People Don’t Actually Like Creativity
slate.com
slate.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AU5x1Ea7NjQ
(I posted it to HN almost a year ago, but it got no upvotes then, though I think it is excellent and merits its own discussion so we don't derail this article's comments too much, so here's a repost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6862219)
He gives several pointers on how work environments could foster creativity if they wanted to, but also weighs the merits of both "open" and "closed" thinking. I thought it fascinating, and a good breakdown of "being creative" versus "getting things done", and the environment needed for each.
I definitely prefer written articles to videos, but I do think the video has a lot of merit for anyone interested in this topic. It has a lot more actionable advice than this Slate article.
I enjoyed the talk, but I don't really see how actionable the advice is. Or, rather, I think it's either wrong or what he says is incomplete. As he sets things up creativity is unleashed in sessions where you have "open" mind and you do the more mundane work in sessions with "closed" mind.
This bifurcation, at least as he sets it up with (e.g., "set aside at least 1 1/2 hours for your open mind session"), doesn't really fit with how creativity gets expressed. In many endeavors -- e.g., music, acting, sports -- the opportunity for creativity comes about only because of huge amounts of practice, in which the endeavor is developed to a point where it becomes second nature. Then, when placed in a situation where you have to perform, creativity comes out. I can't see how this fits with the process of switching from open mind to closed mind, as Cleese describes it.
I also have problems when I think of how creativity comes out in process of writing, whether it's writing fiction, non-fiction, or software. This process of getting work done is much more fluid than Cleese describes. People don't brainstorm for ideas for an hour or two, then sit down to do the mundane work. The work gets done in sessions that are better described by the concept of "flow", where if you still want to use Cleese's concepts of "open mind" and "closed mind" then it is best said that you drift frequently perhaps imperceptibly between the two.
Cleese's characterization in the talk is much more like brainstorming, where you just ponder, daydream, think things up, for an hour or two to find a right "answer", then go to work with "closed mind" implementing your answer. That doesn't seem to me to be how creativity happens, at least not for wide variety of different "creative" endeavors. Creativity comes out when you're in the flow, getting work done in single long session that is not characterizable as an "open mind session" or "closed mind session".
Certainly Cleese is more interested in the creativity of ideas, especially writing, but his requirements for creativity (space, time, time, confidence, humor) apply to anything.
Granted, you will need to be proficient enough in the act before you can be creative with it. However, I would think that musicians have their open time, where they explore themes and ideas, just fiddling with chords and seeing where it goes, i.e. improv, versus their closed time, when they find an interesting theme and want to flesh it out even more, i.e. composing.
> The work gets done in sessions that are better described by the concept of "flow", where if you still want to use Cleese's concepts of "open mind" and "closed mind" then it is best said that you drift frequently perhaps imperceptibly between the two.
My personal experience with drifting frequently between the two is that you hardly get things done. An example I can think of is of programming a particular algorithm. With the "open mind" you'd explore how to express it in interesting ways, but with the "closed mind" you'd have to implement it and move on. If you were to drift between the two frequently, it occurs to me that I would possibly be:
1. spending time exploring (while the deadline is looming)
2. implementing a bad solution (if I did not explore enough)
3. doing no.2 halfway, getting a flash of brilliance, do no.1 to see if it works, then rinse and repeat
By setting aside time to play with the ideas, and then get down to actually fleshing the concepts out, I know how much time I have before making a decision, and once that time is up, I make the best decision I can within that time-frame and stick with it. Second-guessing after this point would be counter-productive, as Cleese mentions.
Also, I think the characterization of "open" as "brainstorming" is a bit more limited than Cleese intended. I understood "open" to mean in consideration of observed feedback. One example he gave of this was "playing" with other people, and thats brainstorming, but thats just one case where the feedback is from other people.
I do think there is something incomplete in the talk, which is the notion of deliberate practice - I'm not sure the distinction between general experience and deliberate practice was as well understood a the time of this presentation. Yea, the more you practice, the faster you can work, and compress the "open"/"closed" cycle - in this sense mastery of work and play increases potential creativity.
It's also important not to forget that creativity isn't in any way limited to the arts. The Cleese talk resonated strongly with my experiences in both engineering design and theatre. The size of the windows for creativity and closed-mind work vary, but the underlying concept is the same.
Not always. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18i08hEO_xw#t=1m30s
From John D. Rockefeller, Sr.'s General Education Board, Occasional Papers No. 1, 1913:
"In our dreams, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions fade from their minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning, or men of science.
We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply…The task we set before ourselves is very simple as well as a very beautiful one, to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are. So we will organize our children and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the homes, in the shops and on the farm."
But is there any evidence that such ideas are actually influential in today's schools? I'll bet that most teachers, if shown your quote, would retch.
Maybe I'm lucky (at least, lucky enough to be affluent), but I don't think that my kids are discouraged from being creative at school or in quasi-school activities such as their music lessons.
I assume you have read John Taylor Gatto's works before. In particular, you might be interested in his most recent: Weapons of Mass Instruction.
I don't know how exactly you would gauge their influence. It's certainly much more prevalent in certain countries (the USA and the major Western European forces, where the idea of modern compulsory schooling originated in the first place: Prussia), compared to say, Eastern European countries. The national psychology has always been different there, and after being ravaged by communism, the school system is quite chaotic and ineffectual, though the EU and other powers are trying to enact change (not necessarily for the better).
In any event, just look at how the classroom model of schooling works these days: intense focus on rote memorization, adherence to ritualistic and often obsolete or pointless standards, very bureaucratic operation and government, a fanatical concern with and faith in the grading system, standardized testing as the be-all-end-all of education and so on.
Then depending on the country, schools are used to instill nationalistic and other forms of propaganda, be it in the history textbooks or throughout the entire atmosphere of the classroom. Typically most states do this, though the exact level and subtlety depends on the individual nation.
The teachers would likely retch, but they're just as big of pawns as anybody else. They're not meant to know. They're told to serve a seemingly benevolent purpose in educating the nation's youth, and they must obviously comply with whatever they're given if they'd like to keep their job.
Modern education is less indoctrination than industrialized daycare.
Grading systems at least have some hope of removing some of the biases inherent other forms of judging people, which tend to come down to social markers (the way you speak, dress, who you know) and perpetuate elite prejudicial advantage. Similarly uniforms: they're a social equalizer for people from a poor background.
Social equalization was no doubt one of the motivations behind uniforms, though it's also likely a symbolic tool to foster groupthink and a superficial cloak of egalitarianism. There's many different ways to show your influence and being of a higher class than through mere clothing.
It is very popular to talk about improving creativity in education. Many educational leaders recognize the issue. But at the same time there are even more discussions about Common Core standards and other ways to standardize education. Sometimes both conversations come from the same people.
I was at a conference this fall, with two session at the same time, in rooms right next to each other -- one promoting why the Common Core is the greatest thing ever, the other denouncing it. Both sessions were equally full, and both sessions got the worst reviews of the entire conference, mostly because the people are so conflicted about how to deal with innovation and creativity vs standardization.
It is a problem that is easy to identify, but much more difficult to fix. People are trying. For example, Khan academy is a great resource for independent learning, but even their elementary math lessons are categorized by traditional grade levels.
The best solution I have to improve creativity in the American educational system is to educate the parents. Make sure that all parents are aware of the issues, and make sure that all parents know that the education of their children is not in the hand of their local school district, but in their own hands. They need to understand the pros and cons of all schooling options, and make the right decisions for their children, and include their children in those discussions when they get old enough.
I know this is a huge tangent away from the original article, but this strikes a bit of a nerve with me, and I agree with you that education is an arena in which the issue of creativity is vitally important, probably moreso than in the workplace.
Schooling, in its present form, is the greatest lie ever told, I would say.
Education is something that should heavily depend on the individual person. The best way to educate is to self-educate. Then there could be certain gatherings like free schools (free as in freedom, look them up if you aren't aware) and democratic schools if one wants to study with a group or requires tutoring from an experienced person. Apprenticeship is also something I would like to see make a comeback.
The school system, however, has done a truly horrifying and dreadful act in that it has killed off the desire for people to autodidact, and has convinced generations that it is the only right way. Of course, many people self-educate in their spare time, but they often do not realize it and instead hold faith in formal academics and schooling as the sole credible form of education.
Another fallacy the schooling system has perpetuated is the incorrect equivocation of school and education. They have nothing alike. One is a strict and guided system, the other is the acquisition of knowledge by any means that are possible.
