20 ms·

Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

• shw1n 2y ago
  Something I noticed from being raised by Indian parents while going through the US school system And again after learning how to acquire new skills quickly
• galkk 2y ago
  I will disagree. Creativity comes from applying acquired knowledge (that's where memorization comes into account) in new contexts.
  • shw1n 2y ago
    Appreciate you reading! But how do you know how to apply this acquired knowledge in this new context? It's some form of pattern matching right -- which imo is just a less obvious form of memorization i.e. you've memorized the match between inherent traits of the context with a specific application of that knowledge
    • GavinMcG 2y ago
      To me, “memorization” implies an active process focused on learning a particular set of “matches” (to adopt the term you’re using here). But it seems to me that tacit knowledge (and other products of less concentrated/deliberate learning) often plays a substantial role in creativity. That is, creativity fundamentally comes from internalized knowledge (as the article says) but internalized knowledge doesn’t necessarily come from memorization.
      • shw1n 2y ago
        I think I see -- in your view "memorization" only refers to conscious learning While internalized knowledge comes from "subconscious" (for lack of a better word) learning? I guess I'm equating the two here and just using memorization as "committing to memory", with the belief being that you can construct the heuristic you'd normally acquire subconsciously and cut down time to mastery
        • GavinMcG 2y ago
          I think memorization can play a role in internalizing knowledge, but it isn’t a “fundamental” as in necessary. Internalized knowledge can also come from other sources.
    • drewcoo 2y ago
      > But how do you know how to apply this acquired knowledge in this new context? That question has a false precondition baked in. If you know how, it's not creative. > It's some form of pattern matching right -- which imo is just a less obvious form of memorization No. Sensing and matching patterns does not imply memorization. Everything you're saying is completely loaded. Did you just discover memorization? Because the pattern I see in your words is similar to anyone who's just learned a new tool or technique - they overapply it everywhere as they learn to use it.
      • shw1n 2y ago
        But you must have knowledge of the basic units of your chosen art to apply that to the new situation right? E.g. if you're an artist, at the very least you need the knowledge of how to draw a line From other comments here it seems the definition of "memorization" seems to be where disagreements are Maybe this is a better explanation: once I started trying to make whatI just learned is called "tacit knowledge" more explicit and then committing it to memory, I was able to cut learning times down significantly
        • Sakos 2y ago
          I think the disagreements are largely from this weird cultural bias against any form of explicit "memorization". It's very, very strange.
        • Jensson 2y ago
          > E.g. if you're an artist, at the very least you need the knowledge of how to draw a line But no artist memorize how to draw a line. They learn how to draw a line, but learning isn't the same thing as memorizing.
    • bawolff 2y ago
      > It's some form of pattern matching right -- which imo is just a less obvious form of memorization I don't think that meets the commonly accepted definition of memorization. E.g. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/memorization https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/memoriza... Memorization: the act or process of learning something so that you will remember it exactly. If you are transforming the knowledge, i dont think that is the same as memorizing it. In fact, i think most people would describe that as the opposite of memorization. Using your definition, everything would be memorization. For example, you could describe picasso as simply pattern matching on other paintings to make something new, but i think it would be crazy to describe his work as an act of memorization (then again, the way AI generated art works... maybe its not so crazy)
• rokob 2y ago
  This seems to resonate with my experience, although I feel myself bristling due to the baggage of the word memorization. Although sometimes “memorization” doesn’t happen because you sit down to do it but rather that you keep using the same things over and over when solving problems that they become internalized. I find that to be a more fruitful path towards understanding that I don’t want to call memorization but it is.
  • shw1n 2y ago
    Thanks for reading! And agreed -- it's this exact realization that led me to both this method and title Imo this negative connotation has made many people refrain from calling internalization what it is But acknowledging that it's memorization has actually made me more efficient at learning, since I can now consciously look for the heuristic, codify it, and try to commit it to memory
  • Sakos 2y ago
    Maybe you should first try to separate the negative feelings you have towards the word "memorization" and the word itself "memorization". There's nothing bad about memorization. This sort of negative bias about inconsequential things is something that can easily hold us back from things that could help us further ourselves.
    • rokob 2y ago
      Tell me about it. Trying to get better every day.
• qingcharles 2y ago
  I genuinely thought creativity was something else until LLMs hit escape velocity and humbled me hard. After that I realized that creativity wasn't some magical quality that would be hard to reproduce mechanically. And that also made me a little sad.
  • shw1n 2y ago
    I'm glad you said this -- I felt the same way after making this discovery through my method outlined in this post It similarly took the magic out of creativity and learning a bit, and made it all seem like work The main way I've found around it is the joy in being creative once basic autonomy is achieved in new skills Consciously discovering the heuristic is another fun part
    • jimmySixDOF 2y ago
      you guys might be interested in the latest Machine Learning Street Talk podcast [1] which right from the start is all about how LLMs are great for creativity, as in novel combinations of trained data (from memorization) -- but are not capable of the reasoning skill needed to verify if any idea is actually plausible given a set of constraints. [1] Do you think that ChatGPT can reason? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1WnHpedi2A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1WnHpedi2A
  • sva_ 2y ago
    But LLMs to date can't really differentiate well between a creative insightful answer, and a nonsensical one. The selection process is still done by a human.
    • qingcharles 2y ago
      This is true. I hadn't thought about that aspect.
  • xanderlewis 2y ago
    I have to say, you were naive to ever think that. Rolling a die can produce creativity — and I’m not being facetious. Creativity, at least in fields traditionally considered to be ‘creative’ like music and visual art, is 90% randomness and 10% retroactively attempting to ascribe meaning to the randomness. And this is coming from someone who hugely values and defines oneself via an ability to be creative. Also, LLMs haven’t hit ‘escape velocity’; that terminology has spread like a meme (because it’s an attractively dramatic yet easy to understand idea) but isn’t backed up by any science. Maybe one day we’ll have the fabled ‘AGI’, but ChatGPT isn’t it.
• euvin 2y ago
  I think memorization gets a bad rep because you need to be acutely aware of what you're memorizing, like memorizing the sequence of an answer sheet instead of core concepts. But when done sufficiently rigorously, the foundations of memorization make room for higher-level critical thinking and reasoning. Practice is an oft suggested solution to developing mastery, but I did like how the article framed it: creating subconscious heuristics and memory.
