On creativity
Dec. 24th, 2013 12:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettSome time ago, I asked you what you thought of prompted by "creativity", then utterly failed to engage in conversation or to explain why I was asking.
So: I had been having the kind of evening, you see, where one ends up on a train with one's programmer partner, the both of you dressed in pinstripes, very earnestly attempting to convince aforementioned partner that coding is a creative endeavour... by means of quoting Robert Frost. As it turns out, this gets you pretty strange looks from everyone around you.
And then, more recently, I went on a course entitled Doing Creative Research, which did not change my mind on anything - I was already in firm agreement - but did lead me to Medawar, and the assertion that there is poetry in science, but there is also a lot of book-keeping.
I don't see my science and my poetry as having any fundamental differences. With both I am trying to find new stuff, be that data or forms of expression; with both I rely on intuition to keep my footing, to find my path.
At the Doing Creative Research course we talked, a lot, about the two cultures: about creativity being constructed as flighty, as arty, as distinct from "rigorous" science: about the ways in which scientists shy away from describing themselves as creative because of these perceived connotations of unreliability; which is heartbreaking, really.
So where am I at, at the moment, which what I think creativity is? Making something from nothing, yes, but also: I think I view it as a skillset, as a process, that can be learned; rather than something either intrinsic (a creative person) or extrinsic (a flash of inspiration). And: I think it is about bravery, and trust in oneself, and willingness to take risks in the knowledge that one will be resilient if they do not work as hoped.
Something that That One Gentleman and I disagreed on (or at least, of which I have not yet convinced him) is that making good choices can be in and of itself creative, specifically in the context of writing beautiful and elegant code (but also, really, of anything else). I am thinking of the study I have heard tell of - but never tracked down - that asked amateur and expert chess players to look at a board laid out in front of them and write down all possible moves; the amateurs listed more, because the grandmasters didn't see the bad moves.
I think that probably I wanted to say more on this, but that's what I've the brain for right now; I would love love love to hear your views. <3
So: I had been having the kind of evening, you see, where one ends up on a train with one's programmer partner, the both of you dressed in pinstripes, very earnestly attempting to convince aforementioned partner that coding is a creative endeavour... by means of quoting Robert Frost. As it turns out, this gets you pretty strange looks from everyone around you.
And then, more recently, I went on a course entitled Doing Creative Research, which did not change my mind on anything - I was already in firm agreement - but did lead me to Medawar, and the assertion that there is poetry in science, but there is also a lot of book-keeping.
I don't see my science and my poetry as having any fundamental differences. With both I am trying to find new stuff, be that data or forms of expression; with both I rely on intuition to keep my footing, to find my path.
At the Doing Creative Research course we talked, a lot, about the two cultures: about creativity being constructed as flighty, as arty, as distinct from "rigorous" science: about the ways in which scientists shy away from describing themselves as creative because of these perceived connotations of unreliability; which is heartbreaking, really.
So where am I at, at the moment, which what I think creativity is? Making something from nothing, yes, but also: I think I view it as a skillset, as a process, that can be learned; rather than something either intrinsic (a creative person) or extrinsic (a flash of inspiration). And: I think it is about bravery, and trust in oneself, and willingness to take risks in the knowledge that one will be resilient if they do not work as hoped.
Something that That One Gentleman and I disagreed on (or at least, of which I have not yet convinced him) is that making good choices can be in and of itself creative, specifically in the context of writing beautiful and elegant code (but also, really, of anything else). I am thinking of the study I have heard tell of - but never tracked down - that asked amateur and expert chess players to look at a board laid out in front of them and write down all possible moves; the amateurs listed more, because the grandmasters didn't see the bad moves.
I think that probably I wanted to say more on this, but that's what I've the brain for right now; I would love love love to hear your views. <3
(no subject)
Date: 2013-12-25 05:47 am (UTC)I mean, this is something I have Opinions about (so, sorry to jump into someone else's thread ^.^;) because I'm doing a bunch of coding interviews these days, and for example I ask a question which involves checking if two strings have a (roman-alphabet, lowercase-only) character in common. The 'best choice' is, objectively, forming & storing a 26-place bitmap of all words, and comparing with a bitwise and.
If we're coding in C and you don't get to this by the second go around, I may have concerns. But if we're in python, and you're good, you probably gave me:
if set(word1).intersection(word2):
and then moved on, because that's /plenty/ pythonic and elegant (compared to the fair handful of lines you'd need for the bitmap, if you can even remember bit-twiddling in python) (and can I just mention how that one line of code is part of why I love python so much? so elegant! don't even need to .split() the words into char-lists, set does that for you!). Sure, I'd hope you'd come up with the 'best choice' bitmap if I pressed you for large-data-set optimisations, but...
The idea that there is ever a 'best choice' or a 'Just The Right Thing To Do' makes me froth at the mouth a little, as you may have noticed. ^.^;
(no subject)
Date: 2013-12-25 11:34 am (UTC)*nods* I was taking a little time to think up my own response to the above, but I think you've hit what I was going to end up at.
I have some sympathy for the idea of defining creativity so that it excludes pure optimisation exercises (given some options and a precisely defined utility function, pick the highest-utility one of the options). If nothing else, you have to define it so that it excludes something or else there's no point having the word in the language at all :-) But in many real-world cases, the utility function is not well defined; for programming in particular it's extremely common that five years down the line something turns out to have been part of what you would have liked to be optimising for in the first place (reusability in some particular way, maintainability in the face of an unexpected constraint), and also a lot of utility functions have messy human concepts like 'ease of use' or aesthetics somewhere in them.
And that flexibility of the utility function is what distinguishes a purely computational optimisation exercise from something that has a predictive, intuitive, imaginative, creative dimension at the point where you apply interpretation to the unclearly specified requirements and decide what actually measurable proxy for those requirements you'll choose to optimise for.