If school systems are so inherently broken, how come all the economically successful countries have public school systems that go on for years? It's the same tired argument as "Capitalism is inherently evil." Yeah, maybe, except that no other system was shown to be better.
I would guess that the most advanced math people use in their daily lives is cross-multiplication.
That is also true for what is usually considered math heavy fields.
I've studied in mechanical engineering. I've never EVER seen anyone use calculus to solve their problem in the real world.
If that is the case, how is your anecdotal observation that you have "never EVER seen anyone use calculus to solve their problem in the real world" even remotely close to relevant?
Furthermore, I have noticed that people have a tendency to conflate "using calculus" with their experience completing homework assignments in their high school/college calc 1 courses.
No, that's not what "using calculus" is, unless of course you're still a student or cannot conceive of a world beyond your own narrow life experiences.
Many of us use mathematics to solve real problems in the real world on a daily basis - and it would be beyond arrogance to suggest that calculus is irrelevant. If you get a chance, pick up the book "Concrete Mathematics" - and "Concrete" is a play on "Continuous and Discrete" math. It's by Donald Knuth and it's a wonderful read. If you're a working programmer or employed in a technical field, you will be better off after understanding how to solve the problems in that book.
Calculus and all derivative mathematics touches more facets of our daily lives than perhaps any other "theoretical" field in academia.
But we don't generally think even for a second. People just take a 'common sense approach' to most things, which while good enough for a large set of applications breaks down in many cases. And come on, you're an engineer, you should try to get the optimum solution possible. Obviously, I'm not pointing to you directly but to people in general.
And yes, I do know that there's analysis paralysis situation as well, but a good engineer know where that line is, and to stop just before that line.
Consider yourself lucky you haven't been exposed to process chemistry. Those people have to rely on experimentally discovered equations where fractional exponents are the the norm. Not to mention that the math involved is, to an IT person, counterintuitive at best - and outright opaque at worst.
The impossibly devious math involved in that field was one of the major reasons I switched my major. (The same maths come across everywhere in that field.) It is hard to imagine the joy you feel once you get to deal with discrete, math after spending a couple of years trying to wrap your head around the mental torture of applied physical chemistry.
If school systems are so inherently broken, how come all the economically successful countries have public school systems that go on for years?
This is a very narrow and one-dimensional argument. You're assuming that everything is sugary, benevolent and works for the common good. No. Compulsory schooling serves a strategic purpose, it's defective by design.
Replace "school systems" with "retributive penitentiary systems" and you'll see what I mean.
It's the same tired argument as "Capitalism is inherently evil."
Not even close. I do not oppose capitalism in any way, personally.
Yeah, maybe, except that no other system was shown to be better.
No other system has really been tested. There's a lot of alternatives that are applied on small scales and are shown to work just fine (i.e. Sudsbury schools), but they receive little attention and are often deliberately misrepresented.
Long compulsory schooling was not a leading indicator of the success of the U.S. We were an outstandingly successful nation back when most people were schooled far less than they are now.
This isn't strong proof of anything about today, but it is at odds with the narrative that institutional schooling is the basic feature that makes a society good.
In fact, capitalism, by design, rewards the most entrepreneurial. Our current school system punishes those sorts of people -- its goal is to produce worker bees who do what they're told (I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that the education system in the U.S. was designed by a rich business owner specifically to produce workers for his company and others like it... although I'm not entirely sure about that)
Now, that's not to say the school system is inherently evil, either. I do wish it had promoted more creative and entrepreneurial ideas, but it is what it is. I felt pretty aimless throughout school simply because the vast majority of what I was learning really didn't apply to anything in my life until I started learning CS in college (and even then, if I was designing my own curriculum, I'd have done it a bit differently)
What's more interesting is whether schooling exists to supply an economic system, or whether it should exist to create a rational, creative, questioning, skeptical, critical thinking population. Is that the measure of a successful education system, or a successful society?
I think the really dangerous thought is not that the people in the schools are special snowflakes held back by the system, but the realization that those at the top are not special snowflakes and are instead propped up by the system. Because then even the very faint illusion of meritocracy as a justification for the distribution of wealth and our current system falls apart completely.
Perhaps a good education system would also have to face the friction between freedom, merit, enlightenment, democracy, and economic output. The US has a strong ideological undercurrent that the earlier factors directly lead to the last. I would argue not only that is it possible that there is in fact potentially an economic cost to a free and enlightened populace, but that such an ideology primarily exists in the US as a social-psychological-bulwark to justify the position of the wealthy. To chip away at such a subconscious connection would lead people to the realization of the dangerous thought I mentioned in the preceding paragraph...
You do realize that the two aren't actually contradictory, right? The adoption of open standards for the web made it more possible for an outpouring of creativity. That's what standardization does.
For a problem you claim is "easy to identify", you haven't even found it.
With regards to creativity, I think the infamous assertion about how to distinguish pornography applies: "I know it when I see it."
The problem is, you can't standardize on subjective measurements.
This is a popular meme but bears pretty much no relationship with reality.
Popular? It's been getting more attention recently due to the work of various authors, but the vast majority of people still see compulsory schooling as an irrevocable necessity.
The "it's only there to make you conform and obey the elites" meme is certainly getting more popular, but its so far from the aims of educators (and the politicians that continue to fund it) that it's about as well grounded and believable as chemtrails, the illuminati or other conspiracy theory.
2) The educators' intentions may be good, but the results are much more important.
3) The politicians do not fund things, they appropriate money from tax receipts.
4) There are many defenders of the public school system who justify it on the basis of creating a 'shared experience' for the citizenry, which sounds quite collectivist. Why would singing national anthems and pledges of allegiance be so common in schools around the world, if not for statism?
5) The government schooling system has historically been used as a tool of oppression against minorities; it would be naive to believe that politicians and bureaucrats suddenly stopped using the schools to achieve their ends .
2) Not when we're talking about the subject we're actually talking about they're not. I quote from the OP - "the suppression of creativity and individualism is one of the key goals of the compulsory schooling system". That's what I dispute. It may well be an outcome, and that would be bad and should be changed, but it's disingenuous (to say the least) to ascribe this as a motive.
3) The politicians decide what to fund out of the public purse, yes. Again, useless distinction
4) Is collectivism evil in and of itself? I don't subscribe to this view in the slightest, in case you were wondering, and I've only ever heard a few left-wing talking heads claim that that is what we should be trying to do with schools. Personally I 'justify' it by observing that education is given to people who otherwise would not get it for a variety of reasons, and having a base level of education throughout society being a very Good Thing.
5) It's also verging on conspiracy to ascribe nefarious aims and goals to every person involved in education.
2) The OP said that 'suppression' was a goal of the system, not of each individual actor; you were addressing the teachers, and I was saying that they are participating in a dangerous broader system.
3) It is not useless to point out that politicians pay for nothing; if they were paying, I would not care how the money was disbursed.
4) Please address the nationalism and statism which is evoked by the anthems and pledges at schools; how does this help the children better their lives?
5) If there have never been "nefarious aims" in the public education system, why did Brown sue the Board of Education? I am simply reciting history, do you disagree with the history? Or do you disagree with my conjecture that all "nefarious aims" may not have disappeared when Little Rock was desegregated?
And no, we do not all pay taxes, some do not because they are as poor as dirt. It's an awesome facet of modern society that they are not condemned to stay there by lack of access to education, nor by parental indifference to it.
2) I do not believe that it is the goal of educators, nor of others that operate or support the system. I do not believe that even if it was set up to do that by some bad evil people last century it is a key goal now. This is the root of my argument. It may be an outcome, it is not a goal.
4) We don't do that over here in communist UKia, because it's weird.
5) I have no idea who Brown is, or anything about Little Rock beyond it being where Bill Clinton came from, sorry. Not american.
It doesn't seem to me like you're well versed into the actual arguments presented by authors and thinkers who write on the inherent flaws of compulsory schooling.
?? I'm responding to this -
>> the suppression of creativity and individualism is one of the key goals of the compulsory schooling system
Which AFAICT is unsupportable and certainly not the stated intention of any of the people I know in education, nor does it seem to be the intention of the politicians who continue to keep the system funded. How is that a straw man? I'm arguing against what you actually said!
>> It doesn't seem to me like you're well versed into the actual arguments presented by authors and thinkers who write on the inherent flaws of compulsory schooling.
There are all sorts of flaws in schooling, compulsory or otherwise. We could probably take the whole weekend just writing out a list of the ones that spring to mind without serious study.
