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Ask HN: Is a very high IQ bad for open-ended creativity?

6 points by amichail 5y ago

While a very high IQ is clearly excellent for directed creativity (e.g., solving a given math problem), one might expect it to be not so great for open-ended creativity (e.g., writing a novel, designing a novel game, etc.). Is this the case?

egfx 5y ago
Creativity breeds out of constraint and limitation. If you have all the resources in the world or all the smarts then there is no need to be creative.
juanani 5y ago
sysadm1n 5y ago
> writing a novel The engineer in me has pondered writing a program that generates novels using sample data from roughly 10,000 popular novels, and generating a plot algorithmically, with syntax, choice of wording, and character development all done with code.
- dtagames 5y ago
  It can't be done. No computer will ever create a story plot with a novel idea, and by novel I mean "new." No computer can ever do anything new and this is by design, since they only operate on programmed instructions. Any book or painting or music by a computer is only the output of preexisting code and contains nothing that isn't already in the code or data supplied to it.
  - PartiallyTyped 5y ago
    I disagree. We have heard that "no computer will ever X" before, some time ago it was chess, then it was GO. As Lee Sedol himself said, some of the moves were very creative. What is creativity if not an affinity for lower probability actions that pass filtering mechanisms? Novelty can even be trained for and we have created agents that seek novelty. > Any book or painting or music by a computer is only the output of preexisting code and contains nothing that isn't already in the code or data supplied to it. The source code of a neural network is both its architecture, and its parameters which can keep changing with minimal interaction from the programmer as the model interacts with the world and learns from experiences. I'd be very careful to avoid claims such as those.
    - sysadm1n 5y ago
      > Novelty can even be trained for and we have created agents that seek novelty I was thinking that too. Instead of merely copying writing styles by authors, it would be possible for a program to dream up new writing styles, and generate idiosyncrasies algortihmically. We can reverse engineer novels and find out their structure and idiosyncrasies, but having the ability to create new idiosyncrasies would be the magic sauce needed to generate novels on demand.
      - dtagames 5y ago
        Where would novelty come from, since all code has to be written in advance? Even code that writes code must be written in advance. The ability to make something truly new is a unique quality of people, not shared by machines.
        krapp 5y ago
        People don't make anything "truly new," they extrapolate from similar information they already have and build on what they know through association or translation, which is what machines can also do. No one who has never even seen an internal combustion engine is going to spontaneously invent a better one, regardless of how brilliant they are.
        dtagames 5y ago
        Wasn't the first internal combustion truly new? And the first computer? And the telegraph, etc? If they are just examples of a better something, what was the something?
        PartiallyTyped 5y ago
        No, they were not truly "new". The first "computer" was very different to what we have now. An actually novel idea was Einstein's General Relativity, but even that built on top of Riemannian geometry, which built on top of other ideas. Another actually novel idea was the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and that needed Heisenberg to sit in a park and observe a person going under lights and then back into darkness. There are very few truly novel ideas in history, and even those built on top of other works.
  - shrimp_emoji 5y ago
    The brain IS a computer.
nabla9 5y ago
No evidence, and no reason to expect that to be the case. I also don't think that things like math are predominantly directed creativity. Math at the highest level is extremely open ended. The problem in fields you describe comes from the audience. If you want to have a audience you must do works for that audience to understand and enjoy. If the experiences and interests are too different, it does not work. Some people like Stephen King are very good and highly intelligent, but they are not popular just because they are good writers. They write for the audience with reading level of a teenager. It's a conscious choice. It's slightly more boring to read than necessary for maybe 20% of the readers but it pays off.
jqpabc123 5y ago
Creativity is hard to define and measure. Is the concept of selling water in a bottle an act of creativity? When I was growing up, bottled water didn't exist as a readily available consumer retail item. When I first heard the concept, my initial thoughts were, "No way! People won't pay for something that is freely available". My high IQ brain just couldn't conceive of the creative possibility. And yet today, Coke Inc. earns more money selling bottled water than they do from their secret formula for Coca-Cola.
powerbroker 5y ago
High IQ is uncorrelated to creativity. Creativity is more correlated with the willingness to take risks, such as, for example: * Looking stupid; * accidentally setting things on fire; * running a couple businesses into the ground; * being among the first to launch off a mountain with your hang glider; * making ugly art.

