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What Hacker News says
- That thesis is way, too oversimplified and a bit misleading. It could lead you to think the real source of creativity is how much you store, facts or patterns. Put Wikipedia on a computer with a pile of heuristics (eg How to Solve It). Then, it will be more creative than humans in no time. Yet, humans with virtually no knowledge are more creative.
My first study of creativity was Cracking Creativity by Michalko. Skimming its tools, I noticed all of them were about changing how one looks at a problem or connects its pieces. Another work told me geniuses are defined by what they forget or ignore more than what they memorize. The two ideas combined into my working approach.
When I did CompSci research, I would look through the papers for the concepts they reported on. High level ones, core prerequisites, and techniques in how they are combined. From there, I could enumerate variations on each. Then, just keep combining them in straight-forward or random ways. Eventually, something emerges.
Likewise, prior work on creativity and A.I. showed reasoning by analogy was huge in humans. We find patterns in one domain that we generalize to look for patterns in another domain. Then, there’s some process of knowing when to try one or not.
These processes so far are extracting a tiny amount of information, filtering most of it, identifying heuristics in a domain, and heuristics across domains. Also, letting the mind just soak on things to do whatever it does in the middle of the night. These are collectively creativity.
Memorization is a building block of, but different from, creativity. The proof is how we’ve long had memory and reasoning in systems but they sucked at creativity. Recently, systems are extrapolating enough to be more creative but are hallucinating nonsense they definitely didn’t remember. So, they’re orthogonal.
“Creativity comes to those who have internalized the patterns of their art -- they can see the connection or novelty because it's all in their head.”
Edit: I’ll also add that, for planning and creativity, many of us use a deliberate, trial-and-error process that takes time. We don’t just “see” it from something we internalized. We work toward it using the creative process. We usually do see it when it’s finished, though.
- Most of the books that changed how I think were effective because of the subject matter and not the specific book or writing style. I suspect other books on the same subject would've been equally perspective-changing. Here are some examples:
1) "A Guide of the Good Life." This is an approachable intro to stoicism and helped me become more conscious of which things are within my control and which things are outside of my control. I now spend a lot more time focusing on the former and a lot less time being anxious about the latter.
2) Books like "Traction" (by Gabriel Weinberg) and "Cracking Creativity" that take a fuzzy subject like marketing or being creative and show that you can get very far by following recipes/algorithms/heuristics. Skill like creativity are not purely innate; they can be learned.
3) "Economics in One Lesson." (Spoiler: the one lesson is: "economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.") After this book, I now think much more carefully about proposed policies/rules/business strategies/etc. "Subsidized child care" or "charge businesses per seat" can sound great on the surface, but specific proposals often have so many unintended or negative consequences that are not discussed, and it's important to weigh those consequences against the benefits.
4) A statistics textbook. I don't remember the specific book that was my first stats textbook, but learning about statistics made me a lot more skeptical and inquisitive about data. Now when I see a graph or number reported in the news, I think "are there ways that this might be misleading?" instead of "omg cool this is a graph in a popular magazine so it must be true."
- Michael Michalko has two excellent books on creativity:
Thinkertoys (http://www.amazon.com/Thinkertoys-Handbook-Creative-Thinking...)
Cracking Creativity (http://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Creativity-Secrets-Creative-G...)andThey're both among my fave books of all time, though they are relatively similar in content so getting just one is fine.
They cover a lot of different strategies for thinking creatively and outside the box, provide tons of examples, and have a lot of exercise that you can try yourself (and while it sounds cheesy, the exercises are actually fun)
