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Two observations: 1) people who seem to have gotten the highest scores are not following directions properly (e.g. someone on Twitter who got >98 used decidedl

Two observations: 1) people who seem to have gotten the highest scores are not following directions properly (e.g. someone on Twitter who got >98 used decidedly technical terms like "codec", despite clear instructions not to use technical jargon) 2) this seems to measure how extensive your vocabulary is (e.g. obscure noncommon words seem to score much higher than common words, even though the common words may be quite diverse, seemingly simply because common words are...well, more common and so more likely to be mentioned in a sentence together, just owing to English sentence structure). I don't understand how knowledge of a broad amount of words maps to creativity? The person who would do best on this test is someone who knows a variety of very obscure nouns. In other words, someone who memorizes a wordlist. How does this map onto creativity? Case in point: young children are extremely creative, and yet I predict would score very low on this test owing to a very limited vocabulary.

chevill 4y ago
I was in the top 2.1% and I used all non-technical words. The most obscure words I used were trimmed off (it only uses 7) and the ones it counted seemed to be words I expect all people of average intelligence to know. It honestly seems like a rather poorly executed test. Valid nouns that are too obscure or "technical" to be in the word list get dropped but the person I know that got the highest score (95.07 raw score, 99.4 percentile) used "titties" (not even a real word) and at least two of the other words he used weren't even nouns (nouns are stated as a requirement).
sporkland 4y ago
I found myself started trying to use obscure words from different time periods as a way of "randomizing" my thoughts before I knew what the test was measuring. It seems like it could be a good technique, but implies nothing about your real creativity.
ipnon 4y ago
Creativity isn't necessarily useful or profound. Children are naturally quite creative, and we find their paintings to be pleasantly unique for example. The reason little kids don't have their creative works in the Louvre is that creativity is not significant in itself.
- Ansil849 4y ago
  I didn't say anything about creativity being useful or profound. My point was that neither is it measured by vocabulary, which this seems to be testing.
hirvi74 4y ago
> I don't understand how knowledge of a broad amount of words maps to creativity? I can see how it maps to complexity, but not creativity. Perhaps, I am not creative enough to think of a way to piece the two concepts together. I would like to see how this test would map to languages with more/less distinct nouns than English. Are native speakers of said languages less creative? I doubt it.
Fwirt 4y ago
One justification for this might be that the greater the number of words in your vocabulary, the more "colors" with which you can paint your linguistic constructs. More complex words can have a subtlety of meaning that distinguishes them from one another, so you can "pack" your sentences with more meaning. The more nuance in a word, the more potential cognitive distance between it and another word. E.g. He had a green car. versus He leased an olive drab Jeep. Surely a distinguished artist could produce a masterpiece with three crayons, but most would not choose to.
- Ansil849 4y ago
  > The more nuance in a word, the more potential cognitive distance between it and another word. I don't see that. What is the cognitive distance between a more common color and a more obscure color? They're both colors. In your example, describing the color as olive instead of just green is certainly more specific, and maybe more accurate, but how is it more creative? If anything, it is less creative because it's more analytical and merely descriptive. For instance, saying something is '.01 centimeters' long is not more creative than saying something is 'small' or saying that something is '.1 centimeters', it's just more precise.
  - Fwirt 4y ago
    If you're writing a story and trying to flesh out a character, someone who leases an olive drab Jeep is likely (a) someone who has money and (b) someone who likes to go off-roading, or at least give the appearance of being rough-and-tumble. Olive drab is also a color commonly associated with military usage, so that plays into it. On the other hand, you could have a character who owns a lime Honda Insight. That is an old, unstylish hybrid, so that character is likely frugal, square, and perhaps more environmentally conscious. And yet both characters could be said to have a green car. But the more detailed word choices can help give the story more life.
    - Ansil849 4y ago
      > And yet both characters could be said to have a green car. But the more detailed word choices can help give the story more life. Given that 'green' encompasses _all_ of the scenarios you describe, whereas olive/lime narrows the scenario, that would then seemingly be an argument that more specific words actually inhibit creativity by limiting the potential scenarios you can imagine with just a 'green' car.
13of40 4y ago
FWIW, I tried a representative word from each category in the Dewey Decimal System and got a significantly below average score. I feel like that should be at least an average spread for concepts, so I agree that it's probably biased toward more obscure words. The restriction on "technical" terms (What even is that?) probably comes from the people running it realizing it's easy to game if you use high-brow words.
