work together. So I really don't feel like somebodies lack of effort negates anything I said in the original post, as it is just another brain function.
This does bring up a interesting crossover where mental faculties does play a role in physical performance. There was a study that showed that "smart" people made poor solders. The notion was that the smarter person was able to think further in the future about how their actions, or orders may play out. It was their ability to ponder the possibilities that ultimately caused them to shut down. On the flip side somebody who did not think as far into the future, or was not keen to pondering on future possibilities executed orders without hesitation -- making them a better solder. I don't know if I agree with this study, or their notion of smart, as "smart" can be subjective and is not really well defined. But it is fun to think about and wonder how these things do play a role in every day life.
I understand and agree to large extent regarding your statement "While some people would have it that "we are all the same" - the fact is that we are not."
What is your take on each individual has his or her own strong quality which is different from others ?
Like some may good at managing people, some good at analysis
As an artist and musician, I often encourage my friends to draw something, paint something, or make some music. The reply I hear over and over again is, "oh, no, I don't have the talent" or "oh, no, I'm awful at drawing". It's like they don't realize that what they attribute to "talent" is attainable through practice and hard work. When I point that out and encourage them to just try, that it might be fun, they make some other excuse. I've come to understand that what all their excuses amount to is that they're just not interested in creating. They'd rather remain consumers.
You have to create in order to be creative. You have to practice creativity in order to be good at it. You can't just read a book, go to a seminar, or wear funny clothes and expect to suddenly be a "creative genius". It can take years to master.[1]
On the other hand, most children don't have any problem being creative. Somehow by the time we become adults we lose that, and then think we're permanently incapable.
[1] - One of my favorite videos[2] shows the artistic progression of Jonathan Hardesty. In his early work few would detect any hint of "talent", and yet after nine years of hard work, his skill rises to a truly impressive level -- at which point, if one had only seen the end result, a lot of people would call him "talented". But as you can see in the video, he was clearly not born with this "talent". He earned it. That's what it takes.
I think you're close. My observation suggests that kids are used to it, everything they do is new, they're inexpert at everything. They don't expect to be good.
Adults think that they should be capable simply because one tends to get better at things as an adult. The weight of expectation makes them often worse.
My field is pottery, some adults think they can just throw a vase on their first go, kids just enjoy the experience (on the whole) and don't expect to be good at it.
Kids, once they've learnt some fine motor control, don't make kid-pictures because they're kids, they do it because they haven't practiced. Adults try, and their observation can get them a little further, but they still make the same sort of pictures and are embarrassed because it's "childish".
I recently started a sports class where I'm ranked along with 7 & 8 yo kids, an interesting and humbling experience.
Another thing that happens is you can get hit by someone next to you, that has just as little experience, doing it a lot better than you on their first try. It doesn't help if this person is way younger than you to boot.
Kids generally get more slack for not being good at things, as well, whereas with adults, since there are many adults who've done X since they were young, being an adult who just started X makes you extra bad and sometimes a minority.
I have gotten the "why are you so bad at this?" reaction from people before when doing new things. Especially with anything physical, I improve rather slowly.
"some adults think they can just throw a vase on their first go, kids just enjoy the experience (on the whole) and don't expect to be good at it."
If they're young enough, they don't even have an opinion on what "good" is (or what art is, for that matter). They just do, and are happy doing it. Judgement, of their own and others' work comes later. That may be when their inhibition starts.
> I've come to understand that what all their excuses amount to is that they're just not interested in creating.
I don't think this is true. If they were uninterested, they would simply say so, rather than making a series of excuses. What seems more likely to me is that they are (on a deep level) scared of creating.
Creativity of any sort requires you to project your personality and be vulnerable in a way that people don't normally do. This can be pretty scary when most actions people do don't open themselves up to possibly being criticized on such a personal level. I think when people aren't creative it's not that they don't care, but rather that the fear of being judged (whether conscious or unconscious) is too strong to overcome. This is why people "don't have any creative ideas" - it's not that they don't have ANY, but instead that they reject the ideas that they do have because they think they are not good enough.
"If they were uninterested, they would simply say so, rather than making a series of excuses."
I think they make those excuses because they don't want to cause offense by saying they aren't interested in what I'm interested in (and even consider to be part of my identity).
I do agree that fear could motivate their aversion, though. But if the fear is there, I don't think it's usually rises to their consciousness or at least is something they could readily admit -- as if it was, they could simply say they're afraid, couldn't they?
Or maybe people refuse to try what you suggest because they hate the results of their past efforts. Many people cannot sing, and no amount of practice will change that. Many others are grossly uncoordinated, and thus hate dance or playing sports. If every attempt I make to draw with pencil and paper looks sick to me, I'm going to stop drawing (which I have). But I'm happy to create in other media.
Maybe the trick to being "creative" is finding a suitable medium for innovation, which may not be one that's typically considered to be "art" -- like software design, organizing your workshop, or building a better mousetrap.
> If they were uninterested, they would simply say so, rather than making a series of excuses.
Haha, not my experience with people. The excuses people say are rarely the truth. People speak in euphemisms for a variety of reasons, and you've got to divine the truth from between the lines.
It's like they don't realize that what they attribute to "talent" is attainable through practice and hard work. When I point that out and encourage them to just try, that it might be fun, they make some other excuse.
That's a bit of a bait and switch, to say, why not try this simple thing just for fun, and then say all it takes is a lot of practice and hard work. Not only do you have to make a long-term commitment that this is going to be one of the few things in your life that you invest a lot of time and energy in, you also have to either enjoy being bad at it (which is even harder as an adult than it is when you're a kid) or stick with it through a lot of thankless effort.
