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Comment by logicchains | Hacker News Reader

>If we define (roughly) social acceptance as the property of sharing common opinions among the crowd, then we can infer that thinking independently would unlikely lead to social acceptance.

Thinking independently doesn't necessarily entail sharing one's independent opinions with whomever one meets. Creativity implies the ability to create humour, and making people laugh is one of the easiest ways to get them to like you. Combined with intelligence, which makes it easier to work out what people want to hear, I'd argue that creativity actually brings a significant social advantage, at least when it's consciously directed towards achieving social ends.

Feynman represents a good example of this, achieving social success by using his creativity as a fount of humour.

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> Creativity implies the ability to create humour, and making people laugh is one of the easiest ways to get them to like you...

Well, regarding jokes, if all people are making a same joke repetitively, so you heard about it many many times, do you still feel that you could laugh out naturally? (I mean laugh not for the sake of laugh, alone)

I just feel that the reason why a joke is a joke, is because you have never heard of it (or at least have never got it) in the past...So this difference -- or this independence from the past -- is the creativity in your sense...

> Feynman represents a good example of this, achieving social success by using his creativity as a fount of humour.

If, there have already been 500 people making jokes in the same way as Feynman did -- for instance, if before reading his book, everyone already played prank on some waitress girl in a restaurant by putting the tips under an upside-down filled cup, would they still find the description in the book funny? Just like what I typed, do you still find this re-description of Feynman's joke funny, like the first time you read about it?

>If, there have already been 500 people making jokes in the same way as Feynman did -- for instance, if before reading his book, everyone already played prank on some waitress girl in a restaurant by putting the tips under an upside-down filled cup, would they still find the description in the book funny? Just like what I typed, do you still find this re-description of Feynman's joke funny, like the first time you read about it?

I was making the implicit assumption that there is an unbounded quantity of potential jokes. 500 Feynmen wouldn't all be making the same jokes; they'd all make different jokes. Just like how 500 Feynmen wouldn't all be writing the same books or making the same scientific discoveries.

The model above actually doesn't directly contradict with the examples you gave...

You can easily create a seemingly dilemma case within the model -- for instance, use the independent creativity to create more common ground (much of which was not visible/observable before) between people, and hence make them more agreeable with each other.

But actually this is not a dilemma, as it is only crucial for the process to be independent, not the ending result -- especially when the goal of your independent creativity process is to make the ending result to be more correlated to some preconceptions.

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