Lecture on Creativity (1991) | Hacker News Reader

Lecture on Creativity (1991)

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154 pointsdrawkbox29 comments

Recently I've been reading "Grammar of Graphics" which changed my perception of creativity, aesthetics and mathematics and their relationships. Fundamentally, the book provides all the diverse tools to give you confidence that your graphics are mathematically sound and visually pleasing. After reading this, Tufte just doesn't cut it anymore. It's such a weird book because it talks about topics as disparate Bayesian rule, OOP, color theory, SQL, chaotic models of time (lolwut), style-sheet language design and a bjillion other topics but always somehow all of these are very relevant. It's like if Bret Victor was a book, a tour de force of polymathical insanity.

The book is kinda expensive https://smile.amazon.com/Grammar-Graphics-Statistics-Computi... but that's because it is in full color and it has some of the nicest looking and most instructive graphics I've ever seen even for things that I understand, such as Central Limit Theorem. It makes sense the the best graphics would be in the book written by the guy who wrote a book on how to do visualizations mathematically.

The book is also interesting if you are doing any sort of UI interfaces, because UI interfaces are definitely just a subset of graphical visualizations.

This lecture, which I think I watched as a video on YouTube, was on my mind along with Hammock Driven Development (mentioned in another comment) while I was reading Thinking Fast and Slow. It fits very well with the System 1/System 2 thinking, where the "open" mode is related to allowing the associative machinery to go about its business, chasing strange combinations and associations without the more analytical thinking interfering too much, and then the "closed" mode is a switch, where you allow the more logical system to take hold, really think about what you've come up with and polish (or discard) it.

Small world. 30 minutes ago I paused Kahnemann's "Thinking Fast And Slow" Google Talk, browsed HN, and this article caught my eye.

I have loved this talk for some time and have forced everyone at my company to watch the video.

I found a lot of parallels with this "Hammock Driven Development" talk by Rich Hickey:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc

They both seem to suggest that you have to put in the effort, do the hard work and dig into the problem deeply. But then when you hit a wall, you should take a break. Relax. Play. Sleep. It is often during this "open" minded stage when the solution comes.

Also, it's the time when you're not visibly "productive".

This is why I feel business struggles with people (who are not traditional artists) needing time to think. Great leaps need a lot of space

s/struggles with/under-appreciates/

s/struggles with/gives hard time to/

s/^.+struggles with.+$/Business has no idea how creativity works/

Tangent. Is creativity rated highly enough in business? I specialise in creative problem solving (not always with tech). Solutions that have eluded many others, often seem obvious to me. Except after they are solved everyone else thinks the solution was obvious too! It is kind of valued, but when it comes to pay review its always...if you had x qualification and other people in the market. Except other people don't get my results!

On the other hand it is draining, keeps me up at night etc. Job interviews never ask 'how creative are you at solving problems'? Are there employers who want this?

Employers don't value problems solved creatively. They value problems solved quickly and reliably. Creativity often helps it.

I'm talking about the problems that a long running company fails to solve for years or decades. The ones that it has become the norm to think of as insoluble. Especially areas where you have been asked to solve a symptom, and instead you solve the cause.

Yes regular stuff gets solved quickly and reliably.

When you solve those kinds of problems, you have a new business, or maybe a new industry. You probably don't have a quick route to CEO of the fossilized company. That involves daggers in the back of your colleagues.

Design / creativity is unfortunately not valued, but it is a value add. It is a reason to choose between you and the other guy, but not to pay you more.

No one cares about the money spent or the money saved in business.. just on the projections. Think about it like a classical tragedy. For narrative impact you need to flag the event well before it happens. Maybe we need to make creativity look hard, stretch it out, make it play.

Just reading the HN submission on Gatto.. "He also learned to make hard tricks look hard, to pantomime the exertion and self-doubt of a man working at the edge of his ability even though his ability stretched on and on." Though, of course, Gatto quit..

Or maybe be an asshole about it like Hugh Laurie in 'House'! Make everybody else suffer too

The nail that sticks out gets hammered back down. If you take a creative risk, and it turns out you were wrong, you'll be punished for it. If you use a conventional approach, and it turns out you were wrong it's not your fault, you were just doing things the way they've always been done.

Makes me wonder if I would be better in my own business..

Makes me wonder the same thing for years now and I believe it's about damn time I finally get to it.

Even if it takes another batch of several years down the line, it's definitely gonna be a time better spent -- as opposed to always trying to educate colleagues and bosses on the added business value of giving people space and time to be creative.

