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In my biology class, we used to have a quiz on whether students could name five organisms as different from each other as possible. (Feel free to try this yourself before reading further.)

Some students would name all sorts of exotic and obscure animals -- axolotl, vampire squid -- but these would be scored poorly. All animals are actually pretty close, no matter how "obscure." The best score would simply pick organisms from different kingdoms: Dog, maple, portobello mushroom, amoeba, e. coli.

I tried this tactic in the above test, picking common words as categorically distinct as possible (dog, thought, kindness, Tuesday, zero), and received a very low score.

It seems that this system prefers the "axolotl, vampire squid..." version of distinctness instead.

One justification for this might be that the greater the number of words in your vocabulary, the more "colors" with which you can paint your linguistic constructs. More complex words can have a subtlety of meaning that distinguishes them from one another, so you can "pack" your sentences with more meaning. The more nuance in a word, the more potential cognitive distance between it and another word.

  E.g.
  He had a green car.
  versus
  He leased an olive drab Jeep.

Surely a distinguished artist could produce a masterpiece with three crayons, but most would not choose to.

> The more nuance in a word, the more potential cognitive distance between it and another word.

I don't see that. What is the cognitive distance between a more common color and a more obscure color? They're both colors. In your example, describing the color as olive instead of just green is certainly more specific, and maybe more accurate, but how is it more creative? If anything, it is less creative because it's more analytical and merely descriptive.

For instance, saying something is '.01 centimeters' long is not more creative than saying something is 'small' or saying that something is '.1 centimeters', it's just more precise.

If you're writing a story and trying to flesh out a character, someone who leases an olive drab Jeep is likely (a) someone who has money and (b) someone who likes to go off-roading, or at least give the appearance of being rough-and-tumble. Olive drab is also a color commonly associated with military usage, so that plays into it.

On the other hand, you could have a character who owns a lime Honda Insight. That is an old, unstylish hybrid, so that character is likely frugal, square, and perhaps more environmentally conscious.

And yet both characters could be said to have a green car. But the more detailed word choices can help give the story more life.

Is exposition-by-possessions really that powerful though? I would not infer all of the military off-roading stuff from a car, even if it was a camouflage painted Humvee.

I'd argue the creative writer would put this person in a situation where they make choices in a way that reveals their affluence and fondness of terrain driving.

Unless maybe this part of their personality is a shallow veneer and not really who they are at their core, in which case I guess possessions might work because it's also not as critical that the reader understand it.

> And yet both characters could be said to have a green car. But the more detailed word choices can help give the story more life.

Given that 'green' encompasses _all_ of the scenarios you describe, whereas olive/lime narrows the scenario, that would then seemingly be an argument that more specific words actually inhibit creativity by limiting the potential scenarios you can imagine with just a 'green' car.

I believe one of the ideas behind the evaluation is being creative enough to be able to imagine the scenario with those details, and then being able to select the words that best fit the scenario you've created. If you know words that encompass more disparate concepts, then the "cognitive distance" between them is greater. If you haven't told us which shade of green the car is, how do we know that you're not imagining everything to be the same shade?

If you're the most creative person in the world, but are incapable of expressing yourself, are you actually creative? It could be the same logic as "I've never played this game, therefore I have never lost, therefore I am the best in the world "

All this being said, I'm not trying to necessarily defend the usefulness of this survey. By their nature, none of these tests for "creativity", "intelligence", or "personality" will ever be able to perfectly capture or categorize or numerically label what is at heart a subjective quality.

> inhibit creativity by limiting the potential scenarios

Constraints are a typical tool for augmenting creativity, by restricting the easy path to a solution.

That reminds me of this research:

https://www.math3ma.com/blog/language-statistics-category-th...

> I don't understand how knowledge of a broad amount of words maps to creativity?

It's not exactly, but from first principles, using it as a proxy does make some sense.

A robust finding in the educational literature is that creativity is generally limited by how many things you know that are relevant to the topic at hand e.g. people who've never programmed before are not actually good at writing creative programs (there's a subtle distinction here where the end goal of the program may be creative, but how they go about getting there is unlikely to be creative).

So, very roughly, if you consider someone knowing more words as a proxy for them knowing both more concepts and having more connections between those concepts, you would expect them to have more creative output on topics of general interest (on average).

source: former educator

Using it as a proxy would make more sense if the instructions said to try to choose the most obscure words you know.

