7 ms·

We can learn to be more creative

63 points by mattivahtera 9y ago

ataturk 9y ago
Public schools beat the creativity out of people for the most part. Even art class isn't all that creative for kids.
gt_ 9y ago
I don't think there is much motivation for people to realize this. Being creative is more painful than not. The thesis of this article is absolutely true, and the most creative people know it. But, it's so much more comfortable to not be creative, and being creative has very few rewards. Conforming to norms is far less risky and not without rewards of it's own.
- mattivahtera 9y ago
  You might be right unfortunately. I hope someone who feels a bit lost in the depths of norms will read this and find his/her way out. And maybe there's even something for those who feel creative but don't know how to get to the next step.
andperseand 9y ago
All thinking is a skill. If there is one thing I wish schools would teach, it is meta cognition.
- ThrustVectoring 9y ago
  Please, no. Schools have already ruined mathematics for the majority of several generations, the last thing we need is to Taylorize meta-cognition as well.
  - dfee 9y ago
    Apparently Taylorism here means http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/Taylorism.html http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/Taylorism.html and not - humorously, where my brain went first - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_series https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_series
    - gt_ 9y ago
      Could someone define it for a non-mathematician? Or would that be Taylorism? EDIT: The businessdictionry.com links explained it well enough. I think this has already been done with creativity, many times over. I imagine it is more harmful to a field like mathematics, though. This is not to say it isn’t a problem. The current state of art school is an atrocity. But, if I’m not mistaken, art has tendency to not only get distracted by the novelty of imitation but to get entirely lost in it, whereas the field of mathematics would have just enough concern for such uninterested forms of curiosity to account for them. This is a lazy account of what maybe Plato would say. Basically, art was screwed in this way from the onset and mathematics has a lot more at stake.
  - andperseand 9y ago
    I'm unaware of schools ruining mathematics - in what sense has this happened? Has this happened in most countries?
    - ThrustVectoring 9y ago
      Most people hate mathematics. How school teaches it is why.
  - nine_k 9y ago
    There can be different kinds of meta. Learning how to learn more efficiently and less painfully would be great for schoolchildren. Learning how thinking may go wrong (basic cognitive biases and faults) is also important to learn in e.g. high school. Going into hardcore epistemology is probably not the right thing for a school.
blt 9y ago
I tried to find the source of the quote on epilepsy from Hippocrates. It appears on Goodreads [1] but not in the version on classics.mit.edu [2]. A different version can be found at [3], but it also does not match. It seems that people are paraphrasing the message of Hippocrates's "On the Sacred Disease". Can anyone confirm? [1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/153826-people-think-that-epilepsy-is-divine-simply-because-they-don-t https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/153826-people-think-that-ep... [2] http://classics.mit.edu/Hippocrates/sacred.html http://classics.mit.edu/Hippocrates/sacred.html [3] http://www.atheistrepublic.com/gallery/hippocrates-men-think-epilepsy-divine http://www.atheistrepublic.com/gallery/hippocrates-men-think...
redmaverick 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_thinking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_thinking Basic theory: To be creative is to have a divergent thinking pattern. If you are very logical then you have a convergent thinking pattern. High amount of intelligence has a negative corelation with creativity. You should have average to above average intelligence in order to be creative. Convergent thinking helps you to come to accurate conclusions if you have all the facts in hand. It will help you ask the exact right questions that you need to come to a conclusion. If there is ambiguity, there is a natural tendency to resolve the ambiguity before proceeding further. It is pretty binary. If there are 10 possibilities and 1 possibility is the right one then you think. Either the first possibility is the right one or the remaining 9 ones. So on and so forth till you get to the correct answer. You also tend to be confident because you are consistent and past experience has reinforced your world views. You are focussed and plow through obstacles till you reach your goal. Divergent thinking helps you to come to a wrong conclusion very quickly using only limited facts out of all the available facts. But this is a heuristic approach. You iterate and go off on tangents till you come to a unique solution which is ultimately correct after a long while and this process cannot be replicated. You get the answer first and the rationality of it later. You backtrack from the answer and add rationality to it later so it is logical and people around you, including you yourself can be convinced by it. Basically, you aim for a goal and then go off on a tangent in a different direction. This different direction is a waste of time but you will learn something indirectly that will help you reach your main goal. If you are logical, you use your intelligence in a conscious manner. If you are a creative type then you will let your unconscious brain guide you into a solution. If you are the logical type and want to be creative, then the best way is to be obsessed about finding a solution. Do your best with your intelligence and then take a break. Like, go hiking, swimming or running etc. Then your unconscious mind will have a chance to come up with the solution and will give it to you. People who are insanely creative know they are creative. There can be absolutely no doubt about it in their minds. People who are highly intelligent and logical don't know that they are intelligent without external feedback from their peers. They are just surprised as to why others are slow or have a difficulty in understanding something when it is so very blindingly obvious to them. They just "get it!" and have high cognitive processing speeds.
- 9y ago
dlwdlw 9y ago
I think creativity is closely related to critical thinking or more specifically the courage to think for yourself. Often this puts you at a disadvantage because it's so much easier to consume and regurgitate estaished knowledge. However only doing this means you have less practice thinking for yourself than those who were stubborn enough to resist and so at the cutting edge cannot contribute much. It's not just lack of practice though. It's more lack of courage because you are used to being right and smart.
- wefj82321a 9y ago
  You might be interested in Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It is essentially a framework that relies on the simple idea you posted. No individual must be forced to acquiesce to supposed "needs" of their culture. Think for yourself. Know that you are right in your own thoughts, but that others are right in theirs. THOUGHTS being key; he was no moral relativist. The utilitarian needs of humanity, aka what society should be about, must be openly debated and decided by inclusive dialectic. He uses his homeland of Brazil to describe how European forms of government were "imported" and forced on the will of the public. I'll argue until the end traditional values haven't gone anywhere. We still expect social conformity, it's just not towards the Bible. Get a job, start a business, and only do what's profitable. The very opposite of being free.
notadoc 9y ago
Of course you can learn to be more creative, it's a matter of practice. If you want to be more creative, start creating. The more you create, the more creative you get.
- mattivahtera 9y ago
  I totally agree. Unfortunately this issue isn't this simple for a lot of people. Many feel that they ra trapped in the non-creative body and there's nothing they can do about it.
ghostcluster 9y ago
While I agree with the statement on its surface, it's important to note that there is likely a ceiling as to how far someone can improve a trait as broadly defined as 'creativity'. A large part of your personality characteristics depend on inheritance.

