Lately I’ve found myself wanting to make the argument that intellectual generativity is very important, and that you should be very careful with subtle forces that can corrode it.
“Generativity” is the sort of word that seems to come up a lot in casual conversations in my current circle but I just went looking for a good explanatory post and couldn’t find one. I’m fairly confident that someone somewhere has talked about it (not necessarily on LW).
Curious if anyone knows of good existing writing?
And if anyone wanted to write up a fresh explanation that’d be cool as well. (A possible outcome is treating the answer section here as an opportunity to write a first draft that maybe turns into a post if there’s consensus the answer is good)
Initially, generativity is largely a matter of curiosity and play, unencumbered by social coercion. Development of ideas beyond the initial stage requires a network of communicating individuals who can check and build on each other’s ideas.
Quoting Isaac Newton:
Regarding Bell Labs (well-known for being highly generative):
“[John] Pierce, to put it simply, was asking himself: What about Bell Labs’ formula was timeless? In his 1997 list, he thought it boiled down to four things: A technically competent management all the way to the top. Researchers didn’t have to raise funds. Research on a topic or system could be and was supported for years. Research could be terminated without damning the researcher.”
(from The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation)
While technically competent management has a clear relation to technical generativity, the other factors are more about absence of negatives (economic and social coercion) than about presence of positives. This makes sense given that (a) at least some humans are automatically generative (in the sense of being curious, inventive, etc) and (b) economic and social coercion destroy generativity. (b) makes sense given that: economic coercion can’t incentivize activities the economic system can’t test on short timescales (e.g. marketing of consumer goods), and social coercion works on very short timescales and causes conformity pressures (where conformity is incompatible with generativity).
Thus, a question that is more often useful than “what causes generativity”, is “what blocks generativity”.
Quoting How to Read a Book (1940), page 284 (chapter 18, “How to Read Philosophy”):
Which is, again, consistent with the picture that humans start generative, and various social forces (especially coercive ones like school, and adults being annoyed at being asked questions, as in diplomat social norms) dim or extinguish the fire of curiosity.
See also: The order of the soul, Better babblers
As a follow-up, note that there is some tension between raw, unencumbered generativity, and the requirement to communicate ideas to others. Communication is essential, as this allows many more to work on the same problems, be inspired by each other’s ideas, and so on.
The goal in shaping an intellectual community is to attain intellectual standards without intellectual homogeneity. Some aspects of the intellectual space, such as language, some truth conditions, some discourse norms, and so on, must be standardized to allow productive communication. However, when such standardization is attained through more wide-ranging intellectual conformity, the result is imitative non-generativity, as is seen in nearly all academic fields right now.
The goal is intersubjectivity, rather than pure subjectivity (isolated perspectives) or objectivity (a single standardized perspective): the ability for substantially different perspectives to communicate with each other, and reach common knowledge on some (but, necessarily, not all) facts that can be expressed in both perspectives.
Thanks! I think the answer you gave is a pretty decent introduction to the topic. And I agree with the general framework/desiderata you go on to describe here for an intellectually generative space.
Does anyone know why Bell Labs didn’t take over the (research) world, either by absorbing more and more researchers or by other organizations or countries copying its model?
I think Bell Labs was on track to doing that until A&T was split apart in an anti-trust action which basically forced Bell Labs to split into multiple organizations, which I’ve heard destroyed almost all of its culture and access to talent.
(Not very confident of this, but that’s my current best model)
I guess part of the reason must be that AT&T was supporting Bell Labs with its monopoly profits, and that’s part of the “secret sauce” that none of the post-split organizations could inherit. What about other monopoly-supported research labs (such as Microsoft Research) though, whose leaders must have Bells Labs in mind as a model? Seems like there’s still something we don’t understand?
As a matter of historical origination, Microsoft (and Apple) looked much more closely at Xerox/PARC then at Bell Labs. As I understand the story, Microsoft Research was supposed to be a more tightly applied and business-oriented version of PARC, which itself was more applied than Bell Labs.
It’s worth considering that Microsoft Research was established shortly before the modern cost-cutting phase of the corporation, and the average lifespan has been plummeting the entire time. AT&T lasted 100+ years, the average corporate lifespan is now expected to shrink to 10.
We’ll need a different organizational form to permit the long view, I think.
