On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 7:31 PM, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 11:01 AM, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> > wrote: > > > most people can't juggle 5 balls. A few people can, but nobody thinks > they are creative because of it. > > I think you'd have to admit that all else being equal juggling is more > creative than not juggling, at least a little. > Ok, I'll admit it. > Its just that in today's world most don't find watching a person juggle > to be very interesting, but it's more interesting than watching a person > just sit there and stare blankly into empty space. > Right, but this already contains a clue that "interesting" is more relevant than "difficult" when it comes to creativity. But it begs the question a little bit, because you could define creativity as the ability to generate interesting things. Of course, you could then say that generating interesting things is difficult, but I would say that it's a very specific type of difficulty, that doesn't generalise well to all cognitive tasks. (thus my accountant example) > > > > I think that creativity is the ability to generate coherent novelty. >> > > It needs one more attribute, it needs to be interesting; firing a > paintball gun at a canvas will produce a novel pattern never before seen on > this planet, but it is unlikely to be judged very interesting by many. > Again, I was trying to avoid "interesting" to not get into a circular definition. > Therefore creativity is not in the thing itself but in the eye of the > beholder; what's new and exciting to me may be old hat and boring to you. > Agreed. Then novelty is also in the eye of the beholder, and at a certain level of abstraction there is nothing novel about a paintball pattern for most people. It might look novel to some naive pattern recognition algorithm. Higher level image recognition might always say "this is a paintball pattern", no matter what the specific pixels are. It will also take higher level modelling of human minds and culture to be able to decide if a paintball pattern is novel, or interesting to a human. My point is that equating creativity with difficulty seems to simplistic. Creativity is difficult, but it doesn't follow that difficult is creative. Telmo. > John K Clark > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