You just explained the reason I don't like writing fiction. I do not enjoy the process of writing more than the pain of being bad at it. I've been trying to write for years but just can not seem to enjoy it. It's a hobby that feels awfully like work, yet I keep coming back to it.
"That's a bit of a bait and switch, to say, why not try this simple thing just for fun, and then say all it takes is a lot of practice and hard work."
These aren't mutually exclusive. You could have fun doing something and yet still take a lot of time and effort to master it.
It's like playing the violin -- something that most people understand takes years and years of effort to master. Most people wouldn't expect to pick up a violin and instantly be able to come out with a virtuoso performance. But for other arts it seems that that's exactly the expectation that they have. If their objection to a suggestion to try drawing is to say, "Oh, no, I'm no good at drawing" my reply would be: "Well, yeah, that's because you haven't practiced drawing. Why would you even expect to be good at drawing when you just start?"
On the other hand, just because you can't yet get the ultimate results you're after when you start doesn't mean you can't have fun trying. There's some visceral enjoyment that can come from handling art materials like charcoal, paints, or clay and using them to create and express yourself -- an enjoyment that non-artists rarely have any idea is there, and will continue to be oblivious to as long as they refuse to try.
The same goes for musical instruments. You can have fun just playing around with them, even if you don't know what you're doing and have no training whatsoever.
When I encourage non-artists and non-musicians to give making art or music a try, I'm not trying to get them to immediately invest 10,000 hours of grueling practice nor to paint the Mona Lisa for me. I'm encouraging them to just try for five minutes, ten minutes, half an hour... just to maybe experience some of the joy that could be there for them.
If you have really never sat down for several hours and worked on a drawing, you immediately have several things going against you:
1. You know you won't make something particularly good the first time. Why spend several hours of concerted effort on something that won't immediately pay off?
2. You aren't an "artist". We tend to categorize people by their current skillset, and constrain ourselves to the skillsets we are comfortable with. I don't know of any good ways to teach the brain around this without simply "pushing through" it.
3. Your goal is to do it "right", but you are going to do it wrong. Thousands of times. Every stroke of a pencil is a wrong stroke. The instinct is to immediately erase.
The beauty of painting is that you can't erase. This is why I would recommend a person begin with painting rather than drawing, so that every action is additive.
4. You have to start with purpose. The purpose has to be good enough to enthrall you for several hours. If you start painting something that you don't find interesting, you know at some point, you will get bored, and you will never finish, so why not stop now?
This goes for anything creative. How can you learn to write software without software to write? How can you perform music without music to perform? How can you build something without something to build? Creation needs purpose, if nothing else.
> On the other hand, most children don't have any problem being creative. Somehow by the time we become adults we lose that, and then think we're permanently incapable.
This is one of the most important barriers for us to overcome.
We need to practice doing things wrong, and creating garbage. Unfortunately, we constantly reiterate the claim that garbage is bad, and that we should do everything perfect.
Your advice echoes that of Carol Dweck: http://www.mindsetonline.com/
"Mindset is a simple idea discovered by world-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck in decades of research on achievement and success—a simple idea that makes all the difference. Teaching a growth mindset creates motivation and productivity in the worlds of business, education, and sports."
probably freedom, and under freedom;
then care and success start to be consumed by the world,
so focus and productivity goes insulted, things would be simple as to fight then takes under to process the work values or so;
probably freedom, and under freedom;
then care and success start to be consumed by the world,
so focus and productivity goes insulted, things would be simple as to fight then taken under to process the work values prisoner of the values;
People have horrible notions about what it is to be "creative" that really just serve to prevent them from attempting something.
Linus Pauling said that when he is asked how he comes up with so many great ideas, he says he just comes up with a lot of ideas and then throws away the bad ones.
People are discouraged when they sit down to a blank sheet of paper and their first few efforts seem like crap.
The truth is that many "creative" people started younger, when their first crappy efforts weren't so stinging.
You can start something new when you are older. But you have to tolerate your errors, and you have to bother to identify your problems and fix them.
Also: you don't have to be Mozart to be creative. Garden-variety creativity is pretty much available to most people who are willing to brave the slog and self-embarrassment.
The article mentions alternate uses of a sock, citing its suggested use as a "water filter" as being particularly creative. In high school I had a project to make a water filter which I forgot about. The day it was due I managed to assemble a plausible filter by taking my sock, getting it wet, and draping it between the dirty water glass and the clean water glass, with the dirty water glass higher so the water would be sucked up and through the sock into the clean water glass.
Maybe there is a high correlation between creativity and irresponsibility or desperation :)
As this is Hacker News and full of curious people, I can tell you that it doesn't work very well. The dirty water just ends up on the other side, minus large pieces of detritus.
Frustration and dissatisfaction are famous sources of creative catalysis. Why go to the trouble of creating unless there's a reward for expending the extra effort?
Maybe the OP psychologists needed to motivate their subjects better. Maybe exceeding a sufficient threshold of desire is essential in order for someone to "get creative"?
>> Creativity is often defined as the ability to come up with new and useful ideas. Like intelligence, it can be considered a trait that everyone—not just creative “geniuses” like Picasso and Steve Jobs—possesses in some capacity.
Well, if you stretch the definition of "creative genius" to include a master of several artistic disciplines who created or popularised entire art movements and influenced artists the world over for more than a hundred years with an entrepreneur who sold lots of electronic devices, then honestly, I have no idea what your experiments are even meant to measure, anymore.
Is one answer psychedelic substances? At a high level it seems consistent with the article conjecture. I haven’t checked research recently, but there sure are some compelling anecdotes.
It’s interesting to me some (based on comments here and elsewhere) many would be opposed to personal experiments under professional medical care.