That doesn't mean that suppression of creativity is the goal of the system.
I use that skill every day - I am an employee, and I create what my employer tells me to, the benefit to me being a salary. If I disagree with my employer about the value of making that thing, I still do it. If I am bored by a project, I still do it. I am lucky that I generally enjoy and care about my work, but some days like everyone, I am working for this abstract, monthly reward.
Exams were like that - you liked some subjects, and read them willingly. Others, you never saw yourself using, but you worked at them to get grades, because grades bought you a salary.
You also probably learned to fear the future. I know I do. More than studying at French because I needed that grade, I studied at French because not getting that grade might mean not going to college, might mean not getting a middle class job. And then... what? I didn't know. I didn't know any non-middle class people.
It is very hard for me, maybe for you too, to imagine a world where life was not geared (8 hours a day) towards working for an abstract salary, paid in abstract money, that will become food, and rent on a small flat in digital bytes without ever becoming cash that you can hold (after all, the bank doesn't actually hold the amount of money it lends).
I hear about a man quitting a good job (one with lots of abstract reward), to spend a couple of years doing the things he wants (Concrete things. Travelling, creating according to his own will, actually seeing his family). I feel he is irresponsible, even though his savings mean his family will never go on foodstamps. I feel a pang of anger driven by... envy?
The left of philosophy (Marx -> Baudrillard) wrote about how we had fetishized symbols over real things. There is some truth in that, but seeing it has... value, only where it informs our actions. In Silicon Valley, young employees trade their 20s for money, one 12 hour day at a time. The reward is abstract, future, retirement, and always tomorrow. Where were they trained to do that?
They may well be outcomes. They probably are, and that's sad and we should certainly not be content with broken educational systems. I just don't think that's anyone's aim, perhaps just a miserable side effect.
>> Where were they trained to do that?
I'm not sure, I seem to have skipped those lessons. But then I'm one of those people that periodically takes several months off to go travelling.
Intent is something many people are willing to brush off as mere conspiracy theory, but it is present. Hanlon's razor does not necessarily apply to political contexts.
That said I have heard of Alfred Whitehead, and his opinions on education (if he did indeed influence the forming of early compulsory/state education systems) seem so far removed from any idea of suppressing creativity and individualism that I'm not sure why you'd drag him out to support your point.
I'm not familiar with Finney.
Hanlons razor would apply to the wider situation regardless - you don't think that any of the army of educators would have caught wind of this nefarious plot?
It's nonsense.
you don't think that any of the army of educators would have caught wind of this nefarious plot?
That's the thing. It wasn't really nefarious to them. The upper class pretty much had a consensus that this was necessary. It started off as industrialization rapidly kicked off nearing the end of the 19th century (especially in the USA), and a way to breed a trustworthy yet disposable workforce was in order. It then went downhill from there.
Woodrow Wilson himself had this to say in 1909:
"We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."
The 'Upper Class' have nothing to do with it any more and what some people said well over a century ago has extremely little bearing on the aims of modern state education.
>> "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."
Which he said over 100 years ago, and which again bears absolutely no resemblance to what we have now.
That's when the seeds were planted, and they continue to grow today. Charlotte Iserbyt provides a fairly decent timeline and compendium of relevant documents related to the shaping of the compulsory schooling system in the USA, entitled the deliberate dumbing down of america. Despite a few conservative biases in her writing style, the documents outlined are self-explanatory.
No, pretty sure I was deliberately not asking about it within historical context, because the aims of those people 100 years ago are not really relevant to the aims and goals of the continuing system, IMHO.
I'm not sure we can garner any meaningful data from dropouts as only 8% of the population (in the US) drop out of the public education system, and I expect you'll find that the majority of them drop out in their later years, after already spending many years exposed to the system.
Re "defined pay schedule": In some fields, you can get paid by a percentage-based commission (real estate, car sales, middle men in general, actors, movie directors etc). That's not always practical, and some employees prefer a fixed monthly salary (versus the insecurity of a percentage).
this is entirely appropriate, and has nothing to do with industrialization. to have a mate, raise children, and prosper, you need to be able to respond to the needs of at least one other adult, one or more demanding children who are incapable of satisfying their own needs, and tohe ability to do these things in an environment over which you have relatively little control.
It's all very well to complain about abstraction and what Marx dubbed 'the dull compulsion of economic relations,' but you might as well complain about the fact that your personal creativity is still constrained by the reality of your body's needs for food and sleep, no matter how much you resent stopping what you're doing to make a sandwich.
Likewise, I really don't like the fact that my dog tends to wake me up around 6am, but it's not because of any ideology; if I ignore his entreaties by refusing to get out of bed then sooner or later he'll end up peeing on the floor. I mention this very prosaic example because of the lessons of Zen Buddhism (a philosophy dedicated to the identification and avoidance of unnecessary abstractions) is that while meditation can free you from illusions, it's not going to free you from the basic necessities of living in the world.
Really? That is what you got out of schooling? If so, I am sorry for you.
Let me tell you what I got out of schooling.
- An appreciation for the English language and the many ways in which it can be used.
- An understanding of the beauty of mathematics.
- A cynical realization that history was written and controlled by Old Dead White Men.
- Basic knowledge of the arts. (Not enough, budget cuts are quite unfortunate!)
- The ability to think critically about a problem and apply any of a multitude of problem solving or analysis techniques to its resolution.
- An appreciation for the beauty of nature.
- Knowledge of the human body.
- Knowledge of biology and genetics.
And that was just my public school education! I went on to college and learned far more!
I will readily confess that roughly 50% of schooling is a waste of time, but that is because students are not being pushed hard enough, rather teachers will assign one book to read over the course of 2 months! Of course this all changes once one goes off to college, where all of a sudden 150+ pages of reading per class per week can easily be expected!
> I use that skill every day - I am an employee, and I create what my employer tells me to, the benefit to me being a salary. If I disagree with my employer about the value of making that thing, I still do it.
Quite unfortunate. I am in the privileged position of only having to work on things that I love, I have a manager certainly, but he respects that he has hired me as a professional and he trusts in my judgement as to how I go about solving problems.
> It is very hard for me, maybe for you too, to imagine a world where life was not geared (8 hours a day) towards working for an abstract salary, paid in abstract money, that will become food, and rent on a small flat in digital bytes without ever becoming cash that you can hold (after all, the bank doesn't actually hold the amount of money it lends).
I can imagine it. I'd be bored shitless. I happen to love what I do for a living. Is it work? Sure technically, in regards that I get up, get in my car, drive a few miles away, park my car, and step into an office.
But honestly? I count everyone I work with as a friend. There is a smile on my face from when I step into the office to when I leave. There is a grand sum total of 0 things in this world that I enjoy more than what I do for work each and every day.
> I hear about a man quitting a good job (one with lots of abstract reward), to spend a couple of years doing the things he wants (Concrete things. Travelling, creating according to his own will, actually seeing his family). I feel he is irresponsible, even though his savings mean his family will never go on foodstamps. I feel a pang of anger driven by... envy?
I feel angry that he is selfish and is thinking only of himself! There is so much that can be done to improve the world. If you told me he left his job that was of little to no societal value, and went off to help others around the world, then I would applaud. But to go off and do nothing but laze around? What good is that, to have the sum of one's life measure up to not but self indulgence.
> The reward is abstract, future, retirement, and always tomorrow.
The reward is impact! Change! The reward is having millions of people use what one has created! Programmers are artists, and our audience is the world! Every day a million symphonies are played out, and a thousand more sonatas written to be performed in the morrow.
My eldest's year 1 [5 -6yo] teacher had a phrase "do it first time". She drilled in to the pupils the necessity for absolute and immediate obedience to her demands.
I find that sort of behaviour abhorrent as it denies the individual the right to express their own will. Yes, some conformity is required in order to make school work but certainly not to that level - this is a common trait throughout [many] schools in the UK.
Indeed I was lecturing a 4yo this evening, with some trepidation, as to why absolute obedience of an authority figure is not essential to welfare and can cause the loss of much that is of value. "There must be a good reason for Mrs. REDACTED to make that rule, otherwise it's a bad rule.".
What does "[seeing] compulsory schooling as an irrevocable necessity" have to do with "suppression of creativity and individualism"?
The US school system sounds like it has systemic problems, and may have bad results. But to say that the whole aim of the system and those in it is to kill creativity and individualism is ludicrous.