  • shw1n 2y ago
    Couldn't have said it better, exactly -- the negative connotations of the word prevent us from recognizing what powers learning at its core But imo acknowledging this unlocks greater speeds and gets us to the "fun part" quicker
  • kiwi_kim 2y ago
    Absolutely, especially in real world application. If you don't have the ability to pull on fundamental ideas anywhere, anytime, then have you really mastered the learning material?
  • usrbinno 2y ago
    Right. I noticed this acutely in an abstract algebra course. We learned several different proof methods, then the exam was just "prove these theorems with the tools you have". I'd never been challenged with math like that before. I mean, I bombed it lol, but nobody was going to pass if they didn't remember, say, how to do a proof by induction or what it means. At some point, you need to be able to recall this information. Maybe the psychologists categorize these things differently, but I'd argue it's clear that some form of memorization is necessary for the task.
• tikhonj 2y ago
  "a flash of inspiration connecting internalized concepts" Well, okay, but rote memorization is neither necessary nor sufficient to internalize concepts. One of the reasons people make fun of the author's approach to creativity is that systematic memorization fundamentally can't teach taste—so the systematic approach reeks of awkward, try-hard, low-brow, tasteless art. More broadly, memorization doesn't help much with any sort of tacit knowledge, not just taste. I just figure taste is especially important in creative endeavors. That's definitely the case for programming! Memorization in programming gives us architecture astronauts and design-pattern soup rather than elegant code. For what it's worth, I do think that it is useful and important to have a good mental model of what expertise is and how you can develop it. Memorization might be a component of this, but it's going to be a small component at most. I expect that realistic practice with fast feedback and expert mentorship matters far more. (If you're curious, I found the book Sources of Power by Gary Klein gave me a good way to think about how expertise works.) At the same time, memorization has a real cost: it takes time and it's frightfully dull. For me, at least, trying to memorize something without context is not just ineffective but also totally kills any intrinsic motivation I have for whatever I'm learning. Sometimes a bit of memorization is unavoidable, but I've found that to be relatively rare. Otherwise, my time is generally better spent on some sort of practice in context.
  • shw1n 2y ago
    Thanks for reading and the response! One of the points I'm trying to make is that taste and elegance fundamentally stem from an internalized heuristic -- which at it's core is memorization. I understand the connotation of "memorization" evokes an image of blindly memorizing without connecting, but isn't the tastefully developed expertise just memorization of a better heuristic?
    • etrautmann 2y ago
      not the parent poster but I think I agree with your perspective here. The alternative is that some individuals' taste or sense of aesthetics is somehow innate and unmoored from the statistics of the things they experience. There may be something to this, but for most practical purposes I would agree with your point.
• navaed01 2y ago
  I disagree with elements of this article, but enjoyed reading it. True creatives do not subvert norms consciously or with an acute awareness as part of this article suggests, I agree they need to be exposed to the norms to generate their own interpretation, but I don’t believe that true creativity is a conscious exercise.
  • shw1n 2y ago
    Completely agree -- but isn't internalization of their art (i.e. memorization) needed to achieve this subconscious creativity? That's the point I'm trying to make at least -- that unintentional creativity stems from learning, which at it's core is memorization
    • ArcaneMoose 2y ago
      Well said - what's funny is that many creative ideas (from an outside perspective) are often very simple connections of two existing ideas for the person that actually did something creative! It's just that other people don't have the same context/knowledge as the creator, so an idea can seem extremely original to them
• ambyra 2y ago
  It’s not memorizing, it’s actually knowing and understanding the utility of different concepts. When you learn of a problem in a new field, you go through your bucket of tools and modify one to fit the new problem.
  • RRWagner 2y ago
    Exactly. And "synthesis" is the better word than "creativity". I wrote an essay about this very topic some years ago: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tbMTpkPWkkN8_KH2KSpteFsbT8X9mFidPUDNotFPZTI/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tbMTpkPWkkN8_KH2KSpteFsb.... (if you can't open Google docs, an older draft is here: https://rogerwagner.com/creativity.html https://rogerwagner.com/creativity.html)
    • shw1n 2y ago
      Interesting -- hadn't heard of this synthesis vs creativity take before I could see that -- agreed that "creativity" can be too blunt of a word to use for all situations
  • shw1n 2y ago
    Thanks for reading! Isn't learning which tools in the bucket fits the a problem best just memorizing a heuristic? That's the point I'm attempting to make, that it's not blind memorization without context, but still memorization of a heuristic at its core
    • stoperaticless 2y ago
      Probably you would have had more agreement, if you would have used a different word (though I’m not able to suggest that different word that captures the meaning I think you intended)
  • suzzer99 2y ago
    For me anyway, it's getting so familiar with something that your mind wanders and considers other possibilities.
• wakawaka28 2y ago
  You have to know things to be reasonably creative but there is a point where memorizing more stifles creativity. Memorization is often very passive and is fundamentally different from searching for new ways of doing things. It's hard to make sweeping statements like this because there are different modes of memory and different modes of creativity. There is a lot of memory involved in being creative, but I think setting out to memorize things is a bad way to be creative. You have to practice being creative. In doing so, you will naturally remember a lot of stuff like what works, what doesn't, and most importantly which types of things you ought to memorize. For example if you're programming you will find it useful to remember the syntax of your languages. If you're writing you'll find it useful to remember styles and vocabulary. And so on...
  • shw1n 2y ago
    Agreed -- I'm not trying to suggest that memory is a replacement for creativity I'm suggesting that it enables it, as it's hard to be creative when you're still trying to remember the basics of your art But once things become autonomous -- you can focus on those higher-level explorations
• rychco 2y ago
  I agree with the author, at least in my own creative experiences. However, it's more likely the case that 'creativity' is arrived at differently for everyone. I find memorization to be a comforting foundational activity that builds knowledge & confidence, which I can later express creatively.
  • shw1n 2y ago
    Exactly -- memorization provides the base for creativity to take place upon But that creativity can come from many places and in many forms!
• singleshot_ 2y ago
  This claim makes little sense because it fails to distinguish between memory and memorization. I memorize almost nothing, but I remember the broad strokes of a lot of things. This allows me to be creative. In a way, memorization is a severe risk: if you memorized something before it changed, for example, your creativity may not mean much.
