Why Creativity Is a Numbers Game (2015)

&gt;creative greatness appears to be doing things differently<p>I&#x27;ve done things differently just out of boredom caused by doing a task, the same way repeatedly.<p>Example: I sometimes get tired of a particular food and tweak it by adding a new ingredient or eating it with something different.<p>&gt;Edison was unlucky—he failed to invent fuel cells. The first comercially successful fuel cells were developed in the mid-twentieth century, long after Edison moved on to pursuing other ideas. &gt;Edison always had somewhere to channel his efforts whenever he ran into temporary obstacles<p>This is completely different from the &quot;Edison never gave up and kept working till he succeeded&quot; talks.

Personally I feel that creativity is something like saturating a solution with ideas until you get that one seed crystal and then everything just comes together. If it wasn&#x27;t already full of thoughts and ideas already, that seed would simply dissolve.

I view humans in a universe like a computer program that brute-forces to find a better solution. You can have some people do everything right and nothing ever works out for them. While you can have the opposite happen. The anomalies&#x2F;survivorship bias gets the most media attention and keeps the rat race going. Sometimes this makes me think the universe is just the outcome of brute-forcing as well.

Some people have the ability to synthesise and evaluate particular ideas faster than average.

Isn&#x27;t this true only through the optics of economy?<p>You can have creative endeavors that serve no purpose, and you still do it for the sake of the activity. Maybe it&#x27;s the by product of practice, but it&#x27;s still creative work.<p>Or even the a problem solving situation, it might solve a problem but no be the optimal solution.

It makes sense that it’s a numbers game. If statistically I try 100 projects and only 3% succeed, I am obviosly doing better than someone putting in 1&#x2F;10 of the effort and having no success. The key ability is not genious but ability to iterate many many times despite failures.

I&#x27;m the crazy idea guy at work. They are usually bad ideas. But occasionally we have to pause and say &quot;that might be a good idea&quot;, and sometimes an idea turns out to be really good, attacking an issue from an unexpected angle.<p>So for me, definitely a numbers game.

&quot;Success is a numbers game,&quot; would have been a more appropriate title.

I don’t dispute most of the factual claims in this article.<p>But this whole lens on what creativity “is” smacks of someone really hoping something so mysterious can be explained using concrete and easy to understand concepts.<p>I’ve personally known and worked with some real creative powerhouses.<p>This sort of article doesn’t really address what makes them effective. It especially doesn’t describe how they seem to think about it, which, I would say is the most interesting topic.

Creativity is a numbers game, and some brains have a higher batting average

Numbers, if your lens is statistics. But human behavior is about um...human behavior. Creativity is about a willingness to experiment; to not fear &quot;failure&quot;; and to learn.<p>Nothing has triggered more creative ideas than asking &quot;what if?&quot;

Creativity is as much a numbers game as Monopoly (the literal board game) is a numbers game: it is and it isn&#x27;t.<p>Sure, I mean you can use statistics and wave your magic eugenics wand around but I see right through you. It&#x27;s a disgrace that in the modern neoliberal hegemony a crock of shit like this gets published in an outlet like Scientific American.

&quot;It&#x27;s a great myth that creative geniuses consistently produce great work. Whereas consistency may be the key to expertise, the secret to creative greatness appears to be doing things differently—even when that means failing&quot;<p>Genius is genetic. Some people just seem to &quot;stumble&quot; upon ideas and methods, but its not random. Why there seems to be such pervasive efforts to prove anything other than the obvious is a mystery to me.<p>EDIT:<p>wikpedia page on it:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence</a>