I have NEVER seen the question "how do we encourage students to behave in ways that we do not expect?".
What does this signal?
I've never, ever heard it put that way by people pushing educational reform or by educators themselves. "How do we help children learn better?", that one comes up quite a lot but is rather different.
>> I have NEVER seen the question "how do we encourage students behave in ways that we do not expect".
It doesn't seem like a useful question to me.
>> What does this signal?
Very little.
By acknowledging that not all children learn well in lecture/"traditional classroom" formats and doing something about it. But that would undermine the system.
I struggle to find this unreasonable.
The people (via the state) fund a particular model, it's true. And you'll never catch me arguing it's not full of all sorts of flaws, but I would still dispute that suppression of individuality and creativity are even a minor goal in state education, let alone a primary one.
Sounds reasonable on its face, but the reality is that if you try and homeschool you will face all types of resistance from the educational establishment. Tellingly, you will encounter that resistance from public primary schools (many colleges love homeschoolers). This is because the primary goal of the system is to strengthen and reinforce itself. This is so that it may have complete power to create generations of people who contribute to making a strong country through work and capitalism.
This purpose may be good or bad, I leave that judgement as an exercise to the reader. But let's not pretend that any of this is done in the best interests of children.
Ummm, yeah it is. Without education they, individually, will find it very hard to thrive in our capitalist system.
Again, I struggle to see this as a bad thing. Yes - one of the goals of the political classes in establishing a perpetuating a compulsory education system is most likely to be economic.
I'm not sure I understand how "people who contribute to making a strong country through work and capitalism" are necessarily devoid of individuality or creativity.
(--edit-- I agree that a lot of systems do end up becoming very focussed on self preservation and expanding their reach, look at the military and police. Education is in no way immune from this, I still don't think that suppressing individuality and creativity are key goals of the system though)
Do you think it is criminally negligent for a parent to bring up their child without any education whatsoever?
Do you think the state should intervene to protect criminally neglected children from their neglecting parents?
Most people I know, myself included, would say yes to both questions, and therefore the establishment of compulsory education is at least in part directly intended to benefit the children. Education is shown to be one of the very few reliable indicators around the globe of both individual and societal prosperity. How we educate is always up for debate.. should we educate is typically not.
That would be one way to teach them not to seek education.
From the sounds of it you probably need some sort of therapy. Did you talk to your parents about it at the time? It's their choice how to educate you.
Sure, why not? It's the end of history, after all.
And you didn't have to be there, your parents had a choice like everyone else's.
As for "deliberate"? Deliberate's got nothing to do with it. See also "The Yellow Wallpaper".
It is an attempt to pass off your reaction as not legitimate, yes, because it's not. I'll say it again - you didn't have to be there, nobody was forcing you to be in that classroom, that was your parents choice. The only choice they didn't have was not to educate you at all.
--edit-- Further on the scars thing - in your first post in this thread you explicitly talk of emotional abuse and deliberate traumatisation during your schooling, I'm not sure why you would think my suggestion you talk to someone about this is so offensive?
No, no it isn't. Look around the world. Ignorance is the default state of being and continues to be the state of being in a lot of places.
>> An education is literally available everywhere,
You and I have different definitions of education.
>> and kids especially seem to get excited about the process.
Some do, some do not.
>> arents would have to explicitly set up an environment to prevent their kids from receiving an education of some kind, which, I agree, would be troubling. How realistic is that kind of environment though?
Very. Watch your cartoons and shut up.
>> Aside from that, it really is just a question of how.
It's really not, it's a question of giving access to learning to kids whose parents can't afford to educate them or don't care. There are a lot of these folks. In the days before mandatory education kids were put to work to support the family, social mobility was close to zero and... well it was Victorian. Compulsory education has been a huge step forward.
Of course we need lower level labor as well, but those do not require much formal education in the first place.
Like the famous observation about Churchill: "His chief of staff Alan Brooke complained that every day Churchill had 10 ideas, only one of which was good -- and he did not know which one."
And when I think of product meeting's I've sat in on... generally 90% of the "creative" ideas would be complete disasters. And a lot of the remaining 10% might be good, but the work involved in figuring that out for sure would often be prohibitive, for an unclear payoff. But occasionally you get a gem that everyone gets excited about.
I would say that people do like creativity, but only when it's clear that the particular creative solution will likely work. Which is generally not the case.
And if people went chasing every plausible creative idea, we wouldn't have time for anything else, like normal productivity. That's why it's a very difficult balance to get right.
So they don't try anything. This is classic "fear of failure".
I agree -- people like creativity when someone else takes all the risk
Look at the reaction to the financial independence/lifestyle design. People HATE them. Tell many Americans that you're going to stop working for six months to read books in Thailand and they will despise you.
There are so many upsides to creativity, and so much human potential for it - the thing that stops most is the shame that gets splashed on you every time. And then you start splashing it yourself. And that's the game.
People react negatively to the "financial independence/lifestyle design" because they suspect you are telling them they are stupid for wanting to build a life the traditional way by working hard, starting a family and saving money for the future.
Seriously. Why should creativity go unquestioned?
To separate the result of the creative process from the process is an abstraction that ends up excluding the actionable content from the concept. To argue over which acts are and aren't creative will do nothing to serve you in your life, so why do it except to try to bring others down?
As it stands, all I see is a six-month vacation in Thailand. I don't see the grand vision you say you have. Make me see it, and then we'll talk. And if you cannot help me see it, then why should I support you? Why should you go unquestioned?
Instead - just look at what you need to justify in order to "support" me (what does this MEAN?)! Why, beyond mere curiosity, do you feel more need to "question" somebody for doing what they want when it is outside of the status quo? Why does this become an issue of approval?
EDIT: To clear up any miscommunication - I am talking about friends/acquaintances getting uncomfortable/upset about my spending my time, money, and life the way I want to simply because it does not conform to the status quo. I am not talking about soliciting anybody (that would be weird).
EDIT 2: Although the fact that multiple commenters assumed that someone else would have to be bankrolling me to do this shows how deep the "always have a job and spend what you earn" conditioning/lifestyle goes.
Why do I question you? Because all you've told me is that you want to spend six months reading books in Thailand. You won't tell me what you're reading, or why Thailand, or why it needs to be done full-time. Do you even know what you're going to be reading? I suspect not; I suspect this is pure leisure, and the plan to read books will only last until the first distraction comes along. But even if it doesn't, I'm not seeing what difference it would make. And all of this would be well enough to leave alone, but you're (hypothetically) asking me to either bankroll it, or to at least treat it as kind of serious personal project, without even telling me why I should do either one.
Why should I question you? Why shouldn't I? There is creativity, and there is BS, and this is sounding more and more like the latter. Why shouldn't you be called out on that? All I've asked is why, yet the response has been defensive if not outright hostile. What are you defending?
I think I know. This isn't Michelangelo or Picasso or Tolkien or Henson or even Yankovic. This is, at its absolute best, Katy t3h PeNgU1N oF d00m, acting out at random in blind rebellion, not against anything in particular, but merely for rebellion's sake, because that's what sounds like fun. And for that, you can leave me off your list of donors.
And looking at the rest of your (Millennium) comments, it looks like you took it personally and unironically got angry.
So much this. Think of someone you see at the coffee shop with a sketch pad - tattooed, big ear plugs, tight jeans and a weird hat. Is this person creative? Without seeing some work output there's no way to know. Lots of people mistake appearance for an indicator for creativity.
(as an aside, since when has "saving money for the future" been the habit in America?)
Which is a problem, people take everything as a personal assault.
This has nothing to do with the creativity or lack of creativity in the action.
Maybe these aren't important questions to the world traveler. Maybe experiencing the world is much more important than career and financial agility and job security. That's fine.
But for me, that's a really sharp value change, and it makes me uncomfortable. I think that's what people are really feeling.
It's kind of like entrepreneurship. Everyone says it's a good idea. But when you get right down to it, most businesses are failures. Are you willing to take that risk on for the possibility of creative freedom?
Find another job. There's no real shortage if you're in tech.
>> Where did all the money for your trip come from?
Money put aside in my previous few years of work.
>> Where are your savings?
In the bank, looking a little smaller than they were before my six months off.
>> Maybe these aren't important questions to the world traveler. Maybe experiencing the world is much more important than career and financial agility and job security. That's fine.
Pretty much, for me.
I like what I do, and I do it well, but I'm not really committed to any one employer, not in the long term, I'm committed to getting the most out of my life. For me that seems to mean hitting the road in a foreign country (or several) for a few weeks or months at a time every few years.