krapp 5y ago

Everything you listed was based on existing knowledge and prior technology, sometimes combined from various sources in novel ways, but that isn't "truly new." Functionally, internal combustion engines are better steam engines, computers are better abacuses and telegraphs are better war drums and smoke signals. But none of them came fully formed and realized out of thin air. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_internal_combustion_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_internal_combus... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_hardware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_hardware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_telegraph#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_telegraph#History

dtagames 5y ago
Nothing comes out of thin air, as far as we know. My assertion is not something from nothing. It's something truly new and unseen. The idea that electrical transmission over wire is just a better smoke signal seems to deny the most basic differences between the two, or that there was any ingenuity or human contribution in the path from one to another. Many animals have language, the chief instrument of intelligence. But no animals other than humans have put language together to make something new -- like buildings, roads, or power plants. Why is that? Why don't other animals evolve language that makes new things? And why do the things not evolve anything new themselves? I think humans are unique and special. As I said, it could be my own bias from being one, but I'm gonna stick with it because -- in the practical world in which we live -- our position and role are unique and our intelligence can lead to truly new and unique outcomes which machines and other animals can't do on their own.
- krapp 5y ago
  To me "truly new," as you keep using it, does imply something from nothing - some aspect of innovation or creative spark that doesn't simply involve the transformation of existing data or basis in existing knowledge. Otherwise, what is the difference between "truly new" and simply "new?" >The idea that electrical transmission over wire is just a better smoke signal seems to deny the most basic differences between the two, or that there was any ingenuity or human contribution in the path from one to another. No, I think we simply disagree on the nature of ingenuity. I argue that there is no aspect of human ingenuity or creativity that cannot be simulated by a machine of sufficient complexity because the human brain itself is simply a complex machine. It's just data processing - we do it every night when we dream. There's nothing ineffable separating the two that makes it possible for a human to innovate but impossible - even in theory - for a computer.

soheil 5y ago

So if I build a machine that has as output other machines randomly generated that are not extrapolated from anything I know it wouldn't count because I still "extrapolated from similar information" I already had? Absurd line of logic.

PartiallyTyped 5y ago

I disagree. All a program needs to do is use noise to generate something new and never seen before.

dtagames 5y ago
I should have said something novel and useful. Every scoop of dirt from the ground is novel, but that doesn't mean that shovels invented anything.
- PartiallyTyped 5y ago
  Any randomly generated image from say Dall-E-2 uses some noise as input, and one can argue that they are indeed useful.
  - dtagames 5y ago
    DALL-E is interesting, but it also helps prove my point. Asking for a picture of a man in jail, for example, produces an image of a black man in jail. That's because the images are not new; they are composites of existing images, provided by people -- along with the biases of those people. "New" methods of face scanning also identify black people as criminals more often because they are not new; they are based on human input and bias.

dtagames 5y ago

But every possible chess move can be defined in advance, and therefore no "new" chess moves can be created. This is true of any endeavor which has fixed constraints -- which means all software code! The miracle of humans, to put it colorfully, is that we can truly devise new information which never existed before -- not in any program or algorithm. We can make things possible which were not possible in a previous paradigm. This cannot be done in software, no matter how cleverly coded, for the software is always written with the information already in mind and already planned for.

PartiallyTyped 5y ago
I disagree, a document is merely a sequence of characters that humans assign meaning to. There is nothing special about them. What makes a document special is the meaning that the reader gives as a consequence of their experiences. Your comment has been found in the library of babel[1] approximately ~10^29 times, here[2] is an instance of it, character for character. [1] https://libraryofbabel.info/search.html https://libraryofbabel.info/search.html [2] https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?mafkjhh,kw_fssarehekqehl194 https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?mafkjhh,kw_fssarehe...
- dtagames 5y ago
  Well, that's certainly an interesting algorithm I hadn't seen before. But code that can reconstruct a pasted paragraph from an existing table of letters isn't proof that my sentence already existed. Quite the opposite. It's just decomposition of something that humans created into smaller, discrete parts and then indexing those relationships. This is something software is very good at. It is not invention or novelty in the way I'm describing them. It's hard to imagine one could have a philosophical disagreement about whether humans invent things and machines don't... but perhaps that's what we have! :-)
  - PartiallyTyped 5y ago
    If I find a seed such that my algorithm reconstructs your comment, has your comment already existed and you just discovered it? How is your brain anything different to a machine that given some seed (i.e. a state) produces a sequence of characters?
    - dtagames 5y ago
      This is very much a view from Descartes which represents philosophy perhaps more than practicality. It may be anthropocentric to believe that humans are different from a clock (Descartes didn't). But, being human, I'm predisposed to think so. To think of people as nothing more than mechanical aggregates is saddening to me, and loses sight of everything that makes people interesting and special. It would be difficult to argue that there is nothing unique about people, given what we've wrought in the world.
      - PartiallyTyped 5y ago
        I don't agree with your conclusion in the second paragraph. I don't think the lack of uniqueness - for lack of a better word - makes people less interesting or special. On the contrary, I think that by accepting that humans are machines shaped by their circumstances and their experiences with their own unique patterns of thought of complexity allows us to better appreciate what they build and construct. It allows us to stop thinking that it's talent that makes a person good at whatever they are doing, but instead to think that what makes them unique and special is the amalgamation of their experiences, their pain, and suffering.