I included “countries” in my original question and I think some countries (e.g., China) probably have the necessary long view, and probably wants to replicate Bell Labs (in, e.g., the Chinese Academy of Sciences), and must be missing some other element of what made it so successful.
I considered the government question, because I think that as an institution they clearly can execute the long view, and I also agree that governments like China’s even seem to have the long view culturally ingrained. I don’t know what the answer is, but I am confident it has more than one component, because I can identify two from the American government research example.
The first is drawn from the history of PARC again: when JC Licklider was getting funding through ARPA (which built the community that eventually was transported almost wholesale to PARC) he broke from the traditional government funding model of short-term grants on a project basis by requesting long-term grants on a person basis. I think that if the old grant model was still in effect, even if everything else stayed the same, they would have been far less productive.
The second is the War on Cancer, which was a political event that heavily impacted the way funding worked across research in the United States. Normally increased resources are considered a good thing, but in this case it came with a bunch of process changes attached: namely researches had to be able to explain how cancer treatment would benefit before they got the funds. I expect that there is always some probability of a large external event like this disrupting the incentives, even if they were in excellent shape before.
To summarize, I think it is very hard for any institution to definitely not do what they would normally do, and then even if they succeed an unexpected change may be forced upon them anyway.
If Bell Labs succeeded because there was little social coercion, the Chinese will have a hard time replicating it with their collectivist culture.
Paying researchers based on their ability to publish papers in journals with high impact factor the way the Chinese do seems also a system that creates bad incentives.
Still leaves somewhat of a question of whether/why no one else has succeeded. Maybe putting it together in the first place is just hard though.
In 1956, AT&T was banned from selling anything other than telecom. I assume that’s why Shockley left to found his semiconductor company that year. I’m unclear on whether it could license patents, but its existing patents were all seized and put in the public domain. AT&T still had a lot of internal needs for computers, so it kept funding research.
This already captures a lot, but I would just add to it something about where the babbling or natural generative stuff comes from that gets pruned by social forces.
My experience of thinking is very much one of random stuff coming up from the deep, and during meditation or other periods where I’m relaxed and letting rather than controlling, more of that stuff is free to come up. We could model this as a kind of suppression that’s normally going on that gets removed by creating conditions where it turns off. Under those conditions, I can sometimes also get something like more creativity by changing something in my mind that causes it to pull “deeper cuts”, or ideas less obviously related to what’s happening right now. It’s sort of like entering a waking dream state where random stuff fires, even more random than what is normally possible, and then while getting there means I can’t process it all that well, if I’m very careful I can catch it, come back from the dream-like state, and examine it more closely to see if there’s anything there.
None of this is a thorough explanation of what’s going on, but it’s worth saying that in a model that’s about how creativity is suppressed, we can still ask where is the creativity coming from in the first place. Removing suppression is an important first step to increasing generativity, but then once we’ve done that we are still left wondering where the core process of generating ideas comes from and how to work with it.
I like this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g
BTW, I’m not a fan of the word “generativity”. I don’t understand how it’s different from “creativity” and I haven’t heard it used the way this thread uses it outside of rationalist circles.
Seconding this. Needless propagation of jargon is bad.
But even if anyone here thinks this bit of jargon is necessary, nevertheless it is very bad to use jargon without having defined it first. If you insist on using jargon, write a definition! (It needn’t be precise, or intensional, but it has to communicate what you mean by the word, such that someone who’s not encountered the concept before, can understand you.)
Otherwise we get the absolute worst of both worlds: writing made inscrutable by jargon, but without the benefit of clarity and precision for those who know the jargon’s meaning—because there is no one who knows the meaning (possibly not even a term’s original user).
EDIT: Needless to say, the practice of hyperlinking to the definition whenever you use a new, less-used, or unusually tricky term of jargon, ought to be considered mandatory on a forum like this.
Huh, apparently generativity has an existing weird psychodynamic definition:
It does seem that “creativity” could technically be used instead. A guess for why someone initiated “intellectual generativity” instead is that creativity primarily has connotations of the creative arts: painting, fiction, poetry, music. So when I think of someone being “intellectual creative”, I’m imagining them coming up with lots of interesting, zany hypotheses. “Generative” has less of that connotation to me, it’s more about just having lots of intellectual output.