>> It's kind of like entrepreneurship. Everyone says it's a good idea. But when you get right down to it, most businesses are failures. Are you willing to take that risk on for the possibility of creative freedom?
I'm a freelancer/contractor at the moment rather than an entrepreneur, but the answer so far as I can tell is - why the hell not? You can always get a proper job afterwards if it doesn't work out.
This is what I keep saying!
My mother (and my ex, too) would get very upset when, after college, I suggested building a business freelancing and eventually building my own products -- it's too risky, they said. But I'm a young person with no dependents or anyone else I'm responsible for, I have very few expenses, I have time to build something substantial that can be more successful than a job. Where's the risk? Worst case scenario, I get another job. Best case scenario -- freedom from concerns about money, location, and time.
Stay on this career path forever? I can't ever have those last three things. But hey, it's the easy way out, right? It's what everybody else does.
Obviously you have to weigh up, for you, the lifestyle you want to lead and the stability you need, but it's not like it's a dumb thing to take a chance, especially when you have no dependents.
Really if you do not party all the time and decide to live in the non tourist areas then besides having a great experience you don't burn a lot of money either.
I'd say that living in a non western culture for a while will actually help you in your career later on as it puts things in perspective.
George Hanson: You know, this used to be a helluva good country.
I can't understand what's gone wrong with it.
Billy: Man, everybody got chicken, that's what happened.
Hey, we can't even get into like, a second-rate hotel,
I mean, a second-rate motel, you dig?
They think we're gonna cut their throat or somethin'. They're scared, man.
George Hanson: They're not scared of you. They're scared of what you represent to 'em.
Billy: Hey, man. All we represent to them, man, is somebody who needs a haircut.
George Hanson: Oh, no. What you represent to them is freedom.
Billy: What the hell is wrong with freedom? That's what it's all about.
George Hanson: Oh, yeah, that's right. That's what's it's all about, all right.
But talkin' about it and bein' it, that's two different things.
I mean, it's real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace.
Of course, don't ever tell anybody that they're not free,
'cause then they're gonna get real busy killin' and maimin'
to prove to you that they are.
Oh, yeah, they're gonna talk to you,
and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom.
But they see a free individual, it's gonna scare 'em.
Billy: Well, it don't make 'em runnin' scared.
George Hanson: No, it makes 'em dangerous...Why do you care -- or ever know -- if most Americans will despise you?
"How can you know if someone is a counter-cultural free-thinking rebel who doesn't care what anybody think? They'll tell everybody."
This is why it's important for an idea to be distilled into something that can be tried without much investment, so that a lot of ideas can be tried and that you'll stumble onto something great. Larger ideas usually end up being tried through force or by going behind somebody's back, and that's probably how it'll stay.
Look, You're close. I think the process of trying out ideas is poorly understood by most people, and based on the way you wrote this, even yourself. You touched on it a bit - "distilling ideas into something that can be tried without much investment". That's the gem.
This is what you're supposed to do with an idea:
* Identify the hypotheses that make it work.
* Identify which hypothesis is the most critical one - if that one fails, then you know the idea isn't going to work. It's fair to say that an idea depends on 2 or more hypotheses - the key here is to identify the critical ones.
* Finally, figure out how to fail each critical hypothesis as fast (and as cheap) as you can. There is always a way. If you can't fail it, then you got something good. You don't need market research. You don't need the assurance the idea will work. Just test the hypothesis.
What about testing the non-critical hypotheses? You'll get to them. Failing those doesn't mean the idea should be thrown out, only that you need to adjust the idea to take your new knowledge into account.
That's it, really†. I'm using this process to build my own business, and it's working out extremely well. I've thrown out tons of bad ideas and got some great traction on the good ones. The scientific discipline to testing the ideas is the key.
†I lied. There's one more step: keep track of your critical hypotheses - that's your business intelligence. You can use them to validate future ideas.
(edit: formatting)
Honestly, we agree.
I was reacting to this part: "Larger ideas usually end up being tried through force or by going behind somebody's back, and that's probably how it'll stay."
My impression was that you appeared to believe this is the only way to do things. I was hoping to suggest that it doesn't have to be. Re-reading your post again, I see better what you're trying to say.
I think there are some ideas that cannot be broken down and you really do have to be reckless to try them - they deserved a mention because otherwise my comment was too general. They're dangerous but they're also important for progress.
The fact is, Mr. I-Am, that most of the time, green eggs and ham are just rotten. We are not looking for a guarantee that we will like your culinary experiments, but we would like some assurance that they are edible.
Risk aversion and stagnation go hand in hand. Or, as Theodore Roosevelt said, "Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat."
Why do we do this? Because once again, the fact remains that most ideas are bad. Too much risk-aversion does indeed lead to stagnation, but too little risk-aversion is even more destructive. A balance must be struck, and the proper balance still leans heavily -not completely, but noticeably- toward caution.
Roosevelt said to be brave. He did not say YOLO.
> Nevertheless, while laying all stress on this point, while not merely acknowledging but insisting upon the fact that there must be a basis of material well-being for the individual as for the nation, let us with equal emphasis insist that this material well-being represents nothing but the foundation, and that the foundation, though indispensable, is worthless unless upon it is raised the superstructure of a higher life. That is why I decline to recognize the mere multimillionaire, the man of mere wealth, as an asset of value to any country; and especially as not an asset to my own country. If he has earned or uses his wealth in a way that makes him a real benefit, of real use- and such is often the case- why, then he does become an asset of real worth. But it is the way in which it has been earned or used, and not the mere fact of wealth, that entitles him to the credit. There is need in business, as in most other forms of human activity, of the great guiding intelligences. Their places cannot be supplied by any number of lesser intelligences. It is a good thing that they should have ample recognition, ample reward. But we must not transfer our admiration to the reward instead of to the deed rewarded; and if what should be the reward exists without the service having been rendered, then admiration will only come from those who are mean of soul. The truth is that, after a certain measure of tangible material success or reward has been achieved, the question of increasing it becomes of constantly less importance compared to the other things that can be done in life. It is a bad thing for a nation to raise and to admire a false standard of success; and there can be no falser standard than that set by the deification of material well-being in and for itself. But the man who, having far surpassed the limits of providing for the wants; both of the body and mind, of himself and of those depending upon him, then piles up a great fortune, for the acquisition or retention of which he returns no corresponding benefit to the nation as a whole, should himself be made to feel that, so far from being desirable, he is an unworthy, citizen of the community: that he is to be neither admired nor envied; that his right-thinking fellow countrymen put him low in the scale of citizenship, and leave him to be consoled by the admiration of those whose level of purpose is even lower than his own.
> The citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must be able to achieve them in practical fashion. No permanent good comes from aspirations so lofty that they have grown fantastic and have become impossible and indeed undesirable to realize. The impractical visionary is far less often the guide and precursor than he is the embittered foe of the real reformer, of the man who, with stumblings and shortcoming, yet does in some shape, in practical fashion, give effect to the hopes and desires of those who strive for better things. Woe to the empty phrase-maker, to the empty idealist, who, instead of making ready the ground for the man of action, turns against him when he appears and hampers him when he does work! Moreover, the preacher of ideals must remember how sorry and contemptible is the figure which he will cut, how great the damage that he will do, if he does not himself, in his own life, strive measurably to realize the ideals that he preaches for others. Let him remember also that the worth of the ideal must be largely determined by the success with which it can in practice be realized. We should abhor the so-called "practical" men whose practicality assumes the shape of that peculiar baseness which finds its expression in disbelief in morality and decency, in disregard of high standards of living and conduct. Such a creature is the worst enemy of the body of politic. But only less desirable as a citizen is his nominal opponent and real ally, the man of fantastic vision who makes the impossible better forever the enemy of the possible good.
It's fully reproduced in several places online under the name "Citizenship in a Republic", occasionally as "that speech he gave in Sorbonne": the first and last bits are very clear that his audience is not American. It is a speech very iconic of Teddy Roosevelt himself, too; one of the anecdotes in there is drawn from his time as a cowboy on the range.
This is a blatant double-standard. Non-entrepreneurs who take the same level of risk that is outright common in entrepreneurial ventures are lamented as frivolous dreamers.
If you never fail, you're not trying hard enough to do stuff that's appropriately difficult for you.
