Comment by gwern | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gwern | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

> 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!

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?

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