Even for a very skeptical person (as I would self identify), consider the countless profound experiences recounted, even by people who might be considered equally skeptical.
Either these experiences are valid, with respect to enabling some sort of beneficial expansion of brain activity, or they are not.
If it is valid, how could such a rare and potentially transformative opportunity be ignored? If it’s not valid, risks seem negligible under professional supervision, and you still might experience a once in a lifetime fantastic journey.
It’s so easy for us to grok what, say a blind from birth person can’t experience through words alone, yet somehow difficult to imagine ourselves having a similarly untapped perspective, through which difficult to imagine insights might be possible.
Hopefully it won’t take too many years for the data to yield an answer. Maybe Steve Jobs and others chose not to wait based on similar cost/benefit analysis.
Some studies find lefties are more creative, and some don't, see e.g. [0] for some discussion. My anecdata is that three times in unconferences for which creativity was a theme, 30%-50% of the people were lefty (compared to 10% in the general population).
This is indeed an interesting conversation ... it seems to me that just like everything else ... being creative is a habit ... the belief that there must be a better way to do something unless proven otherwise seems to be the ultimate source of creativity ...
In AI you quickly see in the first chapters that there is a clear tradeoff on creativity. When doing search algorithms (which is what all AI algorithms fundamentally are), creativity is essentially breadth-first exploring of a search space, and the opposite is depth first.
Neural networks, for instance, are extremely un-creative. They just go straight for their goal, no deviating (the assumption being that any search space is entirely flat if it just has enough dimensions, and clearly to some extent that's true). They will leave very large swaths of the solution space entirely unexplored. But when they work, you can find the method fast and it will yield decent results. Being uncreative, ironically, makes them adapt very quickly.
Genetic algorithms, on the other hand, are the most creative algorithms we have, and of course they are famous for finding ridiculously optimized results, but taking a very long time to do so. Genetic algorithm results are always fun. Genetic algorithms always write a program. And while only simple solutions can be understood by humans, but they're ridiculously optimized. Every instruction does 5-10 different things that affect the end result and somehow those results come together at exactly the right time to work.
People, and especially the HR/coaching industry, seem to deny this tradeoff, but it's inevitable. If a person is creative, they'll be slow and unreliable to produce results, but those results will be a lot better (assuming, of course, there are any). A very uncreative person can produce results quickly and reliably, but they're "bad", in a sense: one might say they're just trivial re-hashes of solutions seen before.
But I wish I had a dollar for every time a high-level manager has come to me with a variation of the following statement : "Ok, let's plan out how we can creatively solve this problem". If a plan is made, of course, in the best case it cuts down on the creativity, in the worst case prevents it entirely.
In my experience most people are entirely capable of being very creative or almost robot-like predictable. It's the environment that forces one over the other (although it may just be their perception of their environment rather than the actual demands placed on them).
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadI see creativity along the same lines. Many folks are conditioned to memorize, follow processes, follow norms and paths laid by others, it may not occur to them to seek out originality. It is another form of learned helplessness.
Creating is hard, especially when judged in a commercial context. Sure, if I make my own bread it will not win a prize but I made it, it is mine and therefore special to me in ways that are not reflected by the market.
Too often emotional value is dictated by market value, with the logical conclusion being "what's the point of making when I can buy something better" -- and you may respond, that is the correct view but it misunderstands that creativity is a process, a worthy act in its own right but also a journey that may end up in interesting places that are not explored by commercial venture.
Reading is a great way to learn new things from different domains.
I disagree. The genetic lottery is unfair; and some people are just better than you no matter what you do, and no matter what they don't do.
Genetics help, sure. But it is just potential. Can you provide an example where one person was so genetically talented that they didn’t train and still were competitive at some semi-professional level?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Sexes_(tennis)#1...
"Another event dubbed a "Battle of the Sexes" took place during the 1998 Australian Open[51] between Karsten Braasch and the Williams sisters. Venus and Serena Williams had claimed that they could beat any male player ranked outside the world's top 200, so Braasch, then ranked 203rd, challenged them both. Braasch was described by one journalist as "a man whose training regime centered around a pack of cigarettes and more than a couple bottles of ice cold lager".[52][51] The matches took place on court number 12 in Melbourne Park,[53] after Braasch had finished a round of golf and two shandies. He first took on Serena and after leading 5–0, beat her 6–1. Venus then walked on court and again Braasch was victorious, this time winning 6–2.[54] Braasch said afterwards, "500 and above, no chance". He added that he had played like someone ranked 600th in order to keep the game "fun".[55] Braasch said the big difference was that men can chase down shots much easier, and that men put spin on the ball that the women can't handle. The Williams sisters adjusted their claim to beating men outside the top 350.[51]"
He obviously had a fuck ton of training, was just 'retired' when he played the game.
The original question was asking for an example of a "genetically talented that they didn’t train" losing to someone who was a "pro" and this is clearly not an example of it.
That said, I'm not trying to make the argument that there aren't 'genetic' limits.
My point, more broadly, is that the idea that, “I can’t do that....genetics!” is misplaced defeatism.
But, as I suggested earlier, I don't think the issue of athletic performance has much to say about creativity, which is the topic of this article. Indubitable's answer of Ramanujan is a much more relevant reply to your question, but where does that leave us? His example does not give us a reason to give up on creativity, which goes to show that the question doesn't address the issue.
Let me say that I don't disagree in the advantages of genes and sex, but from my own experience competing at a moderately high level and knowing players who competed at the highest levels, you more or less train with an expectation of what your opponents will do in mind.
