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Comment by gwern | Hacker News Reader

> It’s not just about learning new facts, of course — it’s about asking questions. Why was a British mystic in Mexico City? How did Spanish-language television evolve in the U.S.? What led someone to invent PLAX or build search tools for financial news decades before Google? Even if you don’t find all the answers, just posing the questions helps you flex the creative muscle that thrives on curiosity and connection.

Maybe wait until you have at least 1 anecdote, anywhere in the history of the world, of major creativity from reading an obituary, before recommending it?

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Goddang, it’s not like they’re giving medical advice or anything, it’s simply about being exposed to novel concepts and ideas, which fosters creativity. You don’t really need “evidence” for this, but even if somehow it’s wrong and reading obituaries either somehow does not increase or decreases creativity, is not like there’s harm in saying “Hey, try reading some obituaries, you might learn some interesting stuff”

But that's not what they're saying. They're claiming it's a creativity hack, not that you might learn some interesting stuff. That's the entire thesis of the post... which isn't backed up at all.

Does there exist anything related to creativity that is backed up with clear data? This article is as convincing as anything else I’ve ever read about increasing creativity.

> Complex training courses, meditation and cultural exposure were most effective (gs = 0.66), while the use of cognitive manipulation drugs was least and also non-effective, g = 0.10. The type of training material was also important. For instance, figural methods were more effective in enhancing creativity, and enhancing converging thinking was more effective than enhancing divergent thinking.

from https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/items/a8357c0b-1e41-4eff-8ad1-fe3b...

reading the obits might fall under "cultural exposure".

There's lots of legitimate research related to creativity which could be discussed: the existence of the 'incubation effect' and sleep effects, the inefficacy of the popular forms of 'brainstorming' compared to the more painful forms that work*, the 'near adjacent', the 'equal-odds rule', the benefits of cognitive/ideological diversity (and lack of benefits of certain other kinds of diversity), the correlation with intelligence and personality traits like Openness...

As opposed to OP. Which adduces so little evidence for the claim about reading obituaries that a rando like me could actually write a more persuasive argument for the benefits of reading obituaries (because I at least wrote one thing tenuously inspired by reading an obituary the other month: https://gwern.net/traffic-lights ).

Even the most shameless periodical usually tries for at least 3 anecdotes, no matter how dubious and strained, before declaring it the hot new trend or It Is Known fact.

* One of Sawyer's research topics, as it happens.

What was the groundbreaking creative that came out of this?

None. But then, that's still more than OP was able to adduce, as they provided no examples at all, neither groundbreaking nor creative. Which is my point: the bar of 'an anecdote' is so very low. You can provide a anecdote for the creative value of smelling rotten apples in a drawer (Schiller); you can provide an anecdote for the creative value of drinking 50 coffees a day (Balzac); you can provide an anecdote for countless crazy things people have done! But you can't provide an anecdote about reading obituaries?

> the inefficacy of the popular forms of 'brainstorming' compared to the more painful forms that work

Interesting, what's your recommended resource for learning more about this?

I don't know if I'd recommend it, but checking, Sawyer's _Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration_ book hits most of the points I'd cite about brainstorming in its chapter, so you could always start there.

Thanks!

Interesting article, thanks. As a frequent city walker and cyclist, I also spend a lot of time thinking about why drivers run reds. It's rarely as simple as "drivers are too aggressive" or "drivers aren't paying attention", the real cause is often more complicated.

I don't know if the concept of "point of no return" is really such an obscure thing. It was part of my standard Illinois drivers education in the mid-00s. Every drive I did with the instructor he'd ask me to call it out when we approached a signal.

I don't think anyone is asking for a double-blind study conducted by accredited scientists from multiple leading institutions on a sample of a quarter-million people across decades getting published on the front page of Science here.

We, since I will gladly agree with the criticism and add myself to that side, are asking for one example of the supposedly creativity-inducing action to have even perhaps tangentially produced some sort of creative insight.

As an example I would submit that the simple advice of "take a walk/shower" has much better attestation for prompting creativity than "read the obituaries". It hardly seems like a stretch to ask the author to provide even a single example of this achieving something.

It depends on how you define creativity probably, but a few scientific examples:

1. "Functional fixedness" was explored in a classic Candle Problem[1] found that high drive (ie rewards on a deadline) led to fewer subjects solving the problem.

2. Quality versus quantity. Sadly I can't find the TED talk (likely a decade ago?) that I saw about this but the basic idea: give subjects some kind of design problem (paper airplanes, egg drop, bridge building) and a metric measure them by. Then split them into two groups; one you measure on how many they build and the other on how well their final product is. I think there may have been some intermediate evaluation step as well, wish I could find the original research. Paradoxically, the quantity group wins on quality scores. Lesson being not to focus on perfecting your first solution.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candle_problem

I invent new things on a weekly basis for years on end to make a living on Patreon, and literally have to unfailingly hack creativity or starve. (my choices of working in open source leave me no alternative as I don't get persistent revenue streams beyond what I'm able to continue to create.)

Everything the author said about creativity checked out from my experience, except that I'm not working in such a generalist field that obituaries light up relevant 'unrelated associations' for me. However, it seems completely plausible from my perspective.

Completely agreed. It's just irresponsibly bad writing to claim "this can boost your creativity!" without even a single example of how it has boosted yours or someone else's. I don't need a scientific study, but surely you can give at least a single anecdotal example? Because if you can't, you honestly shouldn't be writing this in the first place.

If it helps them, that seems sufficient reason to share what works for them. I'd say that a more kind critique would be that their advice could be expanded to: "Read anything" in order to get creativity going. But gatekeeping advice unless they can cite "major creativity" that came from it seems harsh.

When they claim up front that it's a "creativity hack", yes I expect would expect them to back it up. That's not gatekeeping or harsh, it's literally the one job of an article to back up its claim.

Huh?

Obits are mini bios, but better than living bios, and more accessible than bestselling bios that make you think you have to be Rockefeller or Lincoln

I enjoy reading obituaries, for a number of reasons. (Mostly in the NYT, but also, of course, the famous Economist obits.) But I rarely have ever gotten any creative ideas from them, and I do not recall hearing about anyone else doing so either.

And I object in principle to telling silly stories about desirable activities to try to justify them. This is how we get bad ideas like 'Mozart for babies' or 'we should make kids play chess because it correlates with being smarter'. Chess should be played for its intrinsic value, because if it can only be justified by its instrumental value in raising IQ or grades, the case for that was weak, much weaker than its proponents were willing to admit, and has since turned out to be false - but along the way, wasted a lot of time and money and made a lot of kids miserable playing a game they didn't like, and the proponents just made the world a worse place by wasting all those resources, filling the literature with useless analyses and research on chess correlates, and decreasing public trust in science.

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