malwarebytess 4y ago
creativity I think is fundamentally synthesis. a large, varied, vocabulary of concepts is important for this, but I think more important is a high drive for novelty. such a drive probably leads to larger 'vocabularies.'
lliamander 4y ago
My guess: High vocabulary is correlated with high Openness to Experience (a personality trait in the 5-factor model). Openness in turn correlates with creativity. I will note that Openness to Experience can be broken down into two aspects: Intellect* and simple Openness. The former is more closely correlated with vocabulary, whereas the latter is more associated with creativity. Thus I also have some doubts about the quality of this test. *Intellect here does not mean intelligence (though there is a modest correlation). In this case it just means a preference for intellectual activity.
- mikelevins 4y ago
  Creativity and openness also correlate with lateral thinking, which is the tendency to quickly think of lots of concepts with low relatedness. Lateral thinking naturally correlates with facility in rapidly thinking of words with low relatedness. So if you can quickly think of a lot of words with low relatedness, that serves as a loose measure of openness and creativity.
extra88 4y ago
> used decidedly technical terms like "codec", despite clear instructions not to use technical jargon Words that are too technical are invalid and not used. Either “codec” is not too technical or it was not used in the score calculation.
dominostars 4y ago
With 2) I got 91.28 with happiness, basement, electron, cricket, morphine, artichoke, philosophy. Nothing notably advanced here. (My last 3, which weren't included were: pop [like soda pop], disecretion, moon).
proc0 4y ago
I noticed as you go down the list that thinking about divergent terms gets harder because of the suggestive power of the previous items. I suspect it's measure the ability to "think outside the box", or the ability to ignore constraints to find solutions. Interesting, but as it says it's a limited definition of creativity.
Hermitian909 4y ago
> I don't understand how knowledge of a broad amount of words maps to creativity? It's not exactly, but from first principles, using it as a proxy does make some sense. A robust finding in the educational literature is that creativity is generally limited by how many things you know that are relevant to the topic at hand e.g. people who've never programmed before are not actually good at writing creative programs (there's a subtle distinction here where the end goal of the program may be creative, but how they go about getting there is unlikely to be creative). So, very roughly, if you consider someone knowing more words as a proxy for them knowing both more concepts and having more connections between those concepts, you would expect them to have more creative output on topics of general interest (on average). source: former educator
- tshaddox 4y ago
  Using it as a proxy would make more sense if the instructions said to try to choose the most obscure words you know.
- 0x20cowboy 4y ago
  > It's not exactly, but from first principles, using it as a proxy does make some sense. How so? If I asked you to take a test in Mandarin Chinese, I would assume you would know less words, but wouldn't you be just as creative in your mind? (I admittedly did not take the test.)
xlii 4y ago
I got 82 using rather simple vocabulary (cat, milk, office plant, chess, rock, range). Those aren’t random and I have connection in my mind between them but I did make a “stretch” to make them different but not a really huge effort (like 3 seconds max). E.g. plant is a well plant but also can mean putting something in place, and that could be game piece and chess is a game where game pieces are used etc. This can be absolutely gamed and that’s why I believe authors want test taker to first take it and only later read about them.
Closi 4y ago
Also to get a good score you need to think about multiple meanings of each word - for instance I entered gas and can as separate words, however I was thinking of gas (as in fart gas) and can (as in can of beans) and that was chosen as an example of being close (because a gas can is a petrol container). But during the test I realised this about half way through and was then checking for double-meanings. I almost wrote pot to describe marajuana for instance, then decided to go for Satvia because i thought pot would cross with Flower. Having said all this, I did score very well anyway, although I do improv and listing unassociated words or “a to c” connections is a pretty common excercise.
CPLX 4y ago
I got 98.63% using what I think were pretty fair words: Witchcraft Legumes Pagers Uranium Regret Showers Archaeology
SamBam 4y ago
In my biology class, we used to have a quiz on whether students could name five organisms as different from each other as possible. (Feel free to try this yourself before reading further.) Some students would name all sorts of exotic and obscure animals -- axolotl, vampire squid -- but these would be scored poorly. All animals are actually pretty close, no matter how "obscure." The best score would simply pick organisms from different kingdoms: Dog, maple, portobello mushroom, amoeba, e. coli. I tried this tactic in the above test, picking common words as categorically distinct as possible (dog, thought, kindness, Tuesday, zero), and received a very low score. It seems that this system prefers the "axolotl, vampire squid..." version of distinctness instead.