Even a failed business or poor performance at a job won't kill you. These sound like worthier fears since they're more closely related to putting bread on the table, but typically the worst fears of corporate decision-makers are not that the company will execute poorly -- that usually happens anyway -- but that they will be blamed for it.
If we're going to talk about "failing" in general, I say fail as often as possible, even if this means the failures must be small.
You are right, but that is part of the process. When finding a good idea it helps to find lots of bad ideas and understand why they are bad. In the end it makes the good idea easier to see.
When coming up with a system design, db or otherwise I like to understands lots of different ideas, and more importantly, actively reject those ideas with a clear understanding as to why. The helps to find the idea that really does work.
There's a point in time where you have to look at all the things that are being pitched, and think about it objectively in terms of what will work and what won't, but if that's the first step then what your really doing is looking at the steel ore that's being shipped to the auto factory and saying 'this isn't a BMW, throw it out'. Which turns out to be a great way of not making anything.
How are you defining "bad"? Do you mean to imply that all creative ideas must be financially rewarding to be good? Or must have literary or artistic value?
I do agree that within the context of a working environment, many creative ideas are not going to result in a net benefit to the company. But does that make them bad? Or are the cliches and the bad ideas necessary stepping stones to finding the right idea?
I would posit that the bad ideas are a necessary part of the creative process. You are absolutely correct that spending time on every idea would be a disaster. But being dismissive of "bad" ideas does not respect the creative process, and expressing that negativity to a creative team will just encourage them to be less creative next time.
I think your post proved the point of the article.
The thing about creative risk is it's an investment. Most of the time it's likely to fail but occassionally it'll provide enough RoI to make the risk more than worthwhile.
The returns on creative risks over the last century have been astounding. Micro-processors were a creative risk. The airplane was a creative risk. Orbital satellites were a creative risk. The internet was a creative risk. And so on.
For another example (and my, did I have to search for one that was politically neutral...), consider how often we're telling ourselves here on HN that procrastination is bad. If we want to believe that, we need constant reminding of it, constant reminding to carefully consider our real priorities, or our actions will betray our true priorities, which aren't whatever we want or think them to be.
By contrast, consider how often we debate whether the best way to learn programming is by doing it, (exclusive) or by studying it. We might discuss the best way to learn by doing, but virtually no one really believes programming is best learned by extensive study before one is even permitted a REPL. (And anyone who pops up here and claims they believe that I will assume is being contrarian for contrariness' sake. Do take note of my "exclusive" there; of course there's a place for study, but even in formal studies there's no reason not to have the student in front of a compiler/interpreter on day one, or lab day one anyhow.)
> consider how often we're telling ourselves here on HN that procrastination is bad. If we want to believe that, we need constant reminding of it
I don't think it's so much that there are people who think procrastination isn't a bad thing, it's just that it can be a really hard problem to overcome; hence, so much discussion about ways to do so.
I do not believe that repeated assertions are a bad thing. A huge amount of self-discipline amounts to just this sort of hack, where your forebrain tries to figure out a way to basically trick the hindbrain into doing what you want. I also think that in order to optimally use these techniques, its important to understand what you're doing, and to clearly see and understand the discrepancy between actions and words. So I do not intend pointing out the mismatch between words an actions as a criticism, but as an observation.
In Dijkstra's essay "On the cruelty of really teaching computer science", posted here multiple times, he states:
"Right from the beginning, and all through the course, we stress that the programmer's task is not just to write down a program, but that his main task is to give a formal proof that the program he proposes meets the equally formal functional specification. While designing proofs and programs hand in hand, the student gets ample opportunity to perfect his manipulative agility with the predicate calculus. Finally, in order to drive home the message that this introductory programming course is primarily a course in formal mathematics, we see to it that the programming language in question has not been implemented on campus so that students are protected from the temptation to test their programs. And this concludes the sketch of my proposal for an introductory programming course for freshmen."
(Do read his guesses about how his suggestion would be attacked and ridiculed. Reasons he obviously didn't agree with).
As I said, study still has its place, do not get me wrong, but I see no reason to hold the student back from a compiler/REPL even as we are formally educating them.
One is general - that other people imposing their creativity on me requires me to think. This isn't bad, but I have a limited capacity to think, and my bias leads me to think that my new ideas are great, and yours aren't. This is an oversimplification, but if everything changed all the time, we couldn't cope. Some people reject all creativity as a result. Others just put up filters.
Second is just practical career advice. Someone at a large company once told me, "People around here talk about diversity and innovation, but what they really want is people doing the same things just a little cheaper, a little faster, and a little more predictably."
This isn't to say that Change is bad, only that there is lots of resistance with semi-rational reasoning behind it.
Sometimes clients ask me to create slogans for their company. I screw around for a bit, generate a list of maybe 25 slogans, then present them with the 5 best.
I always have a favorite out of the bunch. A slogan that's so memorable, because it's so out of the ordinary. One that gets to the point, and really delivers the benefit of the client's product. And that slogan never gets picked. Business owners are afraid to stick out. So they pick the most tame slogan from the bunch.
Example: A web design company wanted to target a display ad to small businesses without websites. I wrote the ad with the headline: "If you're not online, you don't exist." Client changed this to "If you don't have a good website, we can help."
Most people don't know what they like, or they are afraid to admit it. So instead, they pick the same thing everyone else is doing. It simplifies making decisions. No feelings, no uncertainty. Just a quick Google of your competitors to see what they do.
A week later the CEO designed the startup's landing page. None of the good stuff from the meeting was there, just a generic uninformative slogan and a generic long parallax marketing page that doesn't tell anyone what the product does. Sigh.
Our systems however, are not set up to reward creativity.
Our systems at work, at school, and in life in general are set up to maintain a status quo, to result in the least amount of risk possible (especially as those systems become larger), and in general to reward predictability, consistency, and obedience. All of which describe the opposite of creativity.
The reasons the systems are this way is due to our style of management, primarily in the US. Carrot-and-stick styles, with emphasis on short-term goals and comparison of employees to each other (bonuses for the top 5% etc) result in short-term thinking styles and discourage creativity in the workplace. Bonuses and employee evaluations also tend to focus on measurable goals, and creativity is difficult to measure and difficult to quantify, therefore it's optimized away. Just one of the many negative unintended consequences of our default individual-focused reward-and-punish management style.
Deming-style management process would likely fix this and encourage wider thinking and creativity, with less of an individual focus. Read more and spread the word: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming
I don't think this follows. Just because you like the result of a process, doesn't mean you like the process. For instance, just because people use the fruits of scientific and engineering processes, that doesn't mean they actually think, or want to think, like scientists or engineers.
It is only the people who reject the status quo and find their own way to work that actually are able to make incomes that rise well above the typical worker.
The problem with the "creative" way is you have to go through the process of eliminating all the bad ideas again, which the conventional approach has already done. But the ideas are the fun part.
Being creative means producing lots of bad ideas that nobody wants to deal with. Dragging unwilling participants through your creative process of throwing out all the bad ideas? That's your dirty work. That's housekeeping and laundry. The few good new ideas? Prove them, then bring in others. Unless somebody is paid to put up with your crap.
They laughed at Einstein, but the also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Having watched it, t's entirely possible that they cut the explanatory bits to frame Wintour as even more cold as she is in public persona. I wouldn't be surprised.
But in any case, she's the Editor-in-Chief, which makes her the final filter. She's goes a lot by her hunch which is based on taste, a palette that revitalized Vogue and kept it relevant in the fashion industry. Taste is hard to justify.
In such cases, I don't think it's so much about people not digging creativity so much as the idea isn't there. That's just part of being creative. Sometimes you think you're doing interesting work and it's actually not as good as you think it is.
The article describes how the reception of creativity is all about risk--that we don't know its value immediately. I think this is a more logical way of looking at it.
As far as I know, the number of people who can play even one of the tunes I've written can be counted on your fingers. It might take only one hand. Like so many things, there are strong network effects in Irish tunes. Most of the musicians want to play with other people; so there is limited incentive to learn a tune that almost no-one else knows. When you do want to learn something novel, there are literally thousands of obscure tunes to choose from, with more being written every day. And of course, since my tunes have not been professionally recorded, only a very limited number of people have ever been exposed to them; mostly close friends and a few people who heard me get up the nerve to play them in a bar somewhere.