  • shw1n 2y ago
    Hey thanks for reading! What I was trying to convey is that fundamentally learning is memorization, whether conscious "rote memorization" or more less-intentional committing to memory from doing an activity And that recognizing this allows us to speed up the process of learning fundamentals Which in turn enables creativity as most people see it
    • lelandbatey 2y ago
      You state that "learning is memorization" but I don't think that is true. Of course learning involves something being persisted in one's brain, but stating that memorization and brain persistence persisting are synonyms seems like an incorrect description.
      • singleshot_ 2y ago
        You’re right. The OP is mistaken as to the distinction between memory and memorization. I am able to be creative because, for example, I remember that a woman’s hair smelled like flowers and secrets. It would not be possible to memorize such a thing.
    • ahazred8ta 2y ago
      repetitio mater studiorum est -- repetition is the mother of learning "Repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment."
    • watwut 2y ago
      Conscious memorization and rote memorization are two different things. I can intentionally put things into memory without doing rote memorization - or even intentionally avoiding rote memorization. The techniques you use also give you different results in terms of whether or how you use the memorized concept or word in foreign language. (For example getting the effect where you can translate a word between foreign and your language, but can not use it foreign language sentence and do not understand it in context without translating.)
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• ArcaneMoose 2y ago
  What's more is that memories are just a replaying of neuron connections activating in the brain - and when we are prompted by the world around us those connections will fire in response to the stimulus. Quite similar to how AI neural networks function - which is why I believe that AI can indeed be creative and create "new" ideas
  • ArcaneMoose 2y ago
    I actually made a video diving deeper into this and comparing responses from people and ChatGPT for a creative thinking problem - https://youtu.be/l-9EUBbktqw https://youtu.be/l-9EUBbktqw
    • somenameforme 2y ago
      I think your hypothesis here (and probably the entire article as well) is strongly challenged by the 'progenitor argument.' Take humans at the dawn of humanity. Language did not even exist beyond what may have been crude sounds or gesturing and collective knowledge did not fall that far beyond 'poke him with the pointy side.' Somehow we went from that to putting a man on the Moon in what was essentially the blink of an eye. Training an LLM on the entirety of knowledge at this dawn of humanity and, even if you give it literally infinite training time, it's never going to go anywhere. It's going to just continue making relatively simple recombinations of its training set until somebody gives it a new training set to remix. This remix-only nature is no different with modern knowledge, but simply extremely obfuscated because there's such a massive base of information, and nobody is aware of anything more than a minuscule fraction of it all. --- As for the 'secret' of LLMs, I think it's largely that most language is extremely redundant. One thought or point naturally flows.... why do I complete the rest of this statement? You already know exactly what I'm going to say, right? And from that statement the rest of my argument will also mostly write itself. Yet we do write out the rest, which is kind of weird if you think about it. Anyhow the point is that by looking at language 'flow correlations' over huge samples, LLMs can reconstruct and remix arbitrarily long dialogue from even the shortest of initial inputs. And it usually sounds at least reasonable, except when it doesn't and we call it a hallucination, but it's quite a misnomer because the entire process is a hallucination.
• Terr_ 2y ago
  On the other hand, episodic memory (insofar as that is distinct from "3*9=27" memorization) is built on top of creativity. The vast majority of what we consider "memories" are the creative brain doing an on-the-fly story generation, massaged until it "seems right" and serviced plus a big dollop of emotional confidence.
• swayvil 2y ago
  You may as well say that creativity comes from writing. Because obviously all of the most creative writers write. And the writings of creative non-writers are entirely absent.
• wokwokwok 2y ago
  Is there anything substantive here? It’s just a bunch of arbitrary unprovable assertions. Everyone here seems to have, broadly speaking; neither a) the qualifications to knowledgeably comment of the (honestly poorly understood, afaik) function of “creativity” or b) anything more meaningful than “here is my naive personal lived experience and opinion” to contribute on the topic. It’s just armchair psychology. If you want to wax philosophical, by all means, but I think anyone taking “thoughtful insight” away from this article or thread is fooling themselves.
  • adin8mon 2y ago
    [dead]
  • bubblyworld 2y ago
    Whatever the epistemic quality of the article is, it's triggered some interesting discussion here which I think is valuable. No need to denigrate talking about human experience with other humans, I think?
  • threatofrain 2y ago
    One might talk about it from the perspective of birdsong, which is used by mates to judge sexual fitness. First a tutee bird learns from a tutor bird, and then eventually applies variability to the original song. It's strongly suspected that anterior forebrain pathway (AFP) may be a source of behavioral variability. We naturally age over time, including our vocal musculature, so in some sense we must constantly relearn how to use our muscles to deliver a song. When a bird is deafened its birdsong will naturally drift, but when we precisely damage the AFP along with deafening we find that birdsong remains stable for a longer period of time, until of course inevitably it must drift due to aging vocal musculature.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • kreetx 2y ago
    You'll experience the creativity outlined in the article directly when you start doing deliberate memorization, i.e spaced repetition. No qualification needed.
• relaxing 2y ago
  All very nice and handwavey, but then you see the user’s current venture is scammy deepfakes as a service, which is about as creatively bankrupt as it gets. Shame about the national stereotypes as well. There is plenty of creativity in Asian countries. Just bizarre assertions all around.
  • CuriouslyC 2y ago
    Historically eastern Asian cultures have placed duty to a whole host of things before oneself, and in many cases the old aphorism "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down" applies as well. Plus Japan and Korea have well established cultures of adherence to tradition and mastering simple, time tested things to a ridiculous degree rather than trying to innovate. Not true of everyone, but if you compare a culture that values conformity and tradition to a country that values the freedom for the individual and trying new things, of course it's not going to measure up by western standards of creativity.
    • watwut 2y ago
      Have you seen their art and entertainment? I assure you there is whole lot of creativity in there. And it has a whole lot MORE variety then western tend to have.
      • corimaith 2y ago
        Their art and entertainment in many cases are rebellions and critiques from mainstream norms. The funny thing is that if you have a rigid conformist society, the rejects are going to double down on the "weird" much more than a well adjusted creative would.
        • Barrin92 2y ago
          >Their art and entertainment in many cases are rebellions and critiques from mainstream norms No, that's just the art that Western readers notice because that's the only thing they recognize as art in the first place. Calligraphy (in China traditionally considered the most important form of visual art) for example has an astonishing tradition in East Asia, also notably related to the topic of the thread, memorization and repetition and practice and has very little to do with critiques of norms.