At least in badminton, the way men and women play the game is completely different, but I would be very surprised if it's merely due to physical differences. I don't think it's due to physical differences because the difference in style shows up across the skill level, and I imagine a professional female player who consistently did weight training should be able to achieve the same level of strength as a male who isn't nearly as serious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruki_Murakami#Writing_career
"Murakami began to write fiction when he was 29.[19] "Before that", he said, "I didn't write anything. I was just one of those ordinary people. I was running a jazz club, and I didn't create anything at all."[20] He was inspired to write his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing (1979), while watching a baseball game."
For the mental realm you have people like Srinivasa Ramanujan [1]. He had next to no formal training in mathematics yet would contribute immensely to a wide array of mathematical fields before the end of his brief life, dying at 32.
There isn’t a “genetics only helps so much” argument.
Sure is a good No True Scotsman you've got there. And I'm not even sure you'd be right ignoring that; recall that sports like boxing and MMA separate people into weight classes that are ten pounds wide. In other words, those sports think that, within the bounds of "professional", there is no amount of innate ability or training that can balance out a 25-pound difference in weight.
But even if you were right about reachable levels of ability, you fail to realize that the problem is less about the maximum reachable level and more about the ease of reaching a competitive level. Sure, most people can train up to run a marathon. But some people will take a year to do that and some people will take three month. And that kind of difference is crippling. Trying to get a degree in a one-year skill will cost you more in time and stress than trying to get a degree in a one-month skill, so much more that you may be out-competed and fail or simply collapse under the increased strain.
Furthermore, when looking at Real Life, it's not just about whether you can Get Good at a single skill that you can't choose. It's about how good you can be overall. It's impressive when a 100lb one-armed boxer beats an untrained 250lb person through pure skill because it indicates just how much time that boxer must have spent training to do that. But do we think that the "untrained person" sat on their ass that whole time? No. They spent that time playing chess. And as a result, while the boxer trains their ass off and has a fantastic day and somehow, against all odds, manages to beat the untrained person in a boxing ring... if they squared off across a chessboard the "untrained person" would casually style all over the boxer in between rounds of candy crush.
So yes. Training >>> innate skill, more so for some skills than others. But don't let that make you think that genetics are fair.
That's actually a bad example. UFC got its start with the spectacle of watching comparatively small Royce Gracie beat fighters with significant weight advantages who didn't know how to grapple.
There were some really extreme weight mismatches in 90s MMA: http://www.espn.com/extra/mma/news/story?id=3513974
I was more thinking outside the top 1% of any particular skill, for example when you're hiring a designer or sales staff in a normal company (as in, a not-1% company, such as a refrigerator manufacturer or something).
I'm willing to concede that if you're looking exclusively at top 1% or top 0.01% candidates, you may profit best by taking their innate abilities into account, but if you're trying to find a top 80% or top 70% candidate (if you're trying to play moneyball with your organization or something) I personally would weight the depth and breadth of experience most.
The NFL has 32 football teams. Any quarterback outside the top 10 or so is considered 'bad' by most people. Assuming each team has a backup quarterback, out of the 64 'best' people in the world to do that job, only the top ten are so are safe from being called 'bad at their job' on any given Sunday.
There's also a story about a UFC fighter who went 0-3, and people called him a terrible fighter. Someone from his hometown mentioned how he was the toughest guy in town and one day beat up 4 guys and 5 cops at a bar all by himself, and he was only a 155lb fighter.
EDIT: I think I may have uncharitably read your comment as being argumentative instead of informative.
I also knew an incredibly good 97lbs (44kg) wrestler. He was technically much, much better than me, but I could throw him around like a rag doll so I always won.
With weight comes strength. Any competition that rewards strength but does not penalize weight will end up dominated by heavyweights. Westling is particularly brutal as weight itself is beneficial for inertia.
Really? This runs counter to what I've heard from BJJ and other martial arts practitioners -- that a trained fighter could beat an untrained fighter in a fair fight (ie. no weapons, eye gouging, etc) using technique any day. You're saying that doesn't hold for wrestling?
What? Of course there is. Just at that level, the competitors are all training at their absolute maximums. There is no additional training on top of the world-class training they do that will balance out a 25-pound difference in weight.
I guarantee you a 120 pound (I'm ~145) MMA fighter can kill me with a well placed punch faster than I could even tickle them.
It depends on what you are doing but sometimes people are just wired for something better than others. But everyone can almost always get much better with training.
I can't. My money would be on the trained boxer every time. The untrained one will be slow and will leave an opening right off the bat, boom, one punch and he's done.
I'll never "catch up" to Musk, but I'm better than most people simply by trying my own business ideas.
I think it depends on how you fail though. If you learn something from the experience, your odds of succeeding on the next try increase. Many goals are achieved through a succession of failures.
If you're genetically gifted with a talent and genetically driven to "train" you'll be much better off than someone with only one trait.
What a bizarre statement. This is a generalisation that can easily be shown to be false. If I try and win Gold at the olympics, but fail (only winning silver), I am in a completely different place from you who never tried. There's a million other counter examples.
These things are bigger than you and me and the person next door and there are far more important things than motivating some random person to train more. That is, frankly, peanuts compared to what is at stake.
You are pushing a highly individualistic philosophy that not everyone even agrees on. We live in societies and we have governments beholden to us and it's very important how these things function, much more important than what you individually do. If these systems and structures do not properly serve us because we overestimate personal agency and underestimate circumstance, that's a major problem.
The investigation to find what is true (why are people creative?) with figuring out how to improve the station of some person (why am I not creative?) is a conflict of interest, do not mix these unless you like believing in things that are just plain wrong.
These things are bigger than you and me and the person next door and there are far more important things than motivating some random person to train more. That is, frankly, peanuts compared to what is at stake." Ooh, interesting. Can you elaborate more on what you thing the "whole problem" is? What things are you talking about? What is at stake?
