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
>
>
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