• lanstin 2y ago
  Some minds get a lot done with a lot of memorization and some minds get a lot done with seeing commonalities and creating simplifying abstraction. We need all sorts of minds.
• dzink 2y ago
  One would argue it’s the opposite as people with memory problems have less imprint of old and more creative new ideas.
  • keiferski 2y ago
    I don’t think that’s true. People with memory problems more seem to retread the same foundational ideas repeatedly, whereas those with good memories recognize this repetition and then seek something novel.
• noideawhattoput 2y ago
  A Columbia b-school professor has written a lot about this and developed a very compelling framework based on this. Bill Dugan - https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/7325584.William_Duggan https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/7325584.William_Duggan. The first two books are fantastic.
• suzzer99 2y ago
  "Repetitio est mater studiorum" - repetition is the mother of learning. My creative writing professor, of all people, used to repeat this three times before every class. He was my favorite teacher at any level.
  • jack_pp 2y ago
    Ah, I knew that phrase but never connected it to the title "mother of learning" (web novel). Thanks for that tiny epiphany
  • djeastm 2y ago
    My Arabic teacher liked to say "التكرار يعلّم الحمار" which rhymes and says "Repetition teaches the donkey" Not the most flattering of proverbs, but it stuck with me.
  • arminiusreturns 2y ago
    I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times. Bruce Lee
• kqr 2y ago
  I was the sort of person who did not believe in memorisation as a solution for anything. Then I tried getting really good at spaced repetition for a year (yes, it is a skill that needs to be trained for good results) and I've completely changed my mind. Spaced repetition allows me to become proficient even in things I don't get the natural opportunity to practise daily, so that when the day comes and I need them, I have some level of knowledge already. This has happened to Kubernetes troubleshooting, statistics, PowerShell windows programming, and traffic engineering just in recent history. I have yet to publish some of these, but I have examples from statistics: https://two-wrongs.com/intuition-and-spaced-repetition.html https://two-wrongs.com/intuition-and-spaced-repetition.html https://two-wrongs.com/inventing-fishers-exact-test.html https://two-wrongs.com/inventing-fishers-exact-test.html The latter is certainly creative in my book, although it does imply creativity within strict bounds.
  • kiwi_kim 2y ago
    I'm similar. This from your top link stood out to me: "It’s a little like building with lego bricks or something – spaced repetition helps ensure all the tiny pieces are in the right place, so that the big castle can happen without structural integrity issues." The book Make it Stick (by Henry L. Roediger III) had a similar idea they called 'Structure Building'. Very similar to what you described, more experienced and effective learners were creating mental schemas of how the little, but crucial parts of a subject fit together, and successfully cut through the noise. Structure Building was associated with interleaved practice (shuffling of problem types) and spaced retrieval practice.
  • alecco 2y ago
    Anki flash cards?
    • kqr 2y ago
      I use org-drill in Emacs but it's the same idea, yes. The trick is not so much which software or settings one uses, but writing high-quality prompts.
  • naasking 2y ago
• kiwi_kim 2y ago
  We recently described this to a parent of one of our students as: Understanding -> Remembering -> Applying If you don't understand the basics of a concept, and you're talking about memory, its probably just rote memorization. Students generally find this tedious, and since it's shallow its very hard to retain and connect to disparate but parallel ideas from other fields (roots of creativity). But, most schools and students stop there. They hear 'memory' or 'memorizing' as only rote memory. Step 2 is critical if you want to get to higher levels of learning. As you said in the essay - "Creativity comes to those who have internalized the patterns of their art". At www.sticky.study this is what we focus on. It's fast 2D memory palaces + spaced repetition. Only if you have understanding + remembering can you get to step 3 - applying what you learn reliably at relevant moments in your life. This is the gold standard that schools claim they desire - analysis, synthesis, application, broad transfer, and creativity. You can't reach master efficiently if you lose 80% of all you read or learn.
• sgt101 2y ago
  This is better : https://www.interaliamag.org/articles/margaret-boden-creativity-in-a-nutshell/ https://www.interaliamag.org/articles/margaret-boden-creativ...
• Joel_Mckay 2y ago
  I hear with llm/chatGPT people don't have to blog anymore, but rather the generated plausible-sounding well-structured nonsense flows like an open sewer onto the web. 1. Creativity in a commercial context once stolen/cloned through back-channels accrues value, and manifests as several competitive campaigns 2. New disruptive ideas are usually shelved until the IP/patents expire. No one wants to go through the sometimes impossible licensing process 3. Emerging technology is usually degraded in the rush for IP assets by established firms i.e. large firms dump billions on ridiculous concepts out of fear of market fragmentation 4. Startups do not usually have cash to burn on speculative IP. Thus, real cutting-edge experimental technology is sometimes never made public for numerous reasons. Creativity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUVix0STUqo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUVix0STUqo Best of luck, =3
• nyc111 2y ago
  I agree with the conclusions of the article. A concert pianist can only add his/her creativity to the piece if he/she totally internalized the piece.
• naasking 2y ago
  Creativity is probably some combination of memorization + randomization.
• samirillian 2y ago
  > breaking down the humor patterns of comedians and memes This guy does sound funny but I doubt he can write a joke
• miika 2y ago
  I see it like this: after I have seen some colors and a ball I can then imagine a ball in any of those colors. In other words, everything I have experienced and memorized becomes this pool of resources I can imagine from. More I have seen, more combinations I can imagine. Then I understand how traveling actually broadens my view. It’s not just some nice phrase but hard reality. Also this means maybe anything we can imagine we can also create. Because whatever I can imagine I can also plot a path from here to there, imagine all the steps in-between.
• Herz 2y ago
  Umberto Eco had already discussed this extensively in his paper “the combinatorics of creativity”. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the English version, but it should be very easy to translate, it's only 16 pages. http://www.umbertoeco.it/CV/Combinatoria%20della%20creativita.pdf http://www.umbertoeco.it/CV/Combinatoria%20della%20creativit...
  • leocgit 2y ago
    Thanks for the link. Didn't know the text. I found an English translation here: - https://w4nderlu.st/media/pages/publications/combinatorics-of-creativity/33155054-1711004791/combinatorics-of-creativity.pdf https://w4nderlu.st/media/pages/publications/combinatorics-o... Translated by Piero Molino at https://w4nderlu.st/publications https://w4nderlu.st/publications
    • Herz 2y ago
      Oh wonderful. I hope you can find time to read it! Umberto Eco was one of the most important modern Italian philosophers. I love his pragmatic and rational approach.