Let me say what my actual opinion on all this is, since you seem to be assuming a lot of intent("You are pushing...") from my 2 sentence original post. Many people ask: "why is X more creative than me?", "why is X better than me at Y?" and often the goal is not really to better understand anything about the nature of creativity but to give some justification for their perceived deficiencies. In these cases, this kind of thinking is unproductive because the explanation(something something brain connections blah blah blah) is out of their control! Exactly what you're saying with this being a "conflict of interest." And to these people I say, IF you care about being more creative, IF you care about being the best in your field: control what you control, and whatever happens happens.
"Poor people deserve to be poor" and "we shouldn't help drug addicts, its their fault" are the classic ones. The problem can be summarized as total responsibility assignment (i.e., the idea that a person is fully responsible for their state)
I'm assuming it because it's a very common problem. Discussions about nature vs nurture very often get redirected into moralism. Like this example here:
> the goal is not really to better understand anything about the nature of creativity but to give some justification for their perceived deficiencies
You're saying this as if these things are not related. If people repeatedly get the message that the only thing stopping them from being a great mathematician is hard work, that message better be correct, or there will be social consequences.
It's actually completely reasonable to question the message, and it's very problematic that in the current climate any attempt at questioning it results in a moralistic response akin to "you're just looking for excuses". This is the very kind of thinking I'm arguing against here.
> this kind of thinking is unproductive
The truth is never unproductive.
> The truth is never unproductive. Yes understanding creativity is important. I am not against the truth. But you perfectly well that I am talking about productivity with respect to these concrete goals of becoming more creative/getting better at X/etc. The "truth" that you discover from studies like this are probabilistic. X% of the study participants showed Y or we observed some correlation of Z with creativity, etc. There is no certainty that these findings apply to a specific individual. Maybe, maybe not.
You can make these statements about social structures, (possible) differences in the connections of brains of creative people(as suggested in the linked paper), etc, etc. But what is actionable out of this "truth" if you are trying to become a great mathematician? There are two responses to this. What can we do as a society? And what can I do as an individual who is toiling on this path towards a higher goal? You're concerned about the former. That is fair. I am talking about the latter.
>It's actually completely reasonable to question the message, and it's very problematic that in the current climate any attempt at questioning it results in a moralistic response akin to "you're just looking for excuses". This is the very kind of thinking I'm arguing against here. I have no way of proving this, but I would bet any amount of money that pieces like this and its like have this exact effect that you are against. I hypothesize that a majority of people reading this will walk away with the conclusion that more creative people have these innate differences in brain connectivity and then go on to surmise that the odds are stacked against them so why bother trying. And THAT is more damaging than any motivational message.
After typing all this up, I now agree with your original thesis: "We should take away from this exactly what is true, not what is motivational." In light of that, I stick to my message that you should still control the things you control in your pursuits of w/e goal it is you're pursuing b/c it is unrealistic to imagine that people will walk away from these pieces with just this "truth" - they will naturally form opinions about it and later on inform their actions with this "truth."
I think the important point is that most people can move themselves up a standard deviation or more with dedicated practice, even in areas like creativity. While they might not become geniuses, they can certainly develop quite a respectable level of talent.
This is clearer in some fields than others -- particularly in fields where there are child prodigies, like in chess, music, or mathematics.
In other fields, child prodigies are rare or perhaps even non-existent.
There are, to my knowledge, no child prodigies who've written brilliant novels, or earned the Nobel Prize for Literature (as flawed a measure of talent as it is). There are no children who've composed poems which are considered to be among the greatest in the world.
These fields tend to draw upon a whole life's worth of experience -- something that children obviously lack and can't make up for through "winning the genetic lottery".
On the other hand plenty of great books have been written by people in their 20's which is a long way from a full life.
On the other had there is some IMO great poetry written by kids.
But your broader point: "These fields tend to draw upon a whole life's worth of experience -- something that children obviously lack and can't make up for through "winning the genetic lottery"." Yea, I'd agree with that.
Calling a 19-year-old a "child" is really stretching the definition of a "child", in my view. Compare that to chess and music prodigies, for instance, who are already performing at levels above those of most adults even before their teens.[5][6]
[1] - https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/27/16208294/handbook-for-mor...
[2] - http://gary-lindberg.com/do-you-trust-the-nyt-bestseller-lis...
[3] - http://www.hughhowey.com/the-nyt-and-wsj-best-seller-lists-m...
[4] - http://www.politicususa.com/2010/12/02/palin-bestseller-frau...
[5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_prodigy
[6] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_prodigy
On your point that he was 19 at the time of publication. Sure you can say he was not a kid when he wrote it, but the act of writing it was not something that just happened over night(and certainly not with a piece of work as long as Eragon). I would still argue that he is a prodigy in the sense that he found success as a writer much earlier than most writers usually do. And perhaps this had little to do with his writing talent. Maybe, maybe not.
Most skills are somewhere between the two extremes. If success relative to your peers is the goal, the former type of skill should only be pursued by those with some degree of pre-existing talent, whereas the latter type of skill provides opportunities for talentless but hard-working individuals to outshine their lazier peers.
But if you're just doing it for fun and not to earn a living, you can actually get quite good at any of them with focused training. You might not get professional level good, but you can become objectively quite skilled.
You could be 7 foot with excellent hand-eye coordination, but with no training in basketball, a 5 foot schlub with good training will easily destroy you.
Me, I have no physical talents whatsoever. But I happen to have the inclination and ability to program, so that makes sense for me to do that rather than, say, boxing.
That doesn't mean that you will not have something worth contributing. The difficult thing is to find out what that is of course!