What I'm trying to get at here is this is all perfectly reasonable. If you looked at it from a narrow focus on me, then you could certainly say that creative ideas are being ignored. But if you look at it from a broader perspective, you'd be wrong to conclude that all those musicians don't like creativity. Most of them are looking for something new to play. There's just no compelling reason it should be my tune.
when you have a flabby culture of consensus that rejects those who offend the few, that’s exactly what you’re going to get: risk-minimizers, not excellence-maximizers. It’s generally agreed upon that some people are too creative, too interesting, to succeed in typical human organizations because of that specific effect.
https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/tag/corporate-behavior/
Why not include a link to the source or even the author's actual name?
For untried (i.e. "creative") ideas, this is much harder. Further complicating the process is that the creators of ideas inevitably place a very high intrinsic value on them. There are many reasons for this, but a lot of them are tied into the ego, either directly ("I had this idea, so it's good") or indirectly ("This idea reinforces beliefs I hold, or advances a cause I favor, or lets me practice my favored hobbies, or may answer a question I'm personally curious about, etc., therefore it is good"). Other people just plain don't find these ego-tied arguments compelling, nor really should they, and so they cloud the process of convincing people to go along with a new idea.
It would seem, then, that the trick is to remove one's ego from the convincing process, and argue solely based on what's left. But the ego still complicates things. Even when more observer-independent arguments can be found, they never shine as brightly in the eyes of the creator as the ego-tied ones, and so it feels like you're selling it short: not something creatives like to do, and for obvious reasons. Worse, though, are the many ideas that just plain don't have many (or even any) arguments that don't tie straight back into one's own ego. No one else will ever be convinced to go alongside these, but to attack them is to attack the creator's ego, leading to accusations of sour grapes and headlines like "People don't actually like creativity."
This IMO is what causes creativity to not respected, because people try to use their opinions or common sense to evaluate ideas (because of the perceived high cost of actually evaluating ideas by implementing them) instead of relying on cold hard data. We know is that a good number of the best ideas start out sounding really silly at first, if not they would already exist (right?) So it stands to reason that people would scoff at creative ideas because they would generally not "make sense" to the average person.
That is why it is important to come up with a process or culture that allows you to quickly run an idea through its paces, to validate or invalidate it using data. Making it cheap to entertain ideas in the same way git makes it easy to create and throw away branches.
I think that this is why you find that at the most innovative companies this is exactly what happens, and as soon as this culture of quickly validating ideas goes away, the company starts its slow decline.
I think the thing a lot of "creative" people do is get too attached to ideas. When you have that idea its a diamond. Sometimes its hard to tell that its really just another rock. Of course sometimes ideas don't die. When that's true, you just gotta do it. Find a way.
[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/mb/lonely_dissent/ [2] http://lesswrong.com/lw/qf/no_safe_defense_not_even_science/
Neither bias is either completely right or completely wrong. Most new ideas fail, so it's healthy to know critics who can help counterbalance creative enthusiasm and perhaps see potential pitfalls.
But new ideas—the right ones—are hugely valuable. I've heard creativity described as a tolerance for the cognitive dissonance—that is, the natural mental pain and discomfort—of combining unrelated or incongruent ideas. This process likely bothers a skeptical person a lot more and they tire or frustrate out earlier.
Less creative people can be difficult to brainstorm with because they don't enjoy the process and want to "get to the answer." But creative people can be difficult to execute with because seemingly everything at every moment is up for reinvention.
The point here is that we need people on both ends of the spectrum and they need to understand each other and the value they bring.
"Our results show that regardless of how open minded people are, when they feel motivated to reduce uncertainty either because they have an immediate goal of reducing uncertainty, or feel uncertain generally, this may bring negative associations with creativity to mind which result in lower evaluations of a creative idea. Our findings imply a deep irony. Prior research shows that uncertainty spurs the search for and generation of creative ideas, yet our findings reveal that uncertainty also makes us less able to recognize creativity, perhaps when we need it most."
The key finding is two-fold: in a normal, non-uncertain, state, creativity has positive associations and is easier to recognize and assess. However, when people attempt to deal with an excess of uncertainty, creative ideas have negative associations.
That's something to think about the next time everything is on fire.
Oh, and the final bit is interesting:
"In addition, our results suggest that if people have difficulty gaining acceptance for creative ideas especially when more practical and unoriginal options are readily available, the field of creativity may need to shift its current focus from identifying how to generate more creative ideas to identifying how to help innovative institutions recognize and accept creativity."
[1] http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar... [PDF]
"[...] It's that, the actual doing, that's going slow."
Scriber nodded knowingly. That had been the central problem in his life too.
The exception is an idea that actually has a verified concrete benefit. A good idea. But here, people don't care about the idea; but they care about the benefit.
A common problem is when the greatest benefits of your wonderful idea are not yet verifiable... the solution is to find (or work to create) some benefit - perhaps much smaller than the dream - that is concrete and verifiable. Then, people will adopt it. Ideally, as time goes on, you can add more and more benefits which comprise the dream til it is complete (or at least give you time to work on making real your dream's benefits.)
Furthermore, a lot of 'creative people' are just hipsters that use it as a crutch to never get anything productive done. I mean, shit like this isn't a particularly great expression of creativity: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/63/Robert_D...
We should encourage creativity, but also temper it with realism. While the life of the 'starving artist' is alluring, it's really not all that...
I suspect many here can relate.
Creativity largely ends up coming up with good approaches that are not immediately obviously good and, in that respect it is inherently difficult to tease apart the good ideas from the bad ideas.
What happens when the innovator presents the ten million dollar idea to a room full of dullards? After several such episodes in succession, they've persuaded themselves that the dullards hate innovation.
Blaming people for being risk-averse isn't good enough. There has to be something else going on, such as a gap between perceived risk and real risk, that influences both innovators and dullards.
Don't ask for approval for creativity, noone will let you. Do it and ask for forgiveness later. If you are waiting for approval for creativity you are doing it wrong.
This is the same problem that plagues big companies who had a large market share, without creativity/prototypes/new innovations those companies are dead. The people in those companies are shut down when asking for approval. See the pirate flag days at Apple and what Steve Jobs had to go through for a high level at what happens, even if you start the company they won't let you be creative without a fight.
The very definition of creativity is thinking different and with that comes resistance.
That's the difference between a leader and a follower: if you strongly believe that you are indeed correct, work on the system on your own time and then you either learn a valuable lesson that youre not as "good" as you think you are or you teach the others a valuable lesson that you're better than they think you are. This way people who are good will become leaders and have a better say in what goes on and people who are not will learn and one day be good. The shame is in the people who are good, but remain inactive because they dont figure out if they are actually correct and neither does the management.
Creative people will produce a lot of meh stuff/crap for each interesting output. Environments that promote creativity are easy on mistakes/failed outcomes, because they know that, at some point, it will produce something interesting. Will be 1/100th of the times, but it will be worth it. But most of the people assumes that, just because someone is creative, all the stuff will be awesome. And that's simply not possible. With no patience, there can't be any creativity. And very few people is patient.
Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you to get you get a bad grade. Here in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything --- from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.
The book of course is all about Quality, Creativity, and Innovation. Highly recommended.
I get that at least once a month. What I generally do now is tell people "You are wrong" when I'm told no. This has caused a few surreal situations (one was a bunch of NASA guys listening to a presentation on how Widget T was badly behind schedule and needed a lot of work done, with the first production batch of working Widget Ts in a heap on the conference table).
Elegant design is often easy to recognize and appreciate. We celebrate its creativity and thought because it "looks right" and "feels familiar."
But true creativity is abrasive, uncomfortable, and many times, divisive. It doesn't often look right or feel familiar, especially when it comes from persons or sources not easily understood.
Which is why it struggles in environments where the goal is to stay focused on the task at hand.
"Perhaps for some people, the pain of rejection is like the pain of training for a marathon—training the mind for endurance. Research shows you’ll need it. Truly creative ideas take a very long time to be accepted. The better the idea, the longer it might take. Even the work of Nobel Prize winners was commonly rejected by their peers for an extended period of time."
(More details in http://lesswrong.com/lw/i0b/open_thread_july_1622_2013/9f1o )
other people are not very creative but move things over.
in order to achieve that result that everyone appreciates, there is usually some technical detail we have to work through that nobody else cares about or understands. anyone who is both creative and wants to do stuff has to work through that lonely period.
So true. Half (or maybe more) of being successful as a creative person is learning to play politics and sell your ideas.
You are creative, trust me, you're the result of millions of years of hyper creative areas of brain specialization however current culture has convinced you other wise.
