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Comment by ilkhd2 | Hacker News Reader

Creativity does not appear from nowhere. Of course, it is great to foster it, yet, with loss of industrial knowledge, less and less is left to be taught to people. I do not buy fairy tales that there is abstract creativity you can teach people - there is engineering, artistic, scientific "creativities". One of important sources of creativity come from successful examples of its implementation by other people, and the more industrial you are the more way to use your creativity and get feedback from real, tangible, physical world.

And here is my answer - you want be more creative in engineering creativity increase you industry output.

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That doesn't make any sense.

1. The article described specific research into creativity that does suggest that it can be taught, but you're completely ignoring the content of the article.

2. We live in a global economy now. A firm in the U.S. can design a product which is manufactured in another country. This would negatively affect U.S. manufacturing output, but would not have any impact on "creativity" as you describe it.

3. I have to disagree with pretty much every single statement you're making here. Creativity can be spontaneous -- any bored kid in a school class with a pencil and a paper will show you that. Loss of industrial knowledge does not mean there is "less and less left to be taught to people" -- that's completely uncorrelated, because industrial knowledge isn't the only form of knowledge available to a modern society. Whether or not you "buy" the "fairy tales", the interesting parts of this article do suggest that abstract creativity can be taught, and those suggestions are based on quite a lot of research -- versus your simple assertion that it's not true because it doesn't fit into your industrial-complex worldview.

And so on. You're pushing some kind of agenda and it's not even self-consistent.

> We live in a global economy now. A firm in the U.S. can design a product which is manufactured in another country. This would negatively affect U.S. manufacturing output, but would not have any impact on "creativity" as you describe it.

It can as long as there still remains workforce skilled in details of manufacturing and engineering. They don't disappear overnight. Remember, the USA had decades of industrial development and superiority to the rest of the world.

You'll see less and less of that kind of creativity, the more your country transforms into service economy where people only can cut hair to each other.

Actually, the US still leads the world in manufacturing output (for the moment...projections seem to suggest China will take first next year -- http://www.chinaeconomicreview.com/dailybriefing/2010_06_21/... ) But even a close second is still a long way from what the popular myth that "we don't make anything here anymore" would suggest.

You can look at several additional metrics: - Industrial output per capity - Germany waaay in front of USA. - Amount of cars produced per capita - Japan and Germany way in front of USA. - Electronics industry is still doing very good however.

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