The same applies in the academic setting as well. When I was doing my PhD, I found myself trapped in exactly this kind of paralysis. I was very good at learning things, so everyone expected me to do well, but I had never created anything, and the idea that I ever could was so overwhelming and foreign that I couldn't even get started. It wasn't until a little over a year before graduating that I managed to get it together, and was lucky enough to pull it off in time.
Part of the problem is the romanticization of creativity, at least in my mind, as if it were an act of heroism or exceptional ability. On the contrary, it's mostly a matter of working and thinking and not giving up. Once you get enmeshed deeply enough in something, you stop wondering about if you're any good at it.
Betteridge's law doesn't apply and clickbait is too broad.
Another part of the phenomenon seems to be that the comments here on HN is rarely about the actual content of article itself, but about peoples personal thoughts on the subject. For instance, I wouldn't be surprised if an article about incremental research about dreams would be titled "Why do we dream?", would not contain a satisfying answer in the body of the report, and would on HN mostly consist of peoples own experiences and thoughts about dreams (instead of about the specifics of the research).
"Over promise, under deliver" might fit, though...
The more creative things you do, the more creative you become. I see this a lot in writing. When I'm on the wagon and writing every day, the ideas keep coming and flowing and I start thinking "Maybe I should publish twice a day? There's no way I can limit myself to just once"
But then I fall off the wagon and I publish/write once a week. It becomes a struggle. Ideas don't flow. It feels like I have nothing to say. The less writing I do, the fewer things feel interesting enough to write about. Ideas get discarded.
Try it. Do something creative every day. Even just something small. Write down an idea or a joke or a thought. Or write a 10 line piece of code that does something silly.
Soon enough you won't be able to contain yourself and creativity will come bursting out of you.
You might not write the next Harry Potter or come up with the next Homebrew, but you're going to create something cool I bet.
This is from experience teaching people to "think outside the box" to write better code, to create/describe better models of the real world, etc. starting with people that you would swear didn't have a creative bone in their body and watching them improve dramatically.
\* (I know I kind of did argue that, but since you're asking outright, this is what I actually believe.)
> We also ranked their ideas for originality: Common uses received lower scores (using a sock to warm your feet), while uncommon uses received higher scores (using a sock as a water filtration system).
> Overall, people with stronger connections came up with better ideas.
The only objective measure used here is the originality rank. Just because an idea is "original" doesn't mean it is "creative". At least not in a useful way. What if I suggested using a sock to wash your car? Probably an "original" idea. So maybe they ranked it as less creative, even though it is original?
Of course this is just a contrived example, but it seems to me like this is an area that could introduce bias pretty easily.
Creativity requires both imagination and judgement -- for each idea you conceive, you must also judge its practical utility to serve some known purpose. Or imagine some unknown purpose that it also might serve...
"In shoe world, all hats look just like shoes, but no one wears shoes on their feet. As such, nobody ever invented a sock, nor can they imagine any use for it. After all, why would you put a sock on your head?"
Unfurl the sock and make a "blind man trail" as a party game. Burn the [cotton] sock and use as char-cloth. Cut up the sock and use as fuel in a tiny model steam-engine.
The judgement comes in with craft, or engineering IMO and isn't a facet of creativity per se. Like, burning the sock will create little heat and lots of fumes, etc.; the idea needed creativity. What we mustn't assume is that creation (of goods, craft items, products, whatever) requires _only_ creativity.
Anything is a _____, if you're brave enough.
If you think about it, the hard part is coming up with a useful purpose that can only be fulfilled by one kind of object. What useful purpose can only be accomplished by use of a sock? Not even "keeping a foot warm and dry while inside a shoe or boot" works there.
It tends to become a touchy subject when you suggest that brain functionality differs between people but we seem to blindly accept that some people make better athletes than others.
It is particularly hard because you can't simply look at somebody and make any sort of judgement about ones mental abilities and there sometimes is no rhyme or reason why one person is more creative, or smarter than the other.
For me, I am a strong believer that brain functions are much like those of our physical counterparts. While the majority of people can all train the body up to run 1, 5, or 10 miles or more some people will simply have to exert less effort and be able to run further or faster than others. The same goes for brain functions. We can all be "good" in math, science, reading excreta... But only a subset of us will be experts in those subjects or even all of those subjects.
I think there is a lot to be studied how how early brain development can push the boundaries for the given set of hardware you are born with. But at some point I think you are mostly locked into what you have.
This is a hard topic to even begin to study. Because while two people may be able to preform the same mental functions we don't have a good way of judging amount of effort, and prep time required. For example, somebody who is just introduced to a new consept and can preformed the mental functions within minutes of introduction vs somebody who can preform the same mental functions but required 2 years of practice. The two people have very different cognitive capabilities, and you could argue one is smarter than the other.
As for the notion that we are not all the same. Please don't take that as we should be treating each other different based off skills. I think with regards of us all being human we all deserve the same level of respect and opportunity in life. My interest in this subject is based on the notion that we could have happier lives if this sort of subject was less taboo and we could explore making life decisions based off our actual aptitude. I would much rather work with people, and do a job that I found "easier" every day than a job that I could do that I found "hard". While that is a very black and white statement that is not to mean that I don't want a challenge, but it does mean that I don't want to constantly be struggling.
I see this in the world already. Where people take jobs they hate, because their aptitude is simply low for that line of work. Where everything is constantly a uphill battle. I can't help to wonder how much better their life would be had they picked a different job where the work came more easy and maybe even considered fun to them. I was lucky to find a job where there is just enough hard stuff to keep me busy, but the bulk of the work I find easy. I think a lot of people who found their way into software experience this. Meanwhile I have friends who can't wait till the work day is over and generally hate their job and complain about how hard it is.