chevill 4y ago

I was in the top 2.1% and I used all non-technical words. The most obscure words I used were trimmed off (it only uses 7) and the ones it counted seemed to be words I expect all people of average intelligence to know. It honestly seems like a rather poorly executed test. Valid nouns that are too obscure or "technical" to be in the word list get dropped but the person I know that got the highest score (95.07 raw score, 99.4 percentile) used "titties" (not even a real word) and at least two of the other words he used weren't even nouns (nouns are stated as a requirement).

sporkland 4y ago

I found myself started trying to use obscure words from different time periods as a way of "randomizing" my thoughts before I knew what the test was measuring. It seems like it could be a good technique, but implies nothing about your real creativity.

ipnon 4y ago

Creativity isn't necessarily useful or profound. Children are naturally quite creative, and we find their paintings to be pleasantly unique for example. The reason little kids don't have their creative works in the Louvre is that creativity is not significant in itself.

Ansil849 4y ago
I didn't say anything about creativity being useful or profound. My point was that neither is it measured by vocabulary, which this seems to be testing.

hirvi74 4y ago

> I don't understand how knowledge of a broad amount of words maps to creativity? I can see how it maps to complexity, but not creativity. Perhaps, I am not creative enough to think of a way to piece the two concepts together. I would like to see how this test would map to languages with more/less distinct nouns than English. Are native speakers of said languages less creative? I doubt it.

Fwirt 4y ago

One justification for this might be that the greater the number of words in your vocabulary, the more "colors" with which you can paint your linguistic constructs. More complex words can have a subtlety of meaning that distinguishes them from one another, so you can "pack" your sentences with more meaning. The more nuance in a word, the more potential cognitive distance between it and another word. E.g. He had a green car. versus He leased an olive drab Jeep. Surely a distinguished artist could produce a masterpiece with three crayons, but most would not choose to.

Ansil849 4y ago
> The more nuance in a word, the more potential cognitive distance between it and another word. I don't see that. What is the cognitive distance between a more common color and a more obscure color? They're both colors. In your example, describing the color as olive instead of just green is certainly more specific, and maybe more accurate, but how is it more creative? If anything, it is less creative because it's more analytical and merely descriptive. For instance, saying something is '.01 centimeters' long is not more creative than saying something is 'small' or saying that something is '.1 centimeters', it's just more precise.
- Fwirt 4y ago
  If you're writing a story and trying to flesh out a character, someone who leases an olive drab Jeep is likely (a) someone who has money and (b) someone who likes to go off-roading, or at least give the appearance of being rough-and-tumble. Olive drab is also a color commonly associated with military usage, so that plays into it. On the other hand, you could have a character who owns a lime Honda Insight. That is an old, unstylish hybrid, so that character is likely frugal, square, and perhaps more environmentally conscious. And yet both characters could be said to have a green car. But the more detailed word choices can help give the story more life.
  - Ansil849 4y ago
    > And yet both characters could be said to have a green car. But the more detailed word choices can help give the story more life. Given that 'green' encompasses _all_ of the scenarios you describe, whereas olive/lime narrows the scenario, that would then seemingly be an argument that more specific words actually inhibit creativity by limiting the potential scenarios you can imagine with just a 'green' car.