63 points by mattivahtera 9y ago

Public schools beat the creativity out of people for the most part. Even art class isn't all that creative for kids.

gt_ 9y ago

I don't think there is much motivation for people to realize this. Being creative is more painful than not. The thesis of this article is absolutely true, and the most creative people know it. But, it's so much more comfortable to not be creative, and being creative has very few rewards. Conforming to norms is far less risky and not without rewards of it's own.

mattivahtera 9y ago
You might be right unfortunately. I hope someone who feels a bit lost in the depths of norms will read this and find his/her way out. And maybe there's even something for those who feel creative but don't know how to get to the next step.

andperseand 9y ago

All thinking is a skill. If there is one thing I wish schools would teach, it is meta cognition.

ThrustVectoring 9y ago
Please, no. Schools have already ruined mathematics for the majority of several generations, the last thing we need is to Taylorize meta-cognition as well.
- dfee 9y ago
  Apparently Taylorism here means http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/Taylorism.html http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/Taylorism.html and not - humorously, where my brain went first - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_series https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_series
  - gt_ 9y ago
    Could someone define it for a non-mathematician? Or would that be Taylorism? EDIT: The businessdictionry.com links explained it well enough. I think this has already been done with creativity, many times over. I imagine it is more harmful to a field like mathematics, though. This is not to say it isn’t a problem. The current state of art school is an atrocity. But, if I’m not mistaken, art has tendency to not only get distracted by the novelty of imitation but to get entirely lost in it, whereas the field of mathematics would have just enough concern for such uninterested forms of curiosity to account for them. This is a lazy account of what maybe Plato would say. Basically, art was screwed in this way from the onset and mathematics has a lot more at stake.
- andperseand 9y ago
  I'm unaware of schools ruining mathematics - in what sense has this happened? Has this happened in most countries?
  - ThrustVectoring 9y ago
    Most people hate mathematics. How school teaches it is why.
- nine_k 9y ago
  There can be different kinds of meta. Learning how to learn more efficiently and less painfully would be great for schoolchildren. Learning how thinking may go wrong (basic cognitive biases and faults) is also important to learn in e.g. high school. Going into hardcore epistemology is probably not the right thing for a school.