So simply put, some people are more creative, or smart or any other attribute because we are all different, and had different experiences during critical brain development times in life. I think the expectation that everybody would be the same -- or even have the same aptitude on any given mental exercise would be weird -- unless we were all clones.
Consider applying the same to creative effort. Yes, your absolute best effort may beat my absolute best, but we live in a world where most people are not even trying.
You might end up with something like (effort * raw_aptitude) = actual_aptitude for a given function, and there will be crossovers where where raw_aptitude is less in one person but their effort is more. And again one could arguably assign one being better than the other.
When we talk about these sorts of things there are not many "gotchas" because you can't use one brain function to discount the other brain function as they really work together. So I really don't feel like somebodies lack of effort negates anything I said in the original post, as it is just another brain function.
This does bring up a interesting crossover where mental faculties does play a role in physical performance. There was a study that showed that "smart" people made poor solders. The notion was that the smarter person was able to think further in the future about how their actions, or orders may play out. It was their ability to ponder the possibilities that ultimately caused them to shut down. On the flip side somebody who did not think as far into the future, or was not keen to pondering on future possibilities executed orders without hesitation -- making them a better solder. I don't know if I agree with this study, or their notion of smart, as "smart" can be subjective and is not really well defined. But it is fun to think about and wonder how these things do play a role in every day life.
What is your take on each individual has his or her own strong quality which is different from others ?
Like some may good at managing people, some good at analysis
You have to create in order to be creative. You have to practice creativity in order to be good at it. You can't just read a book, go to a seminar, or wear funny clothes and expect to suddenly be a "creative genius". It can take years to master.[1]
On the other hand, most children don't have any problem being creative. Somehow by the time we become adults we lose that, and then think we're permanently incapable.
[1] - One of my favorite videos[2] shows the artistic progression of Jonathan Hardesty. In his early work few would detect any hint of "talent", and yet after nine years of hard work, his skill rises to a truly impressive level -- at which point, if one had only seen the end result, a lot of people would call him "talented". But as you can see in the video, he was clearly not born with this "talent". He earned it. That's what it takes.
[2] - https://vimeo.com/29510470
Adults think that they should be capable simply because one tends to get better at things as an adult. The weight of expectation makes them often worse.
My field is pottery, some adults think they can just throw a vase on their first go, kids just enjoy the experience (on the whole) and don't expect to be good at it.
Kids, once they've learnt some fine motor control, don't make kid-pictures because they're kids, they do it because they haven't practiced. Adults try, and their observation can get them a little further, but they still make the same sort of pictures and are embarrassed because it's "childish".
I recently started a sports class where I'm ranked along with 7 & 8 yo kids, an interesting and humbling experience.
Kids generally get more slack for not being good at things, as well, whereas with adults, since there are many adults who've done X since they were young, being an adult who just started X makes you extra bad and sometimes a minority.
I have gotten the "why are you so bad at this?" reaction from people before when doing new things. Especially with anything physical, I improve rather slowly.
If they're young enough, they don't even have an opinion on what "good" is (or what art is, for that matter). They just do, and are happy doing it. Judgement, of their own and others' work comes later. That may be when their inhibition starts.
I don't think this is true. If they were uninterested, they would simply say so, rather than making a series of excuses. What seems more likely to me is that they are (on a deep level) scared of creating.
Creativity of any sort requires you to project your personality and be vulnerable in a way that people don't normally do. This can be pretty scary when most actions people do don't open themselves up to possibly being criticized on such a personal level. I think when people aren't creative it's not that they don't care, but rather that the fear of being judged (whether conscious or unconscious) is too strong to overcome. This is why people "don't have any creative ideas" - it's not that they don't have ANY, but instead that they reject the ideas that they do have because they think they are not good enough.
This is also the basis of writers block.
I think they make those excuses because they don't want to cause offense by saying they aren't interested in what I'm interested in (and even consider to be part of my identity).
I do agree that fear could motivate their aversion, though. But if the fear is there, I don't think it's usually rises to their consciousness or at least is something they could readily admit -- as if it was, they could simply say they're afraid, couldn't they?
Maybe the trick to being "creative" is finding a suitable medium for innovation, which may not be one that's typically considered to be "art" -- like software design, organizing your workshop, or building a better mousetrap.
Haha, not my experience with people. The excuses people say are rarely the truth. People speak in euphemisms for a variety of reasons, and you've got to divine the truth from between the lines.
Q: "Wanna go to a movie friday?"
A: "Can't, I'm washing my hair that night!"
What she really meant:
"Drop dead, Walter!"
That's a bit of a bait and switch, to say, why not try this simple thing just for fun, and then say all it takes is a lot of practice and hard work. Not only do you have to make a long-term commitment that this is going to be one of the few things in your life that you invest a lot of time and energy in, you also have to either enjoy being bad at it (which is even harder as an adult than it is when you're a kid) or stick with it through a lot of thankless effort.
You don't have to enjoy being bad, you just have to value the process of getting good more than the pain of being bad.
These aren't mutually exclusive. You could have fun doing something and yet still take a lot of time and effort to master it.
It's like playing the violin -- something that most people understand takes years and years of effort to master. Most people wouldn't expect to pick up a violin and instantly be able to come out with a virtuoso performance. But for other arts it seems that that's exactly the expectation that they have. If their objection to a suggestion to try drawing is to say, "Oh, no, I'm no good at drawing" my reply would be: "Well, yeah, that's because you haven't practiced drawing. Why would you even expect to be good at drawing when you just start?"