• jjk166 2y ago
  Developing heuristics to categorize patterns and internalize concepts != memorization. If anything, it is the opposite of memorization.
  • shw1n 2y ago
    Completely -- it's sort of glanced over in my post as an intermediary step to get the next "thing to be memorized" for two reasons: 1) I've often found these heuristics from books/online/mentors and just had to memorize instead of create them 2) In my own experience heuristic creation has been less of a bottleneck than committing to memory But it is certainly a key piece of info to have
• lukko 2y ago
  Wow, what a load of rubbish. I hate this kind of reductive, formulaic view of creativity. I think true creativity expands what is possible – so some kind of awareness of the current state of things is important, but rote memorisation has no real part in it. The idea that memorisation leads to creativity is actually very misleading - especially the assumption that what you are learning is 'true'. It just means you are more aware of the restrictions and existing work in a field - often the most exciting work comes from the excitement and slight naivety of exploring something new - 'beginner's mind'. Kids are very creative, partly because their model of the world is not fully established.
  • stoperaticless 2y ago
    Pure creativity without skill (i.e. kids) does not yield much. (Spaghetti drawing’s creative value is limited) Skill requires practice, which is building “muscle memory” (which is approx. what is meant by “memorisation” by the author)
    • shw1n 2y ago
      ^ exactly
      • lukko 2y ago
        Huh, muscle memory implies motor programs that are subconscious and stored in the cerebellum - this is very different to creativity. It may enable you to make something new, but that is not a prerequisite. The value of spaghetti drawings is subjective, and actually to be able to make such disinhibited drawings with similar qualities as an adult is very difficult and requires unlearning. Picasso knew this very well. The safe and very systematic approaches the author describes are defensive, too rigid and avoid what creativity really is - a leap into the unknown.
• dash2 2y ago
  The most striking comment was this: > Growing up with Indian parents in California, I was exposed to both. My mom would write daily Kumon sheets out by hand for me to do, and teach me from Indian textbooks from the same grade (which were much more advanced than the US equivalents). The result was me breezing through the US school system without much thought. Ukrainian refugees I know are finding the same things in the UK school system, where the maths is much less advanced. Philippines schools, meanwhile, have better discipline and more motivated students. I conclude that Western public education is in a bad state, and this is a source of chronic social weakness.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • ChrisKnott 2y ago
    > Ukrainian refugees I know are finding the same things in the UK school system, where the maths is much less advanced. This doesn't appear to be reflected in PISA scores (489 UK, 441 Ukraine)
    • mapcars 2y ago
      Maybe because UK education system knows about this PISA and Ukraine and other countries don't even care? For example one thing that puzzles me in western education is this reading comprehension. What exactly is this for? I studied in Russian school/university and we had nothing like that. Reading means you should understand what you are reading, reading without comprehension is just nonsense for me.
      • lomase 2y ago
        I am Spanish. We call it text analysis and it is quit common at all levels in school and university.
        • mapcars 2y ago
          So what exactly is it supposed to teach/train? If I understand meaning of individual words in the text I just put them together and I understand it. If its relatively complex topic I would sit and think about it.
• Mindey 2y ago
  Then a hard drive without processing is very creative? False.
• bamboozled 2y ago
  My phone book is super creative.
• nvln 2y ago
  There is deliberate practice for skill-building. There is exploratory "making" that fuels originality. There is inspiration hunting and incremental tweaking to get to creative mutation. There is high productivity that triggers eventual ingenuity. I find the article hyperbolic in its thesis and execution especially when it comes to the final hand-wavy bit about how there is more per-capita creativity in non-rote learning. While its hard to prove or disprove without a long study to prove or disprove the author's claim, I'm willing to die on the following hills: 1. Kumon sheets are the antithesis to creativity 2. Understanding is not a form of memorization (not the rote variety anyway)
  • ants_everywhere 2y ago
    I've thought a lot about education, and my personal take is that in the US we way undervalue drilling (by which I mainly mean building up familiarity and muscle memory) and way overvalue understanding. I've been collecting quotes about these topics for a few years. One relevant to creativity and drilling is Bob Dylan's > If you sang "John Henry" as many times as me.... you'd have written "How many roads must a man walk down?" too.
    • nvln 2y ago
      There is definitely a lot of value in practice and repetition. I don't think rote memorization / drilling are the only means of getting that practice and repetition. Ironically, with a bit of creativity, we can provide both. Lot of practice, lot of repetition, paired with understanding, play and making things.
• zharknado 2y ago
  OP and others here are stretching the definition of “memorize” to mean “anything that leads to something being retained in memory.” I reject this idea. The trauma of burning your hand on a hot pan creates a memory you won’t soon forget, but almost no one would understand it as an act of memorization. Memorization to me refers to a set of cargo-culty “learning” practices wherein we believe that by using language to drill exposure to an abstract representation of a concept, that somehow we will absorb the concept itself. We do this mainly because experts suck at empathizing with learners and fail to understand that the symbol has meaning for them but not for the learner. It’s the difference between drilling vocabulary flashcards and actually reading, listening, or talking to someone. Young children do not use vocab flashcards to learn their L1. They aren’t being “drilled” to learn “mama.” They have actual needs in an actual social context and attend to nuanced details of that context to make complex statistical inferences about the world, their perceptions, and their body. Mostly subconsciously. Yes, there are specific areas where drilling can help us accelerate or catch up. Many kids seem to need explicit phonetics instruction in order to make the leap to reading words. Phonological speech interventions are often drill-like. Practicing musical scales does make you more fluent in improvisation. Drilling the mechanics of a repertoire piece frees your mind to focus on higher-order expression and interpretation. They’re valuable, they have a place. But this is just a small slice of learning. It’s disproportionately important for passing tests (And getting hired at tech companies!), which to me is the crux of the issue. If I had to reformulate OP’s argument to something I can get behind, it would be more about deliberate practice or “putting in the reps.” This is also often boring, and differentiates highly successful people from average performers. But it’s a broader and more purposeful set of activities than “memorization” would imply.