More generally, creativity (in particular, I'll focus on social humor) has a status effect. Let's put social status on a scale from -1.0 to 1.0. Below 0.0, you're an at-risk member who may be expelled from the group. At 1.0, you're an unquestioned god-king of it (most groups' leaders are 0.5 to 0.7).
When you're above +0.4, you can't really use humor (which I'm taking to be a microcosm of creativity) except of a stunted kind, because most good humor is partisan or offensive, and not "presidential" or "leader-like". That, I would argue, applies to creative expression in general.
Below 0.0, you're a disliked member of the group and your ideas (or humor) will be rejected just because they come from you and are therefore taken to be unskilled displays and desperate attempts to improve status. Between 0.0 and +0.2, your jokes might be well-received, but it's not worth the risk, because you don't have much status capital to spend. This leaves a narrow range of the status spectrum-- 0.2 to 0.4-- in which humor (/creativity) can bring improvement. However, people at +0.3 to +0.4 aren't high enough to end up climbing corporate ladders-- you need +0.6 to +0.7 to play that game, and you need to achieve that status reliably (at each level of the executive hierarchy)-- and doubling down on humor typecasts you as "the funny guy", which isn't the image you want and limits you at the +0.4 ceiling.
The problem isn't really that people individually dislike creativity. It's that social groups become increasingly anti-intellectual and focused on self-preservation (which requires excluding the "different") as they get bigger.
Are you sure it's not just your presentation that does that?
Also keep in mind that morality of systems is complex. Just because bad outcomes can be traced back to $FOO, does not mean that not-$FOO would result in less bad outcomes and so does not mean that $FOO is wrong or immoral.
Some VC-istan companies having asshole managers who react poorly to conceited employees, does not necessarily mean that all of VC-istan shares bad management philosophies. It doesn't even mean that that one company has bad management policies, it could be that anything else (or anything else they've tried) results in more asshole managers or other worse problems.
The problem isn't really that people individually dislike creativity. It's that social groups become increasingly anti-intellectual and focused on self-preservation (which requires excluding the "different") as they get bigger.
How can a group best maximize the well-being of its members?
Suppose interesting new ideas from a group member are nomally distributed, with a mean that varies by the member's skill/intelligence (approximated by status), a standard deviation that varies by the member's creativity, and are adopted by other group members based on some combination of status and approximate value.
Whether you personally get better ideas (and can help the group more) by rolling the dice yourself vs collecting the best ideas from others (and vs spending your time implementing ideas from a single cheap/fast source), depends on how many others there are and how relatively skilled/intelligent you are. As the number of creative people increases, the value of your being creative decreases. As the group size increases, the percentage of the group that needs to be creative decreases (the absolute number of creative members should still increase).
Mistrusting new ideas is not necessarily anti-intellectual. Mistrusting complex ideas because they're complex would be anti-intellectual. Wanting to see a larger sample size so you have a better approximation of someone's cool new idea isn't.
You very consistently manage to mine personal conflicts out of threads and stories that have no apparent connection to you or your beliefs. It's a worrisome habit, in the "I almost worry about criticizing you because I'd feel bad if it turned out that you were actually ill" sense. Broken record: I really think you need to relax and let some of this stuff go, or, at least, if you're totally dedicated to the idea of promoting your vision of the evils of startup culture, find a more coherent way to do it. Perhaps your ideas would be better carried in long-form essays.
It's not that I am especially important; however, my encounter with HN moderation has shown one of the mechanisms by which VC-istan protects its reputation. That is all. By observing those mechanisms, we can possibly make inferences about its health. If what is said on Hacker News actually matters to VC-istan, then it's not a very robust system.
I really think this should be the end of the conversation. Leave the inane personal attacks out of it.
You are not being persecuted.
It is reasonable to be worried about what your comments, taken as a whole, imply about where you're coming from. It's totally possible that I'm wrong and you're just very shrill (you'd think that as a fellow shrill person I'd have a radar for that). But it is not crazy to ask the question. Are you OK?
Those capital-C conspiracy theories are like gods in that they are excuses to look no further. (Why does "the Illuminati" conspire toward evil? Because they're evil! It's a devil archetype.) They almost never exist, and don't hold together for long. The reality is that people act according to their own interests. If we can figure out what those interests are, we can learn things. You learn the most if you assume that conspiracies and weird personal vendettas, prima facie, don't exist.
Paul Graham, for example, probably doesn't care about either of us either. However, he does have a need to appease VC-istan (which is not quite a conspiracy, but has shown aggressively and illegally collusive behavior in the past). If he wants access to the best talent, he needs to be able to place. The fact that someone is pressuring him or one of his moderators to suppress the ideas of someone fairly powerless tells us something-- that VC-istan believes its reputation (the asset that enables it to get top talent cheaply) is in peril.
Given the notion that Paul Graham is not in fact worried about people on HN offending the delicate sensitivities of VC firm partners, your entire argument falls apart, and nothing you've experienced on HN has anything to do with you being a thorn in the side of any "-stan", potential or otherwise.
Incidentally, your continued and ritualized use of the term "VC-istan" harms your arguments, because it's a term that can mean whatever you want it to in any given situation. Is YC part of "VC-istan"? Who knows! It depends on where you want to be in an debate. Anyone who's been on more than a couple message board debates sees that problem coming and discounts your credibility to price that risk in.
It's one thing to use a term like "VC-istan" (I prefer "startuplandia"; Maciej Ceglowski seems to like "flounders") as a way of poking fun at startup culture. But that's not how you use the term. You write as if "VC-istan" is something real.
You didn't answer my question, by the way. I'm easy to find privately if you're not comfortable answering here. Or talk to anyone else. Just make sure you're talking to someone if you need to be.
If you want to know what VC-istan is, start here: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/10/07/vc-istan-1-wh... VC-istan does not mean "whatever you want it to in any given situation".
Once again, we're having this pointless conversation because you argued upthread that Paul Graham is so terrified of venture capitalists that he represses you on Hacker News to appease them, so angry are they at your mean comments about them.
If Y Combinator can't place, it stops being the destination incubator with its pick of emerging startups. It loses the top talent and the brand. Yes, VCs would rather get along with Paul Graham than not, but the real power is with the VCs. If they stop funding YC startups and YC can't place, then it becomes just another crappy incubator.
Paul Graham needs the VCs a lot more than they need him. YC's only advantage is that it seems to get a disproportionate share of highly talented founders. However, VCs don't need more talent-- there's an ocean of untapped talent out there-- but everyone in VC-istan needs funding to play. Money is the scarce resource, not talent.
I respect what Paul Graham has achieved, or at least that he has achieved it. I prefer revolution over incremental improvement, but PG has succeeded on his own terms. However, don't kid yourself. If the VCs stop placing YC startups, he and Y Combinator are nothing in the Valley. If the leading VCs tell him to put the kibosh on inconvenient truths, he has no other choice.
People stop good ideas and back bad ones for political reasons all the time, and VCs are known for the same behavior (probably no more than big-company high officers, but neither no less). People care more about their individual careers and status than about the bottom line of some organization that might kick out a bonus, and that's a big part of why companies don't "act rationally". The people in them are out for themselves because, honestly, who wouldn't be? Selflessness leads nowhere.
You argue that VC collusion would be "an amazing organizational feat considering how many there are and how much some of them dislike others", but there is, in fact, a lot of co-funding, social-proof-oriented decision making, and collusion. Think of how 90+ percent of funding decisions are based on who else is funding the round, or who made the introduction. It's a "who you know", good-ole-boy network, business in the extreme and you're delusional if you think it's still the meritocracy it might have been 15 years ago. The fact that some VCs dislike each other doesn't prevent that collusive culture from existing, just as high-ranking executives in a more traditional company can dislike each other intensely but that doesn't stop the firm from operating.
[ETA 1.5h: also, if you want to prove me wrong and show that you don't answer to VC-istan, you have the option of removing the slowban and rankban.]
I agree though that Michael is taking it a little too far. What's true now, has been, and always will be is that money is king -- all other things, all connections, all politics come second. If YC has a startup in its class that they legitimately think is the next Google, they will fight like animals to get in on it.
If you can introduce creative changes that require little energy to adopt, you're on to something.
At the same time, many "creative" ideas are actually just really stupid ideas. It's to be expected that the person with the stupid idea will accuse his critics of stifling his "creativity". That doesn't mean they're wrong.
However, that doesn't mean creativity should be criticized--it just means we need to teach people to do more than have ideas. Creativity comes into play when problem solving, and determining whether ideas are worthwhile, too.
edit: spelling.