On the other hand, just because you can't yet get the ultimate results you're after when you start doesn't mean you can't have fun trying. There's some visceral enjoyment that can come from handling art materials like charcoal, paints, or clay and using them to create and express yourself -- an enjoyment that non-artists rarely have any idea is there, and will continue to be oblivious to as long as they refuse to try.
The same goes for musical instruments. You can have fun just playing around with them, even if you don't know what you're doing and have no training whatsoever.
When I encourage non-artists and non-musicians to give making art or music a try, I'm not trying to get them to immediately invest 10,000 hours of grueling practice nor to paint the Mona Lisa for me. I'm encouraging them to just try for five minutes, ten minutes, half an hour... just to maybe experience some of the joy that could be there for them.
If you have really never sat down for several hours and worked on a drawing, you immediately have several things going against you:
1. You know you won't make something particularly good the first time. Why spend several hours of concerted effort on something that won't immediately pay off?
2. You aren't an "artist". We tend to categorize people by their current skillset, and constrain ourselves to the skillsets we are comfortable with. I don't know of any good ways to teach the brain around this without simply "pushing through" it.
3. Your goal is to do it "right", but you are going to do it wrong. Thousands of times. Every stroke of a pencil is a wrong stroke. The instinct is to immediately erase.
The beauty of painting is that you can't erase. This is why I would recommend a person begin with painting rather than drawing, so that every action is additive.
4. You have to start with purpose. The purpose has to be good enough to enthrall you for several hours. If you start painting something that you don't find interesting, you know at some point, you will get bored, and you will never finish, so why not stop now?
This goes for anything creative. How can you learn to write software without software to write? How can you perform music without music to perform? How can you build something without something to build? Creation needs purpose, if nothing else.
> On the other hand, most children don't have any problem being creative. Somehow by the time we become adults we lose that, and then think we're permanently incapable.
This is one of the most important barriers for us to overcome.
We need to practice doing things wrong, and creating garbage. Unfortunately, we constantly reiterate the claim that garbage is bad, and that we should do everything perfect.
Linus Pauling said that when he is asked how he comes up with so many great ideas, he says he just comes up with a lot of ideas and then throws away the bad ones.
People are discouraged when they sit down to a blank sheet of paper and their first few efforts seem like crap.
The truth is that many "creative" people started younger, when their first crappy efforts weren't so stinging.
You can start something new when you are older. But you have to tolerate your errors, and you have to bother to identify your problems and fix them.
Also: you don't have to be Mozart to be creative. Garden-variety creativity is pretty much available to most people who are willing to brave the slog and self-embarrassment.
Maybe there is a high correlation between creativity and irresponsibility or desperation :)
As this is Hacker News and full of curious people, I can tell you that it doesn't work very well. The dirty water just ends up on the other side, minus large pieces of detritus.
Maybe the OP psychologists needed to motivate their subjects better. Maybe exceeding a sufficient threshold of desire is essential in order for someone to "get creative"?
Well, if you stretch the definition of "creative genius" to include a master of several artistic disciplines who created or popularised entire art movements and influenced artists the world over for more than a hundred years with an entrepreneur who sold lots of electronic devices, then honestly, I have no idea what your experiments are even meant to measure, anymore.
It’s interesting to me some (based on comments here and elsewhere) many would be opposed to personal experiments under professional medical care.
Even for a very skeptical person (as I would self identify), consider the countless profound experiences recounted, even by people who might be considered equally skeptical.
Either these experiences are valid, with respect to enabling some sort of beneficial expansion of brain activity, or they are not.
If it is valid, how could such a rare and potentially transformative opportunity be ignored? If it’s not valid, risks seem negligible under professional supervision, and you still might experience a once in a lifetime fantastic journey.
It’s so easy for us to grok what, say a blind from birth person can’t experience through words alone, yet somehow difficult to imagine ourselves having a similarly untapped perspective, through which difficult to imagine insights might be possible.
Hopefully it won’t take too many years for the data to yield an answer. Maybe Steve Jobs and others chose not to wait based on similar cost/benefit analysis.
https://patch.com/california/santacruz/can-psychedelic-drugs...
[0] http://mentalfloss.com/article/84560/are-lefties-really-more...
"Mine is being creative."
https://youtu.be/9C_HReR_McQ
Apologies, had to post that.
Neural networks, for instance, are extremely un-creative. They just go straight for their goal, no deviating (the assumption being that any search space is entirely flat if it just has enough dimensions, and clearly to some extent that's true). They will leave very large swaths of the solution space entirely unexplored. But when they work, you can find the method fast and it will yield decent results. Being uncreative, ironically, makes them adapt very quickly.
Genetic algorithms, on the other hand, are the most creative algorithms we have, and of course they are famous for finding ridiculously optimized results, but taking a very long time to do so. Genetic algorithm results are always fun. Genetic algorithms always write a program. And while only simple solutions can be understood by humans, but they're ridiculously optimized. Every instruction does 5-10 different things that affect the end result and somehow those results come together at exactly the right time to work.
People, and especially the HR/coaching industry, seem to deny this tradeoff, but it's inevitable. If a person is creative, they'll be slow and unreliable to produce results, but those results will be a lot better (assuming, of course, there are any). A very uncreative person can produce results quickly and reliably, but they're "bad", in a sense: one might say they're just trivial re-hashes of solutions seen before.
But I wish I had a dollar for every time a high-level manager has come to me with a variation of the following statement : "Ok, let's plan out how we can creatively solve this problem". If a plan is made, of course, in the best case it cuts down on the creativity, in the worst case prevents it entirely.
In my experience most people are entirely capable of being very creative or almost robot-like predictable. It's the environment that forces one over the other (although it may just be their perception of their environment rather than the actual demands placed on them).