> It's not exactly, but from first principles, using it as a proxy does make some sense.

How so? If I asked you to take a test in Mandarin Chinese, I would assume you would know less words, but wouldn't you be just as creative in your mind?

(I admittedly did not take the test.)

I got 82 using rather simple vocabulary (cat, milk, office plant, chess, rock, range).

Those aren’t random and I have connection in my mind between them but I did make a “stretch” to make them different but not a really huge effort (like 3 seconds max). E.g. plant is a well plant but also can mean putting something in place, and that could be game piece and chess is a game where game pieces are used etc.

This can be absolutely gamed and that’s why I believe authors want test taker to first take it and only later read about them.

FWIW, I tried a representative word from each category in the Dewey Decimal System and got a significantly below average score. I feel like that should be at least an average spread for concepts, so I agree that it's probably biased toward more obscure words. The restriction on "technical" terms (What even is that?) probably comes from the people running it realizing it's easy to game if you use high-brow words.

I noticed as you go down the list that thinking about divergent terms gets harder because of the suggestive power of the previous items. I suspect it's measure the ability to "think outside the box", or the ability to ignore constraints to find solutions. Interesting, but as it says it's a limited definition of creativity.

Also to get a good score you need to think about multiple meanings of each word - for instance I entered gas and can as separate words, however I was thinking of gas (as in fart gas) and can (as in can of beans) and that was chosen as an example of being close (because a gas can is a petrol container).

But during the test I realised this about half way through and was then checking for double-meanings. I almost wrote pot to describe marajuana for instance, then decided to go for Satvia because i thought pot would cross with Flower.

Having said all this, I did score very well anyway, although I do improv and listing unassociated words or “a to c” connections is a pretty common excercise.

I was in the top 2.1% and I used all non-technical words. The most obscure words I used were trimmed off (it only uses 7) and the ones it counted seemed to be words I expect all people of average intelligence to know.

It honestly seems like a rather poorly executed test. Valid nouns that are too obscure or "technical" to be in the word list get dropped but the person I know that got the highest score (95.07 raw score, 99.4 percentile) used "titties" (not even a real word) and at least two of the other words he used weren't even nouns (nouns are stated as a requirement).

With 2) I got 91.28 with happiness, basement, electron, cricket, morphine, artichoke, philosophy. Nothing notably advanced here. (My last 3, which weren't included were: pop [like soda pop], disecretion, moon).

My guess: High vocabulary is correlated with high Openness to Experience (a personality trait in the 5-factor model). Openness in turn correlates with creativity.

I will note that Openness to Experience can be broken down into two aspects: Intellect* and simple Openness. The former is more closely correlated with vocabulary, whereas the latter is more associated with creativity. Thus I also have some doubts about the quality of this test.

*Intellect here does not mean intelligence (though there is a modest correlation). In this case it just means a preference for intellectual activity.

Creativity and openness also correlate with lateral thinking, which is the tendency to quickly think of lots of concepts with low relatedness. Lateral thinking naturally correlates with facility in rapidly thinking of words with low relatedness. So if you can quickly think of a lot of words with low relatedness, that serves as a loose measure of openness and creativity.

> I don't understand how knowledge of a broad amount of words maps to creativity?

I can see how it maps to complexity, but not creativity. Perhaps, I am not creative enough to think of a way to piece the two concepts together.

I would like to see how this test would map to languages with more/less distinct nouns than English. Are native speakers of said languages less creative? I doubt it.

I found myself started trying to use obscure words from different time periods as a way of "randomizing" my thoughts before I knew what the test was measuring. It seems like it could be a good technique, but implies nothing about your real creativity.

Creativity isn't necessarily useful or profound. Children are naturally quite creative, and we find their paintings to be pleasantly unique for example. The reason little kids don't have their creative works in the Louvre is that creativity is not significant in itself.

I didn't say anything about creativity being useful or profound. My point was that neither is it measured by vocabulary, which this seems to be testing.

> used decidedly technical terms like "codec", despite clear instructions not to use technical jargon

Words that are too technical are invalid and not used. Either “codec” is not too technical or it was not used in the score calculation.

creativity I think is fundamentally synthesis. a large, varied, vocabulary of concepts is important for this, but I think more important is a high drive for novelty. such a drive probably leads to larger 'vocabularies.'

I got 98.63% using what I think were pretty fair words:

Witchcraft Legumes Pagers Uranium Regret Showers Archaeology