Yes, yes, this is all fine, but do you see the problem? Say I read the OP, I ask “what does ‘generativity’ mean”—and your response is to speculate on what you think when you hear the term, to “think out loud” about connotations and so forth.
So this is what you think of when you hear it, because… why? No particular reason, just, this is what associations the term happens to trigger in your mind. What does the OP mean by it? The same thing? Probably not. But what? How do we know? What does anyone else who reads the post think of when they read it? Something else entirely, different from what you think when you read it, and from what the OP meant? Quite possibly!
I hardly think I need to point out that this is an extremely sub-optimal way to communicate anything of any importance, or anything of the least complexity or rigor, or—god forbid!—anything that is both important and complex and/or rigorous.
Compare what happens if I write a post about, say, optimization processes. “What on earth is an ‘optimization process’,” asks a reader; and I respond:
Link 1 Link 2 Link 3 (etc., etc.)
(Or, of course, I could’ve included those links in my post in the first place.)
“Aha!” says the reader, “I see.”
(Note, by the way, that since the term “optimization process” is well-established among rationalists, anyone else could’ve responded to this hypothetical confused reader with those very same hyperlinks. But how did it get to be this way? Simply that Eliezer explained, explicitly and in detail, what he was talking about!)
I see the problem. As you identified, there are two questions here. 1) Is it necessary to have new jargon here? Can’t we just say “creativity”? 2) Assuming new jargon is warranted, how do we ensure it is properly defined and introduced?
I was addressing the first question, though I completely agree the second is awfully important. I’m not sure how much of a definition is warranted at this put, but I do thing the OP should have offered at least a few sentences describing the thing rather than introducing solely as a term which is often used in their circle.
I actually think people who have lots of intellectual output do tend to come up with lots of interesting, zany hypotheses—some of which end up looking obvious in retrospect. They don’t necessarily present their work as zany when they’re trying to get prestigious journals to publish it. But when I read great inventors describing their process, this comes up in different forms. Here’s Claude Shannon:
Another thought from Shannon I think LW could stand to internalize:
I don’t think Shannon is the sort of person who would use multiple different terms to describe the same thing without a good reason. If you use a single term, all of your knowledge about that concept gets consolidated on a single mental handle. IMO, this kind of thinking can be an extremely powerful way to generate insights. Shannon’s greatest work was arguably on Boolean logic and electronic circuits. In a certain way, all he was doing there was consolidating two different areas onto a single vocabulary.
[As a case study, let’s consider whether we should consolidate “generative” and “creative”. Asking that question generates its own question: what are the fundamental differences between “generativity” and “creativity”? In this case I’d argue there aren’t really any. But if there were, we’d get something else interesting: The beginning of a taxonomy.]
Notice again how the prestige view of research differs from how Shannon does it. In the prestige view, you accumulate technical vocabulary like a war hero accumulates medals. Mastering vocabulary becomes a way to gain insider status. My impression is the best researchers tend to be Richard Feynman types who care more about playing with ideas than winning these kind of status games. (Note: It’s valuable to master lots of concepts. Shannon has a section on that too. But I think it’s a bit better to be motivated by expanding your mental toolkit than demonstrating your superior vocabulary—though obviously you should use whatever motivation works best for you.)
BTW, Shannon himself seemed comfortable with the term “creative”—he used it in the title of the talk I linked.
Good comment. Strong upvote.
Any chance you could write up a summary of the video?
I’m not sure the definitions I can come up with “creativity” and “generativity” are that obviously distinct, but I feel like I have particular associations with creativity, and different associations with generativity.
A property I associate with generativity (curious if others think of it that way) is that it’s sort of self reinforcing once it exists.
When I type “generativity” into google, it autofills “generativity vs stagnation.” (apparently this is because it’s part of a particular psychological theory, although I think the dichotomy makes sense independent of that). When I type “creativity vs” into google it autofills a few things like “creativity vs innovation” and “creativity vs logic” and “creativity vs productivity.”
And I think this is getting at something important. The connotations of creativity are generally contrasted with particular other ways of being productive, whereas the contrast of generativity is “not being generative” – being more like a dead zombie that can shamble forward but cannot create anything new. Contrasted with a healthy ecosystem with lush soil, flowing water, lots of flora and fauna that are fecund and which can feed on each other.
I suspect an important input is finding/cultivating conditions for generative pairings among people working in an area.