i also do not have a guide to creativity to share with you.
I do. Edward de Bono’s oeuvre is all about this, beginning with the work that brought him to public notice and coined an expression that I think most people do not know the origin of these days, “Lateral Thinking”. He and lateral thinking were famous back in the day, but have faded from public attention since. He has been mentioned before on LessWrong, but only a handful of times.
The “Draftsmen” podcast by two artists/art instructors contains several episodes on the subject. These are specific to the topic of making art, which was my interest in watching the series, but the ideas may generalise.
One can uncreatively google “how to be creative” and get a ton of hits, although from eyeballing them I expect most to be fairly trite.
The “Draftsmen” podcast by two artists/art instructors contains several episodes on the subject
i am an artist as well :). i actually doubt for most artists that they could give much insight here; i think that usually artist creativity, and also mathematician creativity etc, human creativity, is of the default, mysterious kind, that we don’t know where it comes from / it ‘just happens’, like intuitions, thoughts, realizations do—it’s not actually fundamentally different from those even, just called ‘creativity’ more often in certain domains like art.
The sources I listed are all trying to demystify it, Edward de Bono explicitly so. They are saying, there are techniques, methods, and tools for coming up with new ideas, just as the Sequences are saying, there are techniques, methods, and tools for judging ideas so as to approach the truth of things.
In creativity, there is no recipe with which you can just crank the handle and it will spit out the right idea, but neither is there in rationality a recipe with which you can just crank the handle and come up with a proof of a conjecture.
neither is there in rationality a recipe with which you can just crank the handle and come up with a proof of a conjecture
to be clear, coming up with proofs is a central example of what i meant by creativity. (“they are not satisfied by avoiding failure conditions, but require the satisfaction of some specific, hard-to-find success condition”)
I do. Edward de Bono’s oeuvre is all about this, beginning with the work that brought him to public notice and coined an expression that I think most people do not know the origin of these days, “Lateral Thinking”. He and lateral thinking were famous back in the day, but have faded from public attention since. He has been mentioned before on LessWrong, but only a handful of times.
There are also a few individual works, such as “Oblique Strategies” and TRIZ.
The “Draftsmen” podcast by two artists/art instructors contains several episodes on the subject. These are specific to the topic of making art, which was my interest in watching the series, but the ideas may generalise.
One can uncreatively google “how to be creative” and get a ton of hits, although from eyeballing them I expect most to be fairly trite.
i am an artist as well :). i actually doubt for most artists that they could give much insight here; i think that usually artist creativity, and also mathematician creativity etc, human creativity, is of the default, mysterious kind, that we don’t know where it comes from / it ‘just happens’, like intuitions, thoughts, realizations do—it’s not actually fundamentally different from those even, just called ‘creativity’ more often in certain domains like art.
The sources I listed are all trying to demystify it, Edward de Bono explicitly so. They are saying, there are techniques, methods, and tools for coming up with new ideas, just as the Sequences are saying, there are techniques, methods, and tools for judging ideas so as to approach the truth of things.
In creativity, there is no recipe with which you can just crank the handle and it will spit out the right idea, but neither is there in rationality a recipe with which you can just crank the handle and come up with a proof of a conjecture.
yep not contesting any of that
to be clear, coming up with proofs is a central example of what i meant by creativity. (“they are not satisfied by avoiding failure conditions, but require the satisfaction of some specific, hard-to-find success condition”)