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Does a well read human produce more, or less creative work than one that is less well read?

froggychairs 4y ago
What a fun question! Obviously the answer is that its a non-question. The amount an author reads doesn’t correlate to success. Plenty of authors are voracious readers, others rarely pick up a book. What do you see with a lot of creative authors (but not all) is a dedication to the craft. Putting in hours of writing. Often editing or just tossing everything. I have noticed though. People on my team best capable of writing technical documentation. Read a lot of technical documentation. This is the exact domain GPT can Excel at, and one where generic language is accepted.
- pieix 4y ago
  > The amount an author reads doesn’t correlate to success. This is, in practice, not true — good writing doesn’t emerge spontaneously, it’s nurtured by reading other good writing. As Cormac McCarthy put it, "the ugly fact is books are made out of books."
  - notahacker 4y ago
    Nobody's saying reading other good writing doesn't help in any way, they're saying that quantity read doesn't particularly correlate with quality of output. I mean, I doubt Shakespeare read as much good quality English writing as the average human today, but the quality of his visual imagery and wordplay is generally considered to be on another level (and at the other end of the scale, his plots were heavily borrowed from the relatively small corpus of histories and dramas he was exposed to, whereas many writers far more widely read and educated in tropes and genre conventions resolved not to use them and came up with more imaginative settings and storylines... ). Many very well read people are competent enough in the use of language but will never write prose other people particularly want to read.
mjburgess 4y ago
It depends on what we mean by "creative". A person who's gone to the moon, say, is creat-ive when they write a book about what it was like. In that they are creating a new book, with new content, that could not be written by any one else. This places a certain sort of discovery at the heart of creativity; and I think that's what I find critical. Yes, a person is typically more "creative in their thinking", the more broadly read they are. But that "creativity" is just a repetition unless they make some discovery. Eg., a such as the impressionist painters, that visual perception is impressionistic -- that lead to a revolution in painting. Yes those artists were "well read" in that they'd probably seen a lot of art. And yes they could appear creative by being able to use that experience to paint. But real creativity came from discovery. And that's what animals are: fundamentally embedded into a world where each experience is a discovery; each moment of time is novel -- and we are all creativity adapting to it. For some, that discovery revolutionises an area and we call them "creative geniuses" -- but we're all doing the same thing. They're just skilled enough to capitalise on it
- discreteevent 4y ago
  Picasso (originally an impressionist) is probably essentially still correct: "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers".
SquareWheel 4y ago
This is a really great question. Learning more can open you up to new ideas, new topics, and new ways of thinking. At the same time, it can bias you towards specific ways of thinking, or to adopting others' models rather than creating your own. All I can say is that learning more will change your creativity in some way. And often, I think that's a good thing.
macrolocal 4y ago
Yep, there’s probably a relationship between lack of creativity and overfitting.

What a fun question! Obviously the answer is that its a non-question. The amount an author reads doesn’t correlate to success. Plenty of authors are voracious readers, others rarely pick up a book. What do you see with a lot of creative authors (but not all) is a dedication to the craft. Putting in hours of writing. Often editing or just tossing everything. I have noticed though. People on my team best capable of writing technical documentation. Read a lot of technical documentation. This is the exact domain GPT can Excel at, and one where generic language is accepted.

pieix 4y ago
> The amount an author reads doesn’t correlate to success. This is, in practice, not true — good writing doesn’t emerge spontaneously, it’s nurtured by reading other good writing. As Cormac McCarthy put it, "the ugly fact is books are made out of books."
- notahacker 4y ago
  Nobody's saying reading other good writing doesn't help in any way, they're saying that quantity read doesn't particularly correlate with quality of output. I mean, I doubt Shakespeare read as much good quality English writing as the average human today, but the quality of his visual imagery and wordplay is generally considered to be on another level (and at the other end of the scale, his plots were heavily borrowed from the relatively small corpus of histories and dramas he was exposed to, whereas many writers far more widely read and educated in tropes and genre conventions resolved not to use them and came up with more imaginative settings and storylines... ). Many very well read people are competent enough in the use of language but will never write prose other people particularly want to read.

mjburgess 4y ago

It depends on what we mean by "creative". A person who's gone to the moon, say, is creat-ive when they write a book about what it was like. In that they are creating a new book, with new content, that could not be written by any one else. This places a certain sort of discovery at the heart of creativity; and I think that's what I find critical. Yes, a person is typically more "creative in their thinking", the more broadly read they are. But that "creativity" is just a repetition unless they make some discovery. Eg., a such as the impressionist painters, that visual perception is impressionistic -- that lead to a revolution in painting. Yes those artists were "well read" in that they'd probably seen a lot of art. And yes they could appear creative by being able to use that experience to paint. But real creativity came from discovery. And that's what animals are: fundamentally embedded into a world where each experience is a discovery; each moment of time is novel -- and we are all creativity adapting to it. For some, that discovery revolutionises an area and we call them "creative geniuses" -- but we're all doing the same thing. They're just skilled enough to capitalise on it

discreteevent 4y ago
Picasso (originally an impressionist) is probably essentially still correct: "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers".

SquareWheel 4y ago

This is a really great question. Learning more can open you up to new ideas, new topics, and new ways of thinking. At the same time, it can bias you towards specific ways of thinking, or to adopting others' models rather than creating your own. All I can say is that learning more will change your creativity in some way. And often, I think that's a good thing.

macrolocal 4y ago

Yep, there’s probably a relationship between lack of creativity and overfitting.