  • patrick451 2y ago
    > The trauma of burning your hand on a hot pan creates a memory you won’t soon forget, but almost no one would understand it as an act of memorization. I reject you rejection. You need to provide a reason something learned via pain is fundamentally different from something learned without pain. We used to beat school children for not learning their lesson.
  • linearrust 2y ago
• UltraLutra 2y ago
  I'm not in anyway an expert, so I googled what some research says. Here's an interesting meta-analysis (https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-023-02303-4 https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-023-02303-4). Memory and creativity are a lot more complex than I realized. There are different types of each, and it seems like they interact in complex ways. Here's the findings from the abstract: > We found a small but significant (r = .19) correlation between memory and creative cognition. Among semantic, episodic, working, and short-term memory, all correlations were significant, but semantic memory – particularly verbal fluency, the ability to strategically retrieve information from long-term memory – was found to drive this relationship. Further, working memory capacity was found to be more strongly related to convergent than divergent creative thinking. We also found that within visual creativity, the relationship with visual memory was greater than that of verbal memory, but within verbal creativity, the relationship with verbal memory was greater than that of visual memory. Finally, the memory- creativity correlation was larger for children compared to young adults despite no impact of age on the overall effect size. These results yield three key conclusions: (1) semantic memory supports both verbal and nonverbal creative thinking, (2) working memory supports convergent creative thinking, and (3) the cognitive control of memory is central to performance on creative thinking tasks. So some memory seems to be correlated with convergent creativity, which according to wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_thinking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_thinking) is "the ability to give the 'correct' answer to questions that do not require novel ideas, for instance on standardized multiple-choice tests for intelligence." It sounds like there's less correlation with divergent creativity, which (again from wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergent_thinking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergent_thinking)) is "a thought process used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions." But my real takeaway is that people here seem to have strong (emotional?) opinions on "memorization vs creativity: which is better", but few people seemed to bother reading page 1 google results on the topic. So I like to think that bothering to do some cursory research beats both. :)
• hello_kitty2 2y ago
  Disagree. Best technique is no technique.
• bootcat 2y ago
  I agree and feel likewise the author's comments on the above about memorization, but I realized - A higher framework and is as below, https://rajivkapur.com/3-pillars-of-vedantic-practices/ https://rajivkapur.com/3-pillars-of-vedantic-practices/
• lubesGordi 2y ago
  Kind of shocking to see so much angst against memorization here. Memory has been long thought to be a critical component of intelligence, with elaborate mnemonics systems developed by people to help memorize more things (see Francis Yates' The Art of Memory, and to a lesser extent her book on Giordano Bruno). I would contend that memorizing concepts is a first step in understanding them. Also, that generally understanding concepts isn't a one and done thing, usually there's layers. Personally I found that memorizing things in math helped me immensely when years later I needed to actually understand the things I had memorized.
  • knallfrosch 2y ago
    A fellow CS student didn't understand a theorem, because he didn't understand any of the three definitions used to state it. We went through the definitions together and suddenly the theorem was "trivial" That is true understanding. He won't need to remember the theorem, because in his mind, it automatically follows from the raw data.
• knallfrosch 2y ago
  Creativity is actually defined by this transformation of finding connections between raw data that you already have to know. Consider use cases for a rock. Boring would be using it as a paperweight or throwing it through a window. Novel but uncreative would be throwing it at the sun, or painting it red. Novel, but kind of useless. But what about using a rock to play rock paper scissors? Planting it in the soil and watching it grow? That's kind of novel, by way of subverting rock's rules (it doesn't grow, unlike plants) or transforming the concept of 'rock' itself — a real rock isn't needed for rock paper scissors. So only connections between known concepts are creative. Others might be novel, but useless.
• hosh 2y ago
  I think the more precise term used by educators is “fluency”
• highfrequency 2y ago
  A lot of debate in the comments about the definition of "memorization"; this is just semantics and misses the point. Creativity is aided by 1) exposure to a wide variety of existing ideas, 2) deep understanding and integration of those ideas, 3) recombination of those ideas. Superficial exposure to existing ideas alone won't get you there, and neither will isolated deep reflection. You need both.
• saint_fiasco 2y ago
  Being forced to do rote exercises sometimes makes you creative. Solve a thousand trivial multiplication problems and you will spontaneously discover lots of shortcuts, patterns, intuitions that can warn you when you make a mistake and so on. A common issue I notice when people discuss the terrible state of math education in the US is that teachers demand that you solve a problem a specific way, such as multiplying two-digit numbers by drawing base-ten blocks and applying the distributive property. People who are good at doing multiplication in their head think the method makes perfect sense and don't know what all the fuss is about. But I believe that those people learned how to apply the distributive property "by themselves". That is, by adults forcing them to multiply two-digit numbers over and over until they developed an intuition of the distributive property by necessity. When people who didn't go through countless drills are taught the base-ten method directly, they have a harder time understanding it. So ironically it is the students who "mindlessly" drill trivial computations over and over that are more prepared to have a "true" understanding of the distributive property, while the ones whose teachers believe drilling is for chumps and try to just explicitly show them the true distributive right away, they end up memorizing the words of the distributive property without understanding it.
• brushfoot 2y ago
  Friendly reminder: This blog post represents a software engineer's personal opinion on creativity, upvoted here by fellow software engineers. No studies are cited. The assertions are corroborated by the author's personal experience. Take its claims with a grain of salt.
  • shw1n 2y ago
    ^ 100x this, absolutely
  • stoperaticless 2y ago
    I think we need some citations to know if what you are talking about is true /s
• sam0x17 2y ago
  I think this analysis as a bit guilty of over-fitting -- it is quite easy to rote memorize a bunch of things while having little to no understanding of what they are or how they work. Trivial examples include training a room of people to memorize a series of facts written in a language they don't speak (the fact that they have memorized doesn't at all mean they have any understanding of the content). So I would say it's not memorization per say, but meaningful exposure to a thing, the more chances you have to meaningfully interact with a thing, the higher the chance is you will learn how to manipulate it and do things with it. This is the difference between understanding and mere memorization, and the more exposure you have, the greater the chance you will start to see the patterns and understand, versus focusing your efforts on memorizing which will just lead to over-fitting and not understanding. As with NNs, so with humans.