13of40 4y ago

FWIW, I tried a representative word from each category in the Dewey Decimal System and got a significantly below average score. I feel like that should be at least an average spread for concepts, so I agree that it's probably biased toward more obscure words. The restriction on "technical" terms (What even is that?) probably comes from the people running it realizing it's easy to game if you use high-brow words.

malwarebytess 4y ago

creativity I think is fundamentally synthesis. a large, varied, vocabulary of concepts is important for this, but I think more important is a high drive for novelty. such a drive probably leads to larger 'vocabularies.'

lliamander 4y ago

My guess: High vocabulary is correlated with high Openness to Experience (a personality trait in the 5-factor model). Openness in turn correlates with creativity. I will note that Openness to Experience can be broken down into two aspects: Intellect* and simple Openness. The former is more closely correlated with vocabulary, whereas the latter is more associated with creativity. Thus I also have some doubts about the quality of this test. *Intellect here does not mean intelligence (though there is a modest correlation). In this case it just means a preference for intellectual activity.

mikelevins 4y ago
Creativity and openness also correlate with lateral thinking, which is the tendency to quickly think of lots of concepts with low relatedness. Lateral thinking naturally correlates with facility in rapidly thinking of words with low relatedness. So if you can quickly think of a lot of words with low relatedness, that serves as a loose measure of openness and creativity.

extra88 4y ago

> used decidedly technical terms like "codec", despite clear instructions not to use technical jargon Words that are too technical are invalid and not used. Either “codec” is not too technical or it was not used in the score calculation.

dominostars 4y ago

With 2) I got 91.28 with happiness, basement, electron, cricket, morphine, artichoke, philosophy. Nothing notably advanced here. (My last 3, which weren't included were: pop [like soda pop], disecretion, moon).

proc0 4y ago

I noticed as you go down the list that thinking about divergent terms gets harder because of the suggestive power of the previous items. I suspect it's measure the ability to "think outside the box", or the ability to ignore constraints to find solutions. Interesting, but as it says it's a limited definition of creativity.

Hermitian909 4y ago

> I don't understand how knowledge of a broad amount of words maps to creativity? It's not exactly, but from first principles, using it as a proxy does make some sense. A robust finding in the educational literature is that creativity is generally limited by how many things you know that are relevant to the topic at hand e.g. people who've never programmed before are not actually good at writing creative programs (there's a subtle distinction here where the end goal of the program may be creative, but how they go about getting there is unlikely to be creative). So, very roughly, if you consider someone knowing more words as a proxy for them knowing both more concepts and having more connections between those concepts, you would expect them to have more creative output on topics of general interest (on average). source: former educator

tshaddox 4y ago
Using it as a proxy would make more sense if the instructions said to try to choose the most obscure words you know.
0x20cowboy 4y ago
> It's not exactly, but from first principles, using it as a proxy does make some sense. How so? If I asked you to take a test in Mandarin Chinese, I would assume you would know less words, but wouldn't you be just as creative in your mind? (I admittedly did not take the test.)

xlii 4y ago

I got 82 using rather simple vocabulary (cat, milk, office plant, chess, rock, range). Those aren’t random and I have connection in my mind between them but I did make a “stretch” to make them different but not a really huge effort (like 3 seconds max). E.g. plant is a well plant but also can mean putting something in place, and that could be game piece and chess is a game where game pieces are used etc. This can be absolutely gamed and that’s why I believe authors want test taker to first take it and only later read about them.

Closi 4y ago

Also to get a good score you need to think about multiple meanings of each word - for instance I entered gas and can as separate words, however I was thinking of gas (as in fart gas) and can (as in can of beans) and that was chosen as an example of being close (because a gas can is a petrol container). But during the test I realised this about half way through and was then checking for double-meanings. I almost wrote pot to describe marajuana for instance, then decided to go for Satvia because i thought pot would cross with Flower. Having said all this, I did score very well anyway, although I do improv and listing unassociated words or “a to c” connections is a pretty common excercise.

CPLX 4y ago

I got 98.63% using what I think were pretty fair words: Witchcraft Legumes Pagers Uranium Regret Showers Archaeology

SamBam 4y ago

In my biology class, we used to have a quiz on whether students could name five organisms as different from each other as possible. (Feel free to try this yourself before reading further.) Some students would name all sorts of exotic and obscure animals -- axolotl, vampire squid -- but these would be scored poorly. All animals are actually pretty close, no matter how "obscure." The best score would simply pick organisms from different kingdoms: Dog, maple, portobello mushroom, amoeba, e. coli. I tried this tactic in the above test, picking common words as categorically distinct as possible (dog, thought, kindness, Tuesday, zero), and received a very low score. It seems that this system prefers the "axolotl, vampire squid..." version of distinctness instead.