I am at a point where I finally concluded I am wasting my time, that people by default have zero interest in evolving their views -- or simply see things through your eyes, even for a minute. And I see no real profit for me being able to do that for them.

So yeah, being your own boss looks to be the best course, with all the hardships, uncertainty and gray hair that comes with it.

No because it's difficult to measure, the current cult of Taylorism doesn't value anything it can't measure. I suspect this is changing but we have a huge distance to go.

Business values tasks being done on schedule and with minimum friction and noise. I fought the good fight of trying to educate people on the added value of creativity. The most positive response I've ever received was "Look, I am aware that you're correct. But your approach doesn't produce positive and quick results 100% of the time, while everybody else somehow manages to do it" -- and the arguments for technical debt go down the drain in seconds.

Everybody wants to please their direct supervisor now -- and to hell with everything else.

As I mentioned in another comment few levels below your comment (but inside it), the people like us who appreciate creativity are probably ill-suited for employees and have to start chasing own business, as nightmarishly hard that is 99% of the time.

The idea of closed vs. open reminded me of a discussion I had once with a psychologist about how he worked with his clients. He said that the first thing he worked with them on was a shift from what he called an "inhibitory" mode to an "excitatory" one.

He defined these states as being the primary way in which a person filters perception, with the inhibitory mode being "filtering to perceive what is negative and not possible", and excitatory being "filtering to perceive what is positive and possible". The way that he assessed what the client perceived was to simply listen to how they expressed themselves and what aspects they emphasised when talking.

This wasn't just another version of, "hey, lighten up, look on the bright side", as I understood it. He'd actively listen for when they would express something as exciting or a positive possibility. Or fish for it by asking them to relate a positive experience, or something like that. Then he'd have them reinforce it by asking questions and putting attention back on the thing that triggered the shift in perception. He'd put a lot of effort into trying to gently get them to spend more time in this mode, if only for a few seconds at a time initially.

He considered helping his clients to an excitatory mode of operation to be a prerequisite for him to be able to help improve their mental well-being ("do therapy") with any effectiveness at all.

That person was a hero then. I really hope he/she is successful to this day! Getting people to bring their positive thinking on the surface is as hard as it's very rewarding.

My theory about innovation (and I think is related to creativity) is that humans are inherently very innovative. I think that is why we have been so successful as a species. But there are many organizations and constructs in society that teaches people to comport in a way that squelches creativity. Whether it is school, work, the military, religion societal norms and so on. Wherever you turn there is pressure to conform. To be more creative I think you have to consciously work on unlearning the conformist thinking.

I agree and I have definitely found this to be the case in my life. I've spent no small amount of years learning to conform and to do my own thing without sticking out.

...Turns out I learned it way too well. I now have to actively get rid of this way of thinking in order to progress in my life and move to another stage -- since my current job/payment situation isnt' satisfactory to me, and I see no way to dramatically improve it by continuing to do [almost] the same as before only slightly better.

I might still be proven wrong, of course -- what I said just above might very well turn out to be the case even though I think it will not be. But at 36 and being strongly unhappy with my professional life, I am starting to look for conclusions which I can act on.

The linked article only provides audio, the video is a bit more engaging https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xPvvPTQaMI

"Now the people I find it hardest to be creative with are people who need all the time to project an image of themselves as decisive." This reasonated with me strongly. I know people like that, I don't like them, I avoid them, they are the reason I am looking for a new job at the moment, lol.

John Cleese talks about "open" and "closed" modes that allow and disallow creativity states.

Now here's the negative thing: Creativity is not a talent. It is not a talent, it is a way of operating.

MacKinnon showed that the most creative had simply acquired a facility for getting themselves into a particular mood -- "a way of operating" -- which allowed their natural creativity to function.

In fact, MacKinnon described this particular facility as an ability to play.

This piece also touches on why the current discourse on AI isn't getting us closer to general AI. Our AI is getting better at solving human defined problems but not getting any better at figuring out which questions are worth asking (aka intuition, knowing when the combination of two seemingly disparate ideas is useful)

on the topic of lectures on creativity Richard Hamming gave a lecture at the naval research facility on creativity [1] (along with other topics, these recordings are often referenced as "Hamming on Hamming" lectures). This is my go to reference when I feel like I'm getting off track.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlTybZvds0U

Chris Crawford's talk about Creativity and Game Design is also interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAX0trP3hIQ

If he's right then to be creative, it would certainly not help to be doing Scrum in an open office plan. I'll have to commandeer empty meeting rooms to really get into the zone.

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