blt 9y ago

I tried to find the source of the quote on epilepsy from Hippocrates. It appears on Goodreads [1] but not in the version on classics.mit.edu [2]. A different version can be found at [3], but it also does not match. It seems that people are paraphrasing the message of Hippocrates's "On the Sacred Disease". Can anyone confirm? [1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/153826-people-think-that-epilepsy-is-divine-simply-because-they-don-t https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/153826-people-think-that-ep... [2] http://classics.mit.edu/Hippocrates/sacred.html http://classics.mit.edu/Hippocrates/sacred.html [3] http://www.atheistrepublic.com/gallery/hippocrates-men-think-epilepsy-divine http://www.atheistrepublic.com/gallery/hippocrates-men-think...

redmaverick 9y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_thinking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_thinking Basic theory: To be creative is to have a divergent thinking pattern. If you are very logical then you have a convergent thinking pattern. High amount of intelligence has a negative corelation with creativity. You should have average to above average intelligence in order to be creative. Convergent thinking helps you to come to accurate conclusions if you have all the facts in hand. It will help you ask the exact right questions that you need to come to a conclusion. If there is ambiguity, there is a natural tendency to resolve the ambiguity before proceeding further. It is pretty binary. If there are 10 possibilities and 1 possibility is the right one then you think. Either the first possibility is the right one or the remaining 9 ones. So on and so forth till you get to the correct answer. You also tend to be confident because you are consistent and past experience has reinforced your world views. You are focussed and plow through obstacles till you reach your goal. Divergent thinking helps you to come to a wrong conclusion very quickly using only limited facts out of all the available facts. But this is a heuristic approach. You iterate and go off on tangents till you come to a unique solution which is ultimately correct after a long while and this process cannot be replicated. You get the answer first and the rationality of it later. You backtrack from the answer and add rationality to it later so it is logical and people around you, including you yourself can be convinced by it. Basically, you aim for a goal and then go off on a tangent in a different direction. This different direction is a waste of time but you will learn something indirectly that will help you reach your main goal. If you are logical, you use your intelligence in a conscious manner. If you are a creative type then you will let your unconscious brain guide you into a solution. If you are the logical type and want to be creative, then the best way is to be obsessed about finding a solution. Do your best with your intelligence and then take a break. Like, go hiking, swimming or running etc. Then your unconscious mind will have a chance to come up with the solution and will give it to you. People who are insanely creative know they are creative. There can be absolutely no doubt about it in their minds. People who are highly intelligent and logical don't know that they are intelligent without external feedback from their peers. They are just surprised as to why others are slow or have a difficulty in understanding something when it is so very blindingly obvious to them. They just "get it!" and have high cognitive processing speeds.

9y ago

dlwdlw 9y ago

I think creativity is closely related to critical thinking or more specifically the courage to think for yourself. Often this puts you at a disadvantage because it's so much easier to consume and regurgitate estaished knowledge. However only doing this means you have less practice thinking for yourself than those who were stubborn enough to resist and so at the cutting edge cannot contribute much. It's not just lack of practice though. It's more lack of courage because you are used to being right and smart.

wefj82321a 9y ago
You might be interested in Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It is essentially a framework that relies on the simple idea you posted. No individual must be forced to acquiesce to supposed "needs" of their culture. Think for yourself. Know that you are right in your own thoughts, but that others are right in theirs. THOUGHTS being key; he was no moral relativist. The utilitarian needs of humanity, aka what society should be about, must be openly debated and decided by inclusive dialectic. He uses his homeland of Brazil to describe how European forms of government were "imported" and forced on the will of the public. I'll argue until the end traditional values haven't gone anywhere. We still expect social conformity, it's just not towards the Bible. Get a job, start a business, and only do what's profitable. The very opposite of being free.

notadoc 9y ago

Of course you can learn to be more creative, it's a matter of practice. If you want to be more creative, start creating. The more you create, the more creative you get.

mattivahtera 9y ago
I totally agree. Unfortunately this issue isn't this simple for a lot of people. Many feel that they ra trapped in the non-creative body and there's nothing they can do about it.

ghostcluster 9y ago

While I agree with the statement on its surface, it's important to note that there is likely a ceiling as to how far someone can improve a trait as broadly defined as 'creativity'. A large part of your personality characteristics depend on inheritance.