• FL33TW00D 2y ago
  The acts of the mind, where in it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)
• Duanemclemore 2y ago
  "Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees." - Paul Valery, famously quoted by Robert Irwin
• Jensson 2y ago
  Alphazero was very creative, yet it didn't memorize a single move, it just self played. Deep blue was not creative at all, but it was the chess engine that memorized the most moves, todays chess engines are much better at chess and they don't memorize many moves at all, if you dig through their internals you wont find a lot of board states there. So no, creativity doesn't fundamentally comes from memorization, memorization is neither sufficient to become creative nor is it a requirement. You don't memorize concepts you build models around the concepts. You wont be able to reproduce the exact descriptions of concepts but you will be able to produce something similar that means basically the same thing.
  • hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
    What happens when you forget the models?
• maksimur 2y ago
  Related discussion: Variability, not repetition, is the key to mastery - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33354355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33354355
• nickpsecurity 2y ago
  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.
• enos_feedler 2y ago
  Did this author read a single book on creativity? Or did he just make everything up? Being creative is simply knowing what you want, knowing where you are and is the process of making choices along the way to get there. The point at which your creation comes to life is fuzzy, but this is the underlying process. As for what rules/patterns/etc that you follow to arrive where you want to go: the whole point is not presubscribe to any of these. Sometimes you draw from a known way. Sometimes you come up with an entirely knew way to take a step. The point is simply to make choices that bring you closer to what you want to make.
• louthy 2y ago
  > A DJ can't mashup two songs unless they're familiar with both As someone who’s DJ’d at a pretty high level I can tell you this is nonsense. And to prove the point, here’s a mix I did recently [1] with brand new records that I’d just received in the post and had never played before or even listened to (other than the samples on the online store). I used to take unlistened records to gigs and play them for the first time, live, in front of a crowd. Simply because I enjoyed the creative process of ‘making it work’. Creativity for me isn’t “writing down heuristics on best DJ transitions” — I haven’t once considered that. It sounds, to me, to be the exact opposite approach to fostering creativity. Creativity for me comes out of play. It grows over time. It’s feeling and emotion, not memory. I stopped reading after that. Especially as I am someone with a terrible memory but am also very creative in a number of fields. [1] https://on.soundcloud.com/xZ28hvv5ieV9RnTU7 https://on.soundcloud.com/xZ28hvv5ieV9RnTU7
  • calf 2y ago
    As a classical pianist their comment about scales memorization was highly problematic.
    • louthy 2y ago
      I hadn't got that far, but went to have a look and yeah, as a fellow pianist I concur. Then I saw the following paragraph: "Another strategy that works well in both humor and famous EDM drops is "violating the expectation", but you need to know the expectation before you can violate it. Once you learn music theory, you're able to violate it in ways that resonate." You absolutely do not need to know anything about music theory to know how to play with expectation of a drop. If you aren't just feeling what the right thing is to do then you're not being creative, you're just following a set of predefined rules, which is likely to be dull. For me creativity comes about when the brain stops 'actively thinking' - when I enter a flow state and creative things 'just happen' because of that zen like state. I get that when I DJ, play the guitar, play the piano, or even when I write code. It's like the subconscious brain has taken over for a while and is working on instinct. It's true that you don't get to that state if you haven't practised enough. That's primarily because you don't want to be actively thinking about hitting the right key, finding the right fret, or knowing how something is architected. That active thinking will kill the creative flow, stone dead. I'd argue creativity isn't memory in that sense, you need (memorised) technique, but it seems far too reductive to say that the creativity that emerges from ones subconscious is only memory -- it's clearly 'something else'. I've also met plenty of smart people in my life who are creatively bereft!
• ethlala 2y ago
  I think this is right, and one implication is that 99.9% of the self-help content you passively consume on the internet will have no impact on your life, because (barring deliberate learning / repetition), you won't remember it in the high-leverage moments when it might have made a difference.
  • shw1n 2y ago
    Thanks for reading! This brings up an interesting point -- while I think many people read and forget self-help books without ever improving their lives, the way they can mostly help people (imo) is by: 1) identifying a heuristic 2) making memorization easier through stories The stories, analogies, acronyms they teach all just make memorizing/remembering/learning their heuristic easier
  • Jensson 2y ago
    > you won't remember it in the high-leverage moments when it might have made a difference But how would you learn to remember the right advice in the right context? The act of remembering something when you need it requires you to do more than just memorize it, you have to properly learn when the thing is actually useful and train your mind to recall this advice in those situations. It is much better to know that an advice exist and learn when to look it up than to memorize the advice without the ability to realize when you would need it.
• willguest 2y ago
  The category is not the thing categorised. Just because you can put things into boxes does not mean that everything belongs in a box. Whatever essential element you seek to create, whether or not it is concrete or abstract, can simply be put forward as a target of memorisation, without pausing to think about whether you can truly memorise it. E.g. a heuristic for determining the best heuristic. Simple, just memorise it, right?
• backtoyoujim 2y ago
  so imagine from playing a guitar and you get famous and people ask you "who were your influences ?" and i assumed that they mean "when you were more horrible at the guitar than you are now whose songs did you learn to play on your guitar ?" and that can be the same with writing as a trick one can write out an other author's work often until there is actual influence on vocabulary and style. Then you take that and make up new stuff using the that new musical or lyrical style or collective style. until someone shows up and does something so outside of the paradigm and yet still sublime that a new source of derivation exists. wash. rinse. wipe hands on pants.
• PaulHoule 2y ago
  When I want to come across as spontaneous I plan ahead what I'm going to say.
• ziofill 2y ago
  I heard this idea recently: creativity needs shallow knowledge over a vast range of concepts. It’s probably not “just” that, but I can see how the vast range helps.
• arjonagelhout 2y ago
  I would argue that creativity is a tendency and fundamental property of an individual’s brain, rather than a skill that can be taught or learned. Creativity does require a context, such as creating a piece of art, music or solving a problem, and then in order to make any meaningful contribution to that problem or piece of art, one needs to have enough knowledge to draw from. This knowledge can be 1) exact, such as specific rendering techniques in the context of building a 3D renderer or scales for improvisation on piano. Or it can be 2) informal, increasingly rich mental models. For example, I have been improvising on piano for a long time, and I have a largely informal mental model of music theory that I draw from during improvisation of what would sound good and interesting and what wouldn’t. In another instance, I’m building software, and I have a growing mental model of how computers work, from the hardware (CPU, GPU, instruction sets) to the software (drivers, operating systems, networking), and how specific programs have been written (web browsers, game engines, databases, certain libraries). The same goes for specific domains I wish to build software for (e.g. AEC / architecture industry), for which I am also forming a well of knowledge of what kind of companies, organizations and individuals collaborate and how information flows between them, e.g. via specific file formats, standards or protocols. These mental models and exact knowledge, are a prerequisite for creativity. But the creativity itself is the tendency of my brain to then, in a specific context, associate and draw from these different mental models and this breadth of knowledge to come up with a piece of output. This can be building a specific feature in software, or coming up with a novel chord progression and melody. So creativity is not about knowledge, but about creating. Creating is inherently hard to formalize, as one has to have a mental model far larger and deeper than what can be written down or communicated via text. In addition, by attempting to formalize the mental model, one loses the impreciseness, fluidity and depth that enables venturing beyond reproduction. This mental model of how to create is what comes from practicing. By playing the piano year in year out and trying out different things, one learns to create good music. By programming for years, one learns to write beautiful software. What defines good or beautiful, and how one achieves that is what creativity is. It is a taste. It is exactly that what goes beyond memorization and mere knowledge. It is not taught, it is learned by doing. It is the application of knowledge, and the internalization of years of practice. TLDR: Creativity is a tendency of an individual. Knowledge is a prerequisite, but creativity is about applying it. This requires a mental model that comes from years of practice.
• enugu 2y ago
  Regarding Asian cultures and memorization, there is a recent change that has to be pointed out. The role of memorization classically was to aid manana/contemplation after shravana/hearing-the-teaching. The stage of manana is a kind of inquiry where you raise questions and clarify them or see how the teaching applies to various situations in your life(Like learning a principle in physics and solving problems based on the principle). In the case of poetic works the inner-feeling/bhaava sinks into you allowing one to access blissful states. However, in the modern context, this has been transformed into memorizing arcane lists/tables, on which one is graded without any further manana.
• bloqs 2y ago
  This is like saying that programming competence comes from breathing air. Creativity (measured by Openness in the Big Five) is a fundamental personality component that cannot be altered, in the same way that your working memory and IQ cant be altered (unsurprisingly they are closely related)
  • __gcd 2y ago
    LSD famously increases openness. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3537171/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3537171/ Also, openness is correlated but not equivalent to creativity.
• cableshaft 2y ago
  > The inspirational lightning bolt writers and artists experience can't happen unless they know how to write or draw. It absolutely can happen (from my experience), but you might not be able to do anything about it. Like I have new melodies and songs pop into my head fairly often, but I'm not good enough at making music to translate those ideas into finished songs (I have made some songs with FL Studio in the past, so it's not totally impossible, but my focus has been on other things). I also have ideas for stories fairly often too, and while I could write them, they tend to get backburnered for my game ideas, which I also have. For me, I have plenty of creative ideas, I just don't have the energy or system built up to help me get those out there in a fast enough manner, and I likely won't ever have that, it would pretty much require other people to handle almost all the rest of the work beyond the inspiration and testing out a few things. As an example, I've made over 60 prototypes for board game ideas in the past five years alone, but still have only gotten one of those games picked up by a publisher. If I were Reiner Knizia, all 60 of these games probably would have been released, because he's built up an engine around him (people willing to playtest all of his designs enough to be polished, and has enough of a reputation that finding publishers willing to publish most of his designs is super easy), and never has to worry about the look and feel or the manufacturing or even the theme of the game, that will all be handled by the publishers.
  • jvanderbot 2y ago
    The spontaneous melody inspiration is probably because you're exposed to music a lot and could easily recompose using those scales, instrument concepts, etc. And 60 prototypes sounds a lot like practice to me. I wonder if that person you named (who I, a layman have never heard of) made a few games before they got to where they are. All that practice builds up ammunition for creativity. The consensus I'm seeing reading these comments is that the article is a lot more useful if you replace "memorization" with "deliberate practice". The first implies little deep understanding but lots of practice. The second implies both.
    • cableshaft 2y ago
      I think if you've ever been exposed to music your mind could come up with different melodies, and who hasn't been exposed to some sort of music in their life. Even if they were the only human on the planet, they'd probably still encounter songbirds, at least. I disagree that you have to be exposed to a lot of music to even have a chance at coming up with something. Maybe coming up with something good, sure, but not having that spark of inspiration. People can have flash inspiration for garbage ideas too, it happens all the time in startups :P That being said, the spark might happen more often the more you practice doing something about it, to your point. Reiner Knizia is the most prolific board game designer of all time. He has 742 games credited to him on BoardGameGeek (some of those are rethemes of older games of his, but he still has probably at least 500 different games released). About half of my prototypes are about on the level of cleverness and completeness as the lower rated half of the games he has published, at least, and maybe even a couple might slip into the top half somewhere (at his most brilliant his games are way, way better than mine though). But his name carries a lot of weight so he doesn't struggle to find publishers for a good chunk of the games he comes up with. Meanwhile I've mostly switched back to video game development because at least that way I can easily publish the game myself when it's ready (game development is super hard in other ways, though). I tried for six years and got one signed board game that still hasn't been released after four years. Meanwhile there was a time where I was releasing 1-2 Flash games a year. If I had just made video game versions of my game prototypes instead I probably could have some basic playable version of it out on a website somewhere. Although I do still submit some board game designs to unpublished game design competitions (I was a finalist in one of the biggest ones, for a design which still hasn't found a publisher) and go to conventions and set up meetings with publishers when I can afford to do so (I couldn't afford to this year, my spouse took a break from work and our income cut almost in half).
• abecode 2y ago
  Good discussion on this article. I went to a Vampire Weekend concert last night and they used the 45 minute encore to play covers that were requested by the audience. They got through about 10 songs (a verse or two and chorus), everything from Talking Heads, to Creed, Sublime, Beastie Boys, and Prince and Bob Dylan (the concert was in Minneapolis, so they probably rehearsed the last two). So basically the band knew/memorized the tune for hundreds/thousands of songs from the past couple decades and the singer knew/memorized the words. So I think that this example supports the authors premise that creativity comes from some form of memorization.
• richardreeze 2y ago
  "Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things." - Steve Jobs
• javier_e06 2y ago
  When you don't understand, the teacher is the answer. When you understand, everything is your teacher. I don't believe the word 'memorize' can be replaced for the word 'understanding' Does creativity involves understanding? Perhaps.
